“Remoted” – Workday 133 / Day 193

The beloved blue jumper,
before the Christmas gravy. 

One Christmas I was in love with a blue velveteen jumper. I adored the color and rubbing my fingertips on the pile of the fabric. Then I spilled gravy down the whole front if it at the dinner table and felt completely gutted over ruining it. There were plentiful tears. 

As early as kindergarten, there were fights with Mom about what I wanted to wear to school and she finally gave up. There was a red plaid dress with smocking across the bodice, slightly poufy sleeves, and a white rounded collar that I adored. My favorite summer dress was navy blue with stitching down the center front to look like a fishing line and a hook, and red pockets shaped like fish.

It was a family joke for pretty much forever that I might not remember what we did, but remembered what I was wearing. There is a lot of truth to my memories being linked to clothing. First kiss? That was a white short sleeved bodysuit and long pants in salmon with big white daisies on them and a green fabric tie belt. At age 12, I wore a dress with a red, white, and blue knit top and white cotton pleated bottom when my family flew to Texas to visit Grandpa Ray. Seventh grade began in a brown long sleeved dress with images of small houses all over it, buttons down the front, and white patent leather go-go boots. The first day of ninth grade featured a salmon turtleneck, forest green pants, and a forest green and patterned sweater with a shawl collar and a belt. I could go on an on.

There were a couple memorable fainting outfits. In my mid-twenties, I fainted in the lobby of a Manhattan office building while wearing a cotton dress with blue and white windowpane check, pleated skirt and a polo collar. My sister-in-law stepped out of the elevator and I passed out cold onto the cool, stone floor. This cancelled the lunch plans for the day, but my mother-in-law and I got to spend four hours of quality time in the emergency room before taking the series of buses back to the Bronx. Many years later, while wearing my favorite jeans and a tee shirt with four multicolored screen printed skulls on the front, I fainted at the Abbott Kinney music festival in Los Angeles and got to spend the rest of the day hanging out in, you guessed it, the emergency room. So fun.

High school outfits were meticulously recorded in a school notebook to avoid accidentally wearing the same outfit twice in a week. And yet, every time the photographer was on site for candid yearbook photos my senior year, I was wearing the same rose cowl neck top with a cream scarf with tan, blue, and rose stripes that I wore in my senior portrait. Go figure. During my first professional job after graduating college, I went three solid months before repeating an outfit. For some reason that was important at the time. Maybe it had to do with the high school photographer thing.

In middle age in more modern times, the importance of outfits has diminished. The pre-pandemic daily outfit test had devolved to two questions: Did I wear it yesterday? Does it fit today? If the answers were no and yes respectively, it was the winner. Working from home, the bar is even lower. Did I wear it yesterday? Who cares, and who will even know? The only concern now is whether or not there is a video meeting involving the same people as yesterday’s video meeting. It’s almost a certainty I’ll be feral by the time I return to the office.