With all this body fat I’ve been pedaling off in the last
months, one of the more surreal results, at least for me, has been the realization
that none of my clothes fit anymore.
Even my shoes don’t fit as they used to!
While I don’t think I had “fat” feet, I have learned that with
significant weight loss, your feet can actually become a little narrower, and
even the arch returns to perhaps what it should be. I can verify, at least, that my feet no
longer “hurt” like they did ten months ago, and that the symptoms of planter fasciitis
have pretty much disappeared.
This led to a much needed and long overdue “going though” of
my clothes closet. I have three general
categories of clothing. The first is “New”
clothes. These clothes are brand new as
in…I just bought this shirt at the store because I need to look halfway decent
for something and there are currently no decent looking shirts in the “new” category. Or, in the same category, are clothes are a
still “new-ish” because I haven’t built an engine in them yet or framed the
side of a building while wearing them.
The second category in my closet is by far the largest. This is the clothing that I wear “Every Day”
for every purpose. I might mow the lawn,
go to work, go to dinner, or muck about for any and many reasons. This category consists of clothing from the “new”
section, that have been demoted for some reason, as in, I accidently welded
something in my new shirt and now it has a burn mark on it. Not bad enough to throw it away, but not “new”
worthy anymore. It is likely, that in my
own cloths buying history, I have never bought an article of clothing that did
not start its life in the “new” category, only later to be cast downward in
importance and priority, to live out its life in the perpetual abyss of “every day”
service.
Lastly are my “Grubby” clothes. Like the name suggests, this is what I wear
when I “know” I’m getting dirty. It’s
what I wear when I plan ahead and have an idea of what I'm going to be
doing. Last week I changed the engine
oil, transmission oil and filters and performed general tune-ups on all our
cars. Since I fully expected to get a
little gritty, I put on some old trousers and a work shirt and got busy. Like the “every day” clothes, nothing in the “grubby”
group started out there. They were once
wonderful new clothes that got a little abused and were put to work as “everyday”
outfits. When those clothes become so
stained, ripped in a place you can’t hide, or just so unfit for everyday duty,
they are again demoted to serve out their remaining years in grubby, oily, and
sometimes on fire, rough service. I will occasionally choose these clothes over “everyday”,
because I may have just purchased a new shirt or pair of jeans for something
important and am more “mindful” of trying to keep them in good order, so of
course will instead choose to work in a more suitable attire. I have, in the past and will again in the
future, purchased brand new work pants, designed for actual physical labor, like
Dickies or Carharts, and because they were new, worn them to a fancy dress
party.
It may appear to the reader that I have racks and racks of
clothes, but I do not. I buy clothes as
often and with as much skill as many women will check their motor oil. Only on those rare occasions, when I
absolutely am forced too, or even when it’s too late, do I buy new
clothes. However, over many years I have
accumulated enough to fill a third of our shared master bedroom closet. Also, Eileen was running out of room. As I consider myself luck to still be sharing
the closet anyway, it was obvious that some of “my” stuff had to go. It was time to go through it all and sort out
what fit, and what doesn’t, what I could give away, and what will become new
shop rags.
It was in this endeavor, this week, when I discovered an
unknown, or perhaps long lost 4th category of clothing. When you get fat, you get fat slowly,
overtime. It’s an effort that takes
little concentration, but can be accomplished if you just keep at it. In the race between my belly button and my
belt buckle, my belly button was way ahead….years ago. Not only do you get bigger, but so do the
clothes you buy. I used to think that
there some sort of conspiracy, perhaps, that “they” were putting size labels on
ever smaller clothes. When I hit a 3x
t-shirt, I was convinced that it wasn’t me, but Wal-Mart that was the one to
blame. The bigger I got, I began to hide
some clothes that were still in the “New” category and were too good to get rid
of, but had become too small to wear. In
the back of the closet, I found a treasure trove of pants and shirts that I
easy remembered really liking, and could now fit into once again.
I got rid of a lot of clothes this week, and I am grateful
in ways indescribable, that I no longer have to wear them. The pay off has been in the re-discovery of
shirts and pants long forgotten. The best
surprise of all was a shoe box I found with two pairs of Hushpuppy’s
shoes. Guess what! They fit again! The first pair, a groovy 70’s
set of black suede with white piping, I got when I took a job as a busboy for a
local seafood chain when I was just 14 years old. I won’t say the name of the food chain here,
but it sounds exactly like Red Lobster.
The second pair I got in the 80’s is red, white and blue leather. I cleaned those off and wore them to a
wedding today, along with a shirt from the “new” section and pants that are hovering dangerously close to a
trip to the dark side of the closet and its residents, the “Grubby” clothes. It’s hard to believe that shoes I bought some
35 yrs ago are still in good working order.
To be honest, they really belong in the “New” category, even though they
are hardly new. But they are new to me,
new again, anyway, and if the comments I got at the wedding today about my red,
white and blue suede Hushpuppies are any indication, they are still in style…….like
I would know……
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