I Heard Tell

I’ve never had what you might call a sense of fashion. That would have been fine, except that I was given a little sister who could distinguish between pleated and flat-front pants before she could distinguish between her mother and strangers. My younger sister can wear cowboy boots and a shower curtain and look like Jackie Kennedy. I don’t know where she got this ability. My suspicion is that somehow my parents saved up and bestowed upon her all of their combined fashion consciousness (or ‘stirrup-pants shunning’) genes. To add insult to injury, she also got cuter feet. My inability to dress myself with anything resembling artistic or even legal vision became clear when I began picking out my own clothes. You know those painfully skinny nine-year-old girls with legs like jointed Popsicle sticks who run around in Magic-Eye-patterned stretch pants? I am particularly sympathetic toward those girls, for I was one of them. The versatility of stretch pants was amazing, I thought at the time. Pair them with an oversized pink t-shirt and a neon scrunchie and you were ready for anything, especially if your socks didn’t match. To nine-year-old me, nothing said cool like mismatched socks. They conveyed the exact attitude I wanted, a combination of breezy coolness and swaggering confidence. Not to mention a complete lack of self-awareness.
My little sister Sarah had her awkward phases as well; there was a stage in her life which we refer to as ‘the Bow period’, during which she wouldn’t leave the house without a large, floppy, brightly colored bow clamped firmly around her skull with a piece of elastic the size and thickness of a stout piece of rope.
Sarah, however, left her awkward phases behind fairly quickly; wrinkling her nose and eschewing elastic-waist jeans by the time she had left kindergarten, while I remained a steadfast devotee long into the twilight of puberty. Style, for me, was strongly wedded to convenience, but it was an abusive marriage.
All things considered, though, I don’t particularly like seeing little children who are well dressed. The sight of tiny little girls in bellbottoms and boys in neat little corduroys has always made
me uncomfortable. If the Good Lord had meant for little children to wear stylish jeans, He wouldn’t have invented sweat pants. You have your entire adult life to wear chinos; why not spend two years living in your Cowbow And Covered Wagon Pajama pants while you still can? No, it doesn’t bother me too much that at age ten I wore white turtlenecks with tiny hearts all over them. However, it does bother me that at age fifteen I wore an undershirt on which I had written ‘It’s Disco Love Tonight’ with turquoise puffy paint. It bothers my mom that I wore that shirt to a church youth group meeting.
Fortunately, I ended up at Bard, where a lack of style can be mistaken for style, and Sarah ended up at art school, where she belongs.

Tags: Childhood

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