Veterans in Hats and Bare-Headed Widows

I take myself out to lunch quite often in good driving months and this week was no exception. Often I’m struck by how many older guys I run across who are wearing baseball hats proclaiming that they are veterans and if you could hear the jumble of thoughts going through my head when I see them, you’d probably be shocked. I get the whole proud to have served thing and how the hat elicits strangers to say, “thank you for your service” and how veterans often stop one another to compare service stats but it also makes me sad and stirs up thoughts I’d rather not have. And I wonder how many of these guys are letting their hats proclaim that their few years in the service were the most significant thing that happened in their entire lives. Do you think I’m being unpatriotic or anti-military or disrespectful to question the message a person’s head gear is expressing?

The sad truth is for many veterans of the Vietnam War it was the most significant and life changing thing they went through in their roughly 60+ years of living. The controversies surrounding the war and the dismissive way our servicemen were treated for many years was different than after previous wars. At least in this country. After WWII the French had collective amnesia about their own dark history. Exhibit A of many: The Vél d'Hiv Roundup when the French police did Hitler’s bidding and rounded up their own countrymen---thousands of Jewish people living in Paris including nearly 4,000 children and shipped them off to Auschwitz. The children were separated from their parents before they got on the trains and when the children got to Auschwitz they were marched directly to the ovens. It happened in July of 1942 and it took until 1995 for the country to officially acknowledge the part France played in delivering so many of their own citizens to their deaths.

I suppose the reason the veteran hats bother me is because they remind me that I can’t live in a bubble where everything is a Disney movie. Letting it go when we should never forget might work for many things but not when it comes to the atrocities that follow on the heels of unfettered hate. In our current political climate it's easy to see how intolerance can creep into public policies that, in turn, could lead to unspeakable acts. I guess that’s one of the good things about old men wearing veteran hats, they remind us not forget those who fought for---hopefully----noble causes. Admittedly, the line between noble causes and self-serving lust for power were clearer during the Civil War, WWI and WWII. Not so much with the Vietnam War. We were lied to. We trusted our leaders and our returning servicemen paid a price for those lies. 

I’ve never thanked a veteran for his service. Why can’t I bring myself to do that? I see others do it and it seems so easy-peasy for them---like a greeting and a handshake. Hello, nice to meet you. Have a nice day. I can’t presume to know what that hat represents to the person wearing it or to the person doing the thanking. Maybe I’d presume too much, maybe not enough. A military hat is not a like college t-shirt on a forty year old, balding guy where you can safely guess the shirt presents a carefree time in his life when he had time to play sports and flirt with the campus cutie pies. It’s not like a hat from a concert or a souvenir hat from a place where you left your heart and half the money in your wallet. 

My husband had a large collection of hats with logos and t-shirts with sayings on the front. It was a big deal every morning to decide what mood he was in when he picked out his fashion choices, especially after his stroke when he couldn’t communicate in other ways. But reading a person’s mood by the messages on his clothing never worked with a friend of ours who, when asked about the logo on his shirt replied, “I don’t know what it is. I buy cheap shirts at the Salvation Army so I can throw them out when they get too grubby to wear.” 

I’ve often wondered what message I’d want to wear on a hat, if I could design one that sums up the most significant thing that happened in my entire life. Sexual abused as a toddler, rape survivor later on? No, those things happened to me but they never defined me. Same goes for surviving the death of my parents and husband. Those things helped make me stronger, but they don’t define me either. Caregiver to a stroke survivor? Now, if I could figure out how to put that on a hat that might work. I stepped up to the plate to care for my severely disabled husband in a way that gave him the best quality of life anyone could have under the circumstances and I am proud of those twelve and a half years. If all that would fit on a hat, I’d no longer be a bare-headed widow. ©

T-Shirts and Old Girlfriends

A few days ago I took myself out to lunch and while I was waiting for my plate of cholesterol to be served a couple about my age walked in. The woman was wearing a t-shirt that read, “Friendship League” and the guy was wearing one with the word 'Superman' plastered across his chest. And that was all it took to transport me back to the '80s when Don had one of those silly superman t-shirts only he didn’t wear his like this man did, for all the world to see. Don loved to wear his superman shirt underneath a dress shirt, suit jacket and a tie. It put him in a silly mood, like he had a secret and was waiting for an opportunity to expose that t-shirt at a party, wedding reception or similar dress-up event. I don’t remember him doing it more than twice---once when a hostess couldn't open a bottle of wine---but he wore that shirt under his dress clothing for years, until it got too small and it went into a box labeled ‘Memory Shirts.’ Most of the t-shirts in that box got donated after his stroke and our downsizing to move but some of them ended up in a quilt that I had made. That was probably the best gift I ever gave my husband and he used it almost every day until he died. 

Did you know that t-shirts evolved from the one-piece union suits (underwear also known as long-johns) that men wore in the 19^th century? They’d cut the bottoms off and wear the tops to do farm chores in the summer months and the cut-off union suits also became popular with miners and stevedores. By the 1920s the word t-shirt was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, but it wasn’t until Marlon Brando, in the 1950s, wore a t-shirt in A Streetcar Named Desire that t-shirts came into their own as a stand-alone fashion garment. Silk screening on t-shirts for self-expression, souvenirs and advertising was popularized in 1960s, but in between the end of WWII and the '60s they could be found in veteran groups. 

In April of 1970 when I met my husband, silk-screened t-shirts were not universally accepted as proper attire in Don’s family, a fact that I didn’t know when I wore one the first time I met his family. It was navy blue and had two large white footprints over my chest--far from a hippie protest t-shirt but close enough, I guess. It was probably the single most notable thing I did to cause one of his three brothers to spend the next four decades looking down his nose at me. I heard stories a few years later about how that t-shirt became the topic of the family gossip mill, with Don’s dad taking my side and declaring me to be "the perfect girl for Don.” Don, at 29, was the unmarried baby of the family and a mystery as to why he let two perfectly nice girls slip through his fingers when either one would have made a wonderful wife and mother. The t-shirt hating brother deemed him to be immature and lacking an anchor. Those two never did understand what made the other one tick.

One of the girls Don dated before me was his high school sweetheart and I have the photos to prove it. She was a red-head who still lives near-by and after graduation she broke up with him because he didn’t produce an engagement ring in a timely manner. She was engaged to someone else a few months later. We used to see her and her husband at class reunions or house parties back in the day and they came to our ‘Thank God, I’m Alive’ party that I threw to celebrate Don’s stroke recovery at the five year benchmark. I don’t even know how that came about; they weren't invited. I was okay being around her---it was high school after all---but her husband always acted uneasy being around the "high school sweethearts." Don’s second serious girlfriend gave up on getting a ring out of him after five year. She joined the WAC, ended up marrying an Army engineer and lived happily ever after in Fiji. I was always glad I never met her. I suspect she was too classy to ever wear a tacky t-shirt with big feet on the front.

Over the years both my husband and I had many favorite t-shirts. Some from places we’d been on vacation like the Gene Autry Museum and Steamboat Colorado, others made statements like “Kiss Me I’m Irish”---Don was and he wore that shirt once a year until it got too tight. Other favorites were for local causes like “Save City Hall!” and a covert protest tee against a local soap manufacturer that depicted a bar of soap on a rope. A giant bar of "soap" on a robe was an entry in a local raft race and that t-shirt was a gift from the artist who made the raft. We took part in that the race for four-five years. We had an old, ten-man military surplus rubber survival raft with a roof that we made into a turtle one year, a whale another. I see that soap t-shirt in the quilt and all those memories come back.

I doubt logo and silk-screen t-shirts will ever fall out of fashion. Though I don’t wear them anymore since my husband died. I gave them up in an attempt to update my wardrobe, not look like a caregiver anymore or an aged-out hippie. But if I ever see a shirt that says, “Friendship League” I  might be tempted to buy it. While I was at lunch I had a terrible time resisting going up to the woman wearing that t-shirt and asking her, “What the heck is a friendship league and how can I join?” I think that's the reason why my husband loved t-shirts---they're great conversation starters. Even after he lost his speech with the stroke, he'd roll his wheelchair up to someone wearing an interesting logo and point to it. Ohmygod, I could write a whole blog entry about some of the situations he got himself into doing that. And I probably did in my caregiver blog. ©

The photo at the top was taken in 1959 of Don with his high school sweetheart. The photo below is of the t-shirt quilt I had made for Don.There are 19 shirts and five patches in the quilt. It's not a pretty quilt but it was the perfect size for lounging in his La-Z-Boy and a prefect memory trigger.

The Widow's Nightgown

It occurred to me this week that every other night I’m wearing my nightgown inside out. I take it off in a manner my mom used to call “skinning the kitty” but somewhere along the line I quit turning the nightgown right side out before hanging it on its hook. Then at night I’ll grab the wrong side out garment, put it on and when it comes off in the morning, skin-the-kitty style again, it turns right side out. This is another old people thing or I’m I just getting lazy or are they one in the same? My nightgown is actually an old, v-neck t-shirt of my husband’s. It’s extra-long and reaches my knees and it’s getting so worn and holey I really should throw it out. Boohoo, I don’t want to do that except I feel the breath of an anonymous social worker on the back of my neck, making judgments and deeming me ready for a nursing home. Someone has to save old people from the dangers of appearing sloppy and as poor as a church mouse, she'd be thinking. Note to self: Don’t start getting the mail in your nightgown because one of the neighbors could have social services on their speed dial.

My husband wasn’t much taller than me but because he was in a wheelchair and in charge of dressing himself he could never get his pants pulled up high enough on one side thus the extra-long t-shirts did a good job of hiding his fanny. This is a common problem with people in wheelchairs and it’s always bugged me that others don’t understand they can’t help it. It’s just the way it is. Disabled people usually do the best they can to dress themselves and the rest of us need to do our best to ignore an exposed fanny from time to time. That’s hard for one particular acquaintance of mine to do. She’s so judgmental on this topic that it makes me crazy, but that’s a rant I should probably turn off and go on to other things. Sometimes I forget I’m no longer an advocate for stroke survivors. I have widow and old people issues to fry now that my husband is gone.

A few days ago I took an older cousin-in-law on a little road trip to have lunch with another cousin of ours. The cousin I picked up has gotten so frail since I saw her last at my husband’s funeral but she's still as sharp and as much fun to be around as she's always been. I hope people can say the same about me when I'm her age. Back when the three of us were young I spent a fair amount of time with each of them and at lunch we had a good time talking about our families past and present. It’s a shame we lost that closeness over the years. But the miles separate us physically and our lives all went in different directions separating us in other ways. It’s the way of the world when kids grow up and leave their core families behind.

Have you ever played the what-if game where you daydream about how you would have been different if so-and-so had remained in your life? Usually we do it regarding someone negative---an x-spouse, a nasty parent or even someone we loved who didn’t love us back. Rarely do we wonder what influences a do-gooder type would have had on our life trajectory, but I did just that after our cousin’s lunch. I suspect I would have turned out to be a better person if the influence of my younger cousin had reminded in my life all these years. Let’s just say she got all the Mother Theresa genes in the family. She’s probably the most charitable, do-good person I know---genuinely sweet and giving where I’m pickier about my do-good causes and more protective of my free time. She’s touched so many lives that when she dies they'll have to hold the service in the local high school auditorium. When I die my service could take place inside a Volkswagen. In other words, she threw rocks in the pool of life, I threw tiny pebbles.

One of the most interesting things about growing older is we get to see how the choices we made early on in life panned out over the years, we get to see how the people who came in and out of our lives have enriched us or torn us down, and we get decide if we’d take a do-over if do-overs were humanly possible. I’m putting on some rose colored glasses here but I like to think that most of us by the time we enter our “Golden Years” are happy with the way we turned out---or at least we’ve made peace with our personal histories---and we wouldn’t change much in our pasts. Our collective good, bad and the ugly experiences all had a hand in building the kind of people we’ve become. Take something ugly out of the mix and more than likely we wouldn’t have the same level of appreciation for the good stuff that came along later. Bottom line: I like myself and how I turned out but I sure admire my younger cousin. She’s so much like my dad in character and personality you’d think we were switched at birth if not for the two years that separate us. Get out the fiddles, there might be a country western song in there somewhere.

My house cleaning service comes in a few days and the girl assigned to my house is in college part-time, working towards a degree in social services. She’s a sweet, compassionate young woman but I’m starting to think I should buy myself a new nightgown so I don’t end up as Exhibit B in a term paper she has to write. When to Get Involved: Signs to Look For In Our Aging Population. One of these days she’s going to hit the chapter on protecting senior citizens from themselves and she’s going to start pushing numbers on her cell phone if I don’t shape up and get rid of my shabby, widow’s nightgown beforehand. ©

P.S. This is the 200th blog I've written since my husband passed away. I don't know what that means but I thought I'd mention it.