clock and shirt
The poet Walt Whitman had a favorite shirt — red, soft cotton, open-collar. It rested on his shoulders as easily as a cat on a pillow. He refused to give it to his laundry-woman for fear she’d wash the comfort right out of it. I lie in the night air in my red shirt, he wrote, the pervading hush is for my sake.
My second-cousin Eddie O’Shea had a favorite shirt — black cotton, t-shirt, with a picture of Willie Nelson on the front and the words ‘Too Late – Done Growed Up To Be a Cowboy’ on the back. He used it to bind up the wound on Jackie Brewster’s left arm after the chainsaw accident. They cut it off in the E.R. and threw it away.
The physicist Ernst Ising, who developed the Ising Model of ferromagnetism, was buried in his favorite shirt — blue and green checked wool, long sleeves, a tear in the elbow. Ising had lost most of the buttons on the shirt and replaced them himself, using whatever thread and button was handy at the time. In honor of Ising’s shirt, his colleagues referred to any bodged-together device as ‘Isingware.’
Given the right circumstances and the right person, a shirt becomes more than simply a garment. It becomes almost a friend.
Editorial note: With the exception of the last line and the bit of verse from Song of Myself, none of this is true. All of it, however, could be True.
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