Beargrease #2

A year ago, I wouldn’t have worn the skirt or the boots, especially the boots. They’d have been too extreme for me, too unusual and different. Flamboyant. Other people would wear boots like that. I wouldn’t.

And the skirt over my jeans. Seriously.

A few months ago, a younger woman remembered the times we met many years ago when I was a program evaluator and she was the nervous manager of a literacy program. “You would take off your suit jacket and sit there in that crisp white dress shirt,” she said, and she went on to reminisce about my white shirt as if it had been a third person at our meetings. I didn’t tell her the white shirts still hung in my closet, too big for me now and never worn. I’m not that person anymore. I don’t want to be around anything starched.

The bit about my white dress shirts made me think about how much what we wear is telling people who we think we are.

Dress the part.

Clothes make the man.

Dress for the job you want.

And I think I’m still doing that except now I’m someone very different. I’m someone who would wear fur mukluks and an insulated skirt in a big crowd of people and not think a thing of it.

Age gives us these little gifts, we just have to learn to wear them.