Requiem for My Memory Shirt
A salute to a Nike base layer that's full of memories, heavy with adventure and thick with, well …
It’s a gray, wicking, long sleeve t-shirt with a Nike swoosh on it, and it has been on my back for many adventures. I wore it to the top of mountains in California, Idaho and New Hampshire, to the bottom of a gorge in North Carolina and on countless F3 workouts in Missouri. In one weekend in Oregon, it soaked my flop sweat as I took off-road driving lessons on a one-lane mountain road, flew down the beach in a side by side, and pedaled along the Pacific Ocean. I wore it as a base layer as I drove deep into the Italian alps, hollered hello to a man unloading firewood from a truck and discovered he is my distant cousin.
My wife, my kids, my parents, my brothers and my best friends all stand alongside me in photos as I’m wearing it. That shirt drips with emotional power from some of the greatest memories of my life.
It’s also in the bottom of a landfill somewhere because last week I threw it away.
I didn’t plan on that shirt becoming My Memory Shirt, it just turned out that way. We all own something like that, don’t we? It might be an old Tigers hat or a concert t-shirt or a pair of jeans that used to be cool to wear out then were cool to wear around the house then were cool to cut the grass in and now you just can’t throw them away.
A friend of mine has a pair of sweats he loves so much that when they became unwearable, his wife cut the legs off and sewed them onto a hoodie as sleeves. God love him, when he wears them, his arms look like the wings from a bird of my kid’s nightmares.
I thought saving clothes long past their usefulness was a guy thing, but when I researched this topic for a slightly different version of this essay a few years ago, two women friends told me they have t-shirts from 1994 that they still wear all the time and a third still wears her wedding shoes … and her 50th anniversary has come and gone.
Another friend first dyed her wedding shoes from white to black and then took them to the cobbler multiple times to get them resoled. They were expensive, comfortable, dance-in-them-able and she wanted to keep them for as long as possible. But this is how her beloved shoes met their end: “I spilled maple syrup on them and realized they were finally done. I left them in a garbage can on Main Street outside of the cobbler’s shop. Now when I pass by that garbage can, I think of my shoes and where they’ve been.”
Sweat pants, hiking boots, wedding shoes, jeans, however disparate these items may be, they all serve as memory conduits, and they transport us back to vivid moments in our lives. Maybe, like these brides, your item is tied to an important event. Maybe it’s a Red Sox hat or your alma mater’s shirt, and you love it for that reason. Maybe good things happen to you when you wear it so you keep it in heavy rotation.
Around the time I bought the shirt, I was laid off from my full-time magazine job. The first few months after that are a blur of stress. I tried to start a freelance writing career. I discovered I knew how to write a story but didn’t know the first thing about selling a story.
I sent out story pitches, waited five minutes, then refreshed my in-box obsessively in anticipation of responses that never came. I spent long hours in my home office not knowing what to do with myself. I had to get out of there.
So I hiked.
A lot.
My obsession with hiking turned into stories about hiking, which turned into stories about travel, which turned into stories about adventure, which turned into stories about fitness. The shirt was my frequent companion.
I kept it long after it had become ripe, as if throwing it away would somehow cheapen those memories and that saving it preserved those memories. I know that’s not true, but I saved it, just in case.
I decided to get rid of it when, well, let’s just say it became two-tone. And so, heavy with ceremonial solemnity, I marched to our kitchen trash can, opened it, and plopped it in.
I’m a little surprised it didn’t explode.
I don’t have the shirt, but I’ve still got the pictures. I’ve still got the memories that animate those pictures. And I’ve got another Memory Shirt in the making. It’s a top layer, which will extend its life. And it’s black, so it won’t change colors like the gray one did. I’ll have it forever.
