We Call His Style Homeless, or Senior Citizen, or Homeless Senior Citizen

Since I waited so long to actually retrieve the rubber-maided (yes, that's going to play an adjective today) summer clothes from the attic and by that time the knowledge that taking the repacked winter clothes back up there meant that the force of the heat would kill me dead and my ungrateful family would fight over who had to to go up and get me, then just decide to make up lies to account for my disappearance and leave my body until it was cooler in the Fall, I didn't store away the winter clothes this year. Instead, every bedroom has a rubber-maid container or two, the big ones, stacked in a corner.

I try to be an optimistic person, keeping on the sunny side and all that, so I decided that this was good. I would take this opportunity to weed out the things that we hardly wear or have grown out of and give them to Goodwill.

Rolled right through the kids' boxes, they being generally agreeable to my "get rid of" piles. Hey, that meant less stuff for them to have to put away, and "Oh look, I sure have grown. I must need some new clothes, conveniently enough, three days before school starts." (Puh! School clothes. Kids today. Aren't any clothes school clothes if that's where you wear them?) Kids' clothes = done.

Moved on to Jefferson's and I's. I diligently worked, taking a deep dive into Reality Ocean and created a small pile of jeans that had moved from the "dream" category to the "joke" category a fair while ago. There were also a few "favorite" sweaters that I haven't really worn in years.

JEFFERSON! on the other hand, will. not. part. with. ANYTHING. And he has two rubber-maids!

Now, you must understand that there is a major difference in the clothes that he and I pick out, and on a daily basis he wears the shorts, pants and occasional shirt that I buy, so we are mostly safe. But sometimes he shops on his own! This is so dangerous we're this close to a family intervention.

Due to the fact that he refuses to spend actual money on such an abundance of readily available commodity, he shops at Goodwill. (Sounds fine, I do, too, though not exclusively.) HOWEVER, I swear that he bribes some old lady with a nickle and gets her to pull out the oldest, ugliest, tackiest box of rejected clothes from 1966  that she can find. Then she sells him the whole box for a quarter. Oh, and it doesn't matter if they fit him, "Aw nobody'll know these sleeves are short if I wear it rolled up. This shirt has years of good wear left in it."

Negotiations have been going on for hours, but I am willing to fight to the death over most of the contents of that second rubber-maid container. There will likely be bloodshed tonight if at the very least, those maroon polyester pants that were handmade for a man 4 inches shorter and 15 inches rounder than Jefferson are not out of my sight, and out of this house, by morning.

{Edited: one hour later. "No, honey. A belt will not help."}

Comments

[kim]

J has this problem, too - but his isn't the "make do" variety, it's the "loves clothes and has clothes in 3 different sizes" variety. This isn't helped at all by the nay vee's insistence that he have a special uniform for every damn occasion you can imagine.

We have 4 closets in this house (including an ENORMOUS master bedroom closet) and they are all packed full of clothes.

Plus, I have this notion that I should hang onto an entire closet's worth of winter outerwear - and we live in, ah-hem, San Diego.

This is a sickness.