That’s a picture from a year and a half ago, or maybe a lifetime ago, I don’t know. Anyway, it’s also a picture of me, and it’s also a picture of my niece (the Burrito).
It’s also a picture of one of the many t-shirts my sister (the Burrito’s mom) has gotten me for Christmas over the years.
I feel like an idiot for realizing that this has in fact been a tradition of hers, and having only just realized it a few minutes ago. Yesterday I got her somewhat belated Christmas present in the mail. It was of course another t-shirt (Chateau Picard!). And a few minutes ago I think I also finally realized why my sister has had this tradition:
I’m a t-shirt guy. I mean, it’s not unusual to wear t-shirts. It’s not even unusual to have t-shirts with pop culture references.
It may be unusual to keep restocking the wardrobe with new ones, year after year, decade after decade. And to have a sizable, rotating collection worn daily. Again, I am not wholly unique in this regard. I get that. But I think in my family this is one of the many things I pursue differently than the rest of us.
And my sister noticed.
And so pretty much without fail, she’s been helping me add to the collection at Christmas. Hey, I added to it last year myself, quite happily, with a Buccaneers Tom Brady t-shirt. I sent a picture of it around to the family. We’re New England folk. Everyone else might think the past twenty years were a fluke stoked by cheating, but for us (okay, some of us are traitors) Tom Grady is unquestionably great, and yeah, I was pretty pleased that when he finally left the Patriots, he ended up here in Tampa.
So yeah, I’ve got a lot of t-shirts, celebrating various things. I’ve got one I just wore the other day, from a party I attended in 2007 the same day the last Harry Potter was released, the same day I got copies of my first book. I’ve got a t-shirt celebrating Moxie, which is an old timey soft drink my hometown adopted. I’ve got one featuring Gasparilla, the Tampa pirate festival. Some people wear the same treasured t-shirt memory endlessly. Me, I’ve got dozens of those.
Sometimes, sadly, the collar frays. I have to concede to stop wearing it. I keep those, too, of course, add them to my “archives.”
What can I say? I’m a t-shirt guy. And thank you, Burrito’s mom, for being a part of that.
I think he's one of the greatest players ever.
ReplyDeleteI'm also a t-shirt guy. Every year I remind my wife how many t-shirts we have and go easy at Christmas. Every year we blow it. (I think I got six this year.) I think the oldest one I still wear is from a Yes concert almost forty years ago.
T-shirt Christmas. It is officially a thing!
DeleteNot a big t-shirt guy but I have one that says "GRANDPA life is great." It has the word grandpa spelled out in very large letters. At the zoo with the grandkids a stranger came by with his family and said, "Hey, Grandpa, will you take a picture of me and my family?" His wife gasped audibly and started to apologize because he never does that sort of thing and how embarrassed she was. He said, "What? His name is right there on his shirt!" He and I were cracking up but she didn't at first because she as embarrassed. He was younger than me and I told him a quote from a different t-shirt, "Grandchildren are God's reward to you for not killing your own children."
ReplyDeleteGrandparents, when parents decide it’s not time to retire from the family business.
Deletelol. That's a good one.
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