The Vinyl Café Notebooks Read Online Free Page B

design and not unstylish all these years later, especially with the jeans and the untucked shirt.
    I have a long history with blazers. As a child, I went to a boys’ school where we all wore them.
    A blue blazer, grey flannel pants and a white shirt and tie is a good look for a boy. Unfortunately, I carried the look with me into adulthood. A grown man in grey flannels and blazer looks like a poetry teacher at an English prep school. It tookme a while, but I now understand that this is not a good look for an adult, which is why the blazer was in the back of my closet. My question is, Why have I held on to it? For decades?
    First, I would put forward, because of the sentimental attachment. I have had a blazer in my closet, or thrown over my bedroom chair, pretty much since I was eleven years old. I am not sure what might happen if I didn’t have one. Something bad, probably.
    I own other articles of clothing like this, clothes that I never wear anymore but feel attached to nonetheless. There is a brown corduroy jacket, for instance, that isn’t, but looks just like, the brown corduroy jacket that my first-ever girlfriend, Joanne, made for me. How can I throw it away? It’s a stand-in, yes, but it stands in my closet as a symbol of young love. And speaking of love, there is also the suit I was married in. I bought it, on a Friday night, in between flights, at Brooks Brothers in Boston. Racing to the store from the airport in a taxi, I bought the entire wedding kit in no time flat: a white shirt, a muted tie and the dark blue suit.
    I had tried to buy a wedding suit before I left home. My friend Suanne still tells the story of how I called from a downtown men’s store, stuffed, pathetically, into a sleek Italian suit.
    “Come and tell me if it is all right,” I begged.
    Suanne jumped into a taxi. “Holt Renfrew,” she barked. “It’s an emergency.”
    When she got there, she looked at me and sniggered. “It looks like that suit is wearing you,” she said.
    By the time I hit Boston, I was suit-less and just one flight away from my own wedding. I was desperate, and thereforeflushed with both pride and relief when I got the job done.
    Pleased as punch that I had pulled it off, and with time to kill before my plane, I wandered down Clarendon Street and, eventually, into another men’s store, a stylish place called Simon’s, where a flamboyant young salesman took me under his wing, poured me a glass of ouzo and asked me to show him what I had bought. He took one look at the shirt and tie I had chosen and wrinkled his nose.
    “Is this a wedding? Or a funeral?” he asked. “Are you happy about this?”
    It didn’t take much for him to talk me into a happy shirt and an exuberant red tie that I was almost too shy to wear.
    The shirt long ago vanished, and the lining on the tie is gone, and, sadly, I am no longer married, but the suit is still in my closet, hanging there loyally, with the conviction I lost. And though, perhaps appropriately, it doesn’t fit me anymore, it is a silent reminder of a great good thing, and it is not going out. Not ever. It has a lifetime membership, and I have packed and unpacked it each time I have moved, with a tinge of melancholy but never regret.
    There are other things like it. A shirt that was once in style but isn’t anymore. I don’t wear it either, but I did to great effect for a while.
    “Look at you,” said a pretty girl one night. “That is a stylish shirt.”
    There is a velvet jacket that I bought from a vintage store, that I could once pull off but wouldn’t try to these days. And other stuff too.
    There is part of me that believes if I threw any of these things out, or dumped them in a Goodwill box, it would bedaring the world to turn on me. You think you are too good for that blazer, Mr. Fancy Pants? Well, deal with this then. And there would be a huge economic conflagration, and I would lose my job, and the ability to pay for power and, more importantly, heat, and I