My clothes closet

“I’m going to bury you naked,” she said with some vehemence, let me tell you, said it explosively, like you might hear in front of a marriage counselor in a climactic 5th session. Now, I was taken aback. I am, as you already know, 85 years old. The occasion was my declining the offer of son #3 to accompany me on a trip to buy a suit. I do not own a suit, have, in fact, only one sport coat, one that no longer buttons and whose sleeves show an inch or two too much shirt

Her shot not across but deep into my bow forced some personal scrutiny. Truth is, yes, I am pretty much a sartorial disaster. I have a 10-foot-long closet stuffed with four score and seven Huckleberry Finn-brand dress shirts with designs resembling 1950s tablecloths, one tie, already knotted for quick donning, with an unremarkable but useful good-for-all-seasons giant flower design but reaches only to the second shirt button above my waist, and a few pants, generously baggy now, from a time when I had an behind to brag about.

In terms of the number of sneakers, the bottom of my closet competes with the Sixers’ dressing room, but I have only one pair of shoes, size 10 ½ when I am now a 13, and of such considerable tonnage and inflexibility that I think of them as Dutch boy wooden shoes. I clack when I walk. When I wear them, I am reminded of my only concession ever to clothing fashion. I flaunted Flagg Flyers in the 1950s and still sing the jingle: “Flip they’re open / Snap they’re shut.”

I am an only child. My mother dressed me. We shopped at Robert Hall Men’s Shop in Upper Darby (sing along with me, “When the values go up up up / and the prices go down down down / Robert Hall this season / will show you the reason”), where through my teens “our” salesman, Jules, seemed addicted to measuring my pantleg length. This maternal management of my outward appearance as well as internal machinery no doubt explains much about my nature

So I see where she’s coming from regarding my requiem. My daily octogenarian dress is almost universally rumpled jeans and extra-long and long-sleeved sweatshirts designed to cover a multitude of rather hideous skin grotesqueries and embarrassing weight irregularity. My only recent clothing acquisition is a dozen compression stockings.

It can be said of me as was said unflatteringly of Walt Whitman, “He is the friend of bus drivers.”

So perhaps it is well that she bury me naked. Passing through death with nothing on as well as with nothing else might better fit me for the start of a better life second time ‘round.

Edward J. Gallagher

Bethlehem