It all began, as these things do, with the mother. My mother, who, one summer day, actually gave in to my request to go by myself to the department store downtown and buy myself a shirt to wear to school.
Eighth grade loomed on the horizon, and I was at the stage of a boy’s growth when to be seen with either one of his parents in a public place was, pardon the cliché, a fate worse than death. Shopping with my mother was fine when I was in elementary school, but definitely was not the way to start junior high school.
Bob Kalish observes life from a placid place on the island of Arrowsic (motto: You’re not in Georgetown yet). You can reach him at bobkalish@gmail.com.
According to my mother, I wore a men’s medium or a boy’s size 12; it was up to me which one looked better. So on the trolley to downtown I kept silently repeating, “Men’s medium, boy’s 12.”
Turned out that the fashion masters who decide such things chose the combination of charcoal gray and pink as the “color du jour.” For that year. The combination was everywhere – advertised in magazines, on television. There was even a bestselling book, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.”
On my way into the department store, the mannequins stood frozen in mid-ecstasy, dressed in charcoal gray pants and a pink shirt with a Mister B collar. The Mister B was a flared collar that stretched almost to the shoulders, popularized by the singer, Billy Eckstein. My 12-year-old mind reeled and I fell into a state where I do what I’m told, and I was told by the saleswoman who waited on me that the shirt I held up before the mirror was “terrific, makes you look taller.” Magic words for a fledgling Boston Celtic.
My mother disagreed. Vehemently. Taller, shmaller, pink is not what a fair-skinned, blue-eyed young lad on the cusp of adolescence wears to school, she said. I hoped I could get away with bringing it home and storing it in my drawer, to come out only in the most extreme circumstances, like a nuclear missile attack. Fat chance.
“What made you think pink was a color you could wear?” she scolded, as I stood there with the shirt hanging from my fingers. I sensed that was as far as I would get to wearing it. My mother was not a religious woman, so she didn’t know who to blame for the lack of shopping genes inherited by her son. She could only shake her head in wonder at the circumstances that led to the point where her son apparently did not share the shopping DNA in her family that dated back to the Pleistocene era.
So it ended up I was taken by the hand like a toddler and back on the trolley with the shirt and sales slip in a bag in Mother’s hand. All I could think of was “Men’s medium, boy’s 12,” until we were at the men’s department, where a man I recognized as the high school music teacher wearing a pink shirt with a Mister B collar and French cuffs was serving a customer.
“He can wear a shirt like that,” Mother said, not unprepared for my defensive counterattack. “He’s dark, and his eyes are brown. Nice looking, sure, but not for you.”
My mother left me and ignored the other salesperson while she went through a stack of folded shirts and two racks of shirts on hangars before deciding on an OK shirt with a traditional collar and earthy colors. It was blue.
“You can’t go wrong with blue and green,” Mother said. “Remember that.”
Since that day I have never worn pink.
Next week: History of Shopping, part II
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