Dave and I have been together 30 years this year. That’s 10,950 days of marital bliss and romance right here on Coleman Farm. Of course, he keeps hoping that I will transform into a chirpy morning person, and I dream that he will quit drinking from the milk bottle when he thinks I’m not looking, but overall each of our tics seem to work out with the other’s tocs pretty well. Still, there’s a part of me that wonders if David wouldn’t be happier if I left him to himself more often. What if I just let Dave be Dave? What if I allowed him to be his own, natural Dave self? I suspect he’d like it plenty, but my theory may never be tested. I just can’t seem to take myself out of the equation of his life.
Consider the subject of clothing. Both Dave and I can agree that he needs to wear it, but from there our opinions head off in different directions never to meet again. What he’ll be wearing is never a mystery. On any given day, I can predict with 99% accuracy what’s coming out of the closet. For chores, it’s going to be a T-shirt, Carhartt pants with lots of pockets, boots of some kind and a baseball cap. I think he wears T-shirts so often, he no longer considers them as separate from himself. They have become his second skin – his top epidermal layer. I’m not even going to comment about which layer is the worst for wear. If I close my eyes, I can see his shirt now: 100% cotton, loose cut, sporting a left front pocket. If I accidentally buy a shirt without a pocket, I don’t even need to bother putting it in the closet. The color will be white, blue, brown or green. Of course, what a Dave-shirt doesn’t have is as important as what it does have. It’d better not be bright or patterned – heaven forbid flashiness of any kind. No stretch to the fabric. No synthetic nothing. According to the Fashion Bible of Dave, page 1 of 1, farmers do not wear polyester.
This brings me to the drama that played out in the living room a few days ago. The kids were looking for gift ideas for Dave. It’s no small problem finding a gift for a farmer in the “under $50,000” range. Birthdays, Father’s Day and Christmas – they are a Dave mystery to us all. In fact, I think there needs to be an emergency phone number to call: OLD-FAR-MMEN extension goodluck. There probably is a website. Dave was already stocked with pocketknives, socks and cheese, which pretty much rounds out his personal survival kit, so the kids were reduced to asking him for suggestions. Asking dampens the element of surprise for sure, but in the case of farmers, the element of surprise is seldom a good thing anyway. Dave was happy to help them out. He didn’t even have to stop to think. “A motorcycle helmet.”
At this point, all I needed to do was keep my mouth shut and my nose out of the conversation. I knew this was none of my business and just needed to play out between the kids and their dad. “Just exactly how much will a helmet like you want cost?” I suddenly heard someone say – someone who sounded suspiciously like me.
“$250 to $300.”
“Dave! The kids don’t have that kind of money!” Yup, no question now. That voice definitely was mine.
“Oh right.” Dave looked chagrined. “How about a leather jacket for when I’m riding my motorcycle on road?”
“Leather jacket, Dave?”
“They asked me what I wanted, Michele.”
“How about something in the broke-college-student-minimum-wage range of possibilities?”
Dave looked like a man who was ready to be a bachelor. “OK then, what do I want?”
“You could use some new T-shirts.”
“T-Shirts?” I might as well’ve said “more field rocks” or “head lice” or “a kidney stone.” “Michele, I have stacks of T-shirts in the closet. Piles of T-shirts. I don’t have room for any more T-shirts!”
“And every one of them is stained,” I snapped back. “You need shirts you can actually wear out in public.”
And then he handed me this question: “Where in the world do I go that I would need to wear a T-shirt that doesn’t have stains on it?”
In the entirety of my life, I’ve never been accused of being a fashion maven, but somewhere deep in my soul I’m sure that there are occasions that merit stain-free presentation. I don’t think that was Dave’s real argument though. Note to self: Dave doesn’t consider a T-shirt to be a gift. He apparently expects articles of clothing to spontaneously appear on his shelf with no strings attached as to where and where-not he can wear them.
I know this though: If I put a new shirt in his closet, that’s the one he’s going to wear. He’ll wear it to town, then he’ll wear it to pull a calf, then he’ll wear it out to dinner. He might even use it as a grease rag, but he’s for sure going to use it as a washcloth. The concept that clothing should be parsed out to fit different activities and occasions is not interesting to him – unless we are talking about motorcycle riding, that is. Second note to self: If I want to give Dave clothing as a gift, it’d better be that leather jacket.
