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.
