Souvenir Tee Shirts

Decades of clutter populates my house and office. An organizational message appeared in my mail not long ago. If you have not used something in two years, it said, chances are you never will. Toss it was the impending message. Clutter slows you down, impedes your life and makes you unhappy.

Maybe so, I thought as I folded my laundry. Maybe I should throw away some of my old tee shirts, especially those with tears and stains. I began sorting the tee shirts on my bed with that thought in mind.

The first tee I held up for inspection was from the Redbud 10K race of 2000. I had to think a moment before its relevance came to mind. When it did, it poured over me with a poignant flood of memories, still painful after almost eight years.

Barely managing to cope with the death of my wife in 1998, I had gained an enormous amount of weight, and I continued to seethe with an inner anger that would not quit saying, “why me?” Jogging had helped me maintain my sanity during Anne’s illness and I needed to know that I still had the physical, and the mental strength to go the distance.

I parked my car a mile from the starting line and walked the rest of the way to loosen my muscles I knew would be screaming uncle long before the finish of the six-point-two mile course. Halfway there, a young man jogged up and began walking with me.

“Are you doing the Freedom Walk,” he asked.

“Nope,” I said. “The 10K.”

“You sure you can make it, big fellow?”

“Don’t know, but that’s what I’m here to find out,” I told him.

“You can do it,” he said. “But you need to go out slow. Don’t get caught up in the crowd. Just run your own race. If you get tired, then walk for awhile.”

With that, the man I am positive was an angel tapped me on the shoulder and jogged away without another word. Before I reached the starting line, it began to rain. It continued to rain until I completed the 6.2 miles that I did without stopping, not even once. The torrent ended as I crossed the line.

“I can’t throw this baby away,” I said, folding the tee shirt and putting it aside.

The next tee was from the Downtown Oklahoma City Art’s Festival of 1995. There was no Oklahoma City Art’s Festival in 1995. City Fathers canceled the event because of the Oklahoma City bombing attack on the Murrah Building in April of 1995. I bought the tee a year later, as the festival had an unsold stock of them. The tee had a torn sleeve where my Labrador Lucky had taken a bite from it when he was a puppy. Lucky, my best friend in the world, had helped me survive my grief. Folding the tee, I put it aside.
“Can’t throw this one away either,” I said.

Ten raggedy tees later, I had failed to throw even one of them away.

Sitting here now, punching these random thoughts out for all you anonymous people in the blogosphere, I cannot help but think of the clutter in my life. Yes, I need to throw some things away. I know existence would be simpler and better if I could control the chaos in my house, my office and yes, in my brain.

Maybe, but perhaps the clutter in our lives is really the essence of our being, the essential glue that binds our very souls. I do not know. What I do know is that without memories we would be little more than pulsating blobs of protoplasm.

Stuffing the tees in my chest of drawers, I forced shut the drawer and decided to worry about the chaos later.

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