“As you wish was all he ever said to her.
“That day, she was amazed to discover that when he was saying, ‘As you wish,’ what he meant was, ‘I love you.’”
The perfect choice for weekend chore work in service of one’s Buttercup.
I find that wearing this liberates me from having to say much, which thereby lessens my odds of saying something dumb, and/or something that will get on Buttercup’s nerves.
Spill a little mustard on your shirt for Franktuary, which sunsetted its brick and mortar a few years back, but still operates a food truck here and there I hear.
Reverently prepared hot dogs.
Peter and I used to pilgrimage to their Lawrenceville location for boys day out Saturday lunches.
And like the great philosophers of antiquity, we’d spend the purgatory between our ordering and our munching engaging in spirited, hangry debates over the universe’s cosmic questions.
Does ketchup belong on a hot dog?
Answer: as you will consistently find across both your meat-eating eastern and western religions, the creator intended ketchup for hamburgers, mustard for hot dogs.
Are Franktuary’s fresh cut fries with garlic aioli better than Shorty’s fries with gravy?
Answer: What, in life, is truly objective? Just as Plato and Kant tussled with that hot potato across centuries … Peter and I staged “The Great Potato Debate” across many a table over the years. He was unequivocally Team Frankturary. Me? I was polytheistic on the matter. For the ultimate answer … ask God next time you see her.
Without irony, I believe that you can test the mettle of a good cathedral by the questions and conversations it engenders.
Once, while Peter and I were debating metaphysics, Heidegger, and the nature of being — by which I mean whether honey mustard was a salad dressing (Peter) or a condiment (me) — a father and young son, both dressed in Pirates jerseys, sat down at a booth across from us.
No sooner had they taken their seats when the son, maybe eight or nine, asked his Dad, “Who’s your favorite baseball player of all time?”
Which settled the question of God’s existence for me once and for all.
In dogs we trust.
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so seen.
I love this shirt so much.
I imagine the person who designed it going on to an amazingly successful full life — Nobel-Prize-winning scientist or somesuch — and still knows in their heart that this shirt will always be their greatest accomplishment.
It clicks on so many levels.
For starters, the juxtaposition of the Tuscan Raider’s Gaffi Stick for the boom box? Stop it. Wearing Lloyd’s coat? Get the f*ck out of here. Goddamn landspeeder replacing young John Cusack’s 1976 Chevy Malibu? Punch me in the face already.
Full disclosure I’m on V2 for this shirt.
Wore the first till it completely faded, which Lloyd’s love for Diane will never do.
My only regret? That I only have one torso.
Will I get a third version?
I don’t know, but I know that I don’t know.
Couple weeks ago we’re in the kitchen when Karry asks me about a charge on our credit card that looked suspicious.
Read aloud the name of a company she didn’t recognize.
“No, that’s me,” I said.
Was kinda’ hoping that would end her curiosity.
Had the opposite effect … like most of my good intentions.
“What did you buy?” she asked.
“It’s … a surprise.”
As an aside … that’s pretty good for me as far as comebacks under pressure go.
But it was late October. She knows I’m not that proactive with my holiday shopping.
“What did you buy?” she repeated.
“A t-shirt,” I confessed.
She: You bought a $35 t-shirt?
While it might seem like a yes or no question, the answer … was nuanced.
Me: No, I bought a $28 t-shirt.
She: (silence)
Me: Seven bucks for shipping.
Karry tends not to put on her cheaters to appreciate nuance.
For context, I love t-shirts.
My family prefers the word ‘addiction.’
It’s my only one.
Yep, T-shirts and postcards.
And, um, books.
T-shirts are among the reasons I don’t get tattoos.
I’m too easily seduced.
I fall in love too frequently … and fleetingly.
I mean, just when you see a design of a badass skull made up of tiny cats ($28 + $7 shipping), your feed serves up a silhouette of a man’s arm coming into frame to fist-bump a similarly silhouetted cat who looks like one of the cats who live in your house (Viktor).
The family staged an intervention a few years ago.
Unbeknownst to me, they harvested a bunch of t-shirts from my closet and had them made into a blanket … like parents do when their kids leave for college.
They were sneaky. Did it under the guise of my birthday and presented it as a ‘gift,’ … which forced me to suppress my immediate reaction, which was along the lines of, “You did … what ???!!!”
Some (most) of the shirts were still in regular rotation … including one of my all-time favorites: the orange GI Joe “Man of Action (With Lifelike Hair)” number that I found in a comic book store in Houston, Texas many years ago.
Joe’s head on the t-shirt had the same life-like hair as the action figure doll I had in the 70’s.
Glorious.
Over the years many wide-eyed smiles and fist-bumps from kindred spirits, most (all) middle-aged men, most (all) of whom proceeded to lose their sh*t when I pointed out that Joe’s coiffe was, in fact, life-like.
Since the thoughtful-birthday-gift-slash-intrusive-intervention (still stings), we’ve operated under an uneasy detente.
For any new t-shirt I bring into the collection, I must remove one from my closet.
So I felt cornered when Karry called me out in the kitchen on my latest acquisition.
“It’ll be my last one of the year,” I blurted.
She: Yeah, right.
Me: No, seriously, last one of the year.
She: (silence)
Me: It’s only, like, two months. I can make it.
She: (silence)
While acknowledging that historical precedent would suggest, shall we say, an uphill climb, I pointed out that a little encouragement would, you know, go a long way.
She: You’ll never make it.
__
Couple weeks later, I’m downstairs when I hear yelling from the laundry room.
“Wait, did you get another t-shirt?”
While it seems like a yes or no question, the answer was … nuanced.
At the storytelling thing in the city I went to the night before, Jacob the producer gave me the t-shirt I won a couple months ago. They were out at the time.
I hadn’t bought it, so therefore had not violated the embargo.
I assured her that my t-shirt fast was still holding strong.
Then she did the thing she does sometimes … where she held her gaze a couple extra seconds without saying a word … letting me know she’ll be keeping an eye on me … until midnight strikes on Dec. 31.
Which I received as, you know, encouragement.
Recognizing that I still have about four weeks to go in my fast — which, let’s be honest here, will be brutal for the holiday algorithms ramping up to tempt me at every turn — I thought it’d be healthy to channel my energies away from my feeds and towards counting my blessings, by which I mean the treasures hanging in my closet.
Which history suggests are only ever a stealthy intervention away from being permanently removed from circulation.
So I’m here today to officially launch the TWELVE DAYS OF T-SHIRTS … a celebratory ‘greatest hits’ retrospective befitting, you know, a man of action with life-like hair.
The ones that bring me joy.
The ones that keep me in Cozy Mode as I clumsily navigate the world around me.
The ones that I impulse bought in spasms of poor decision-making somewhere between my second and third Moscow Mules.
Each one with its own story to tell.
Full disclosure: knowing that the odds of my following through to 12 are only marginally better than my resisting t-shirt temptation for the next four weeks … I will be receiving any and all feedback (including silence) as encouragement.
Tomorrow: #1 Tuscan Serenade
Apologies in advance.
I have few vices.
Where others might commission tattoos, I have … t-shirts.
I fall in love with too many things and am way too scrawny to commit to tattoos.
I can be pretty much summed up by and/or reduced to the Billy Collins’ poem, “Aimless Love.”
“But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.”
Much to the chagrin of my wife (and my closet), I find t-shirts inexhaustible objects for my affections.
While shopping local a couple months ago, I stumbled upon the most wonderful creation, whose artist happened to choose a t-shirt for their canvas.
The above captures Forbes Field’s manual scoreboard the moment right before Bill Mazeroski cemented his baseball legacy on Oct. 13, 1960 — the second before his Game7-World-Series-winning home run off the Yankees’ Ralph Terry in the bottom of the ninth inning.
For me it was love at first sight.
So I was bummed when, the day after I ordered, I got an email from Wild Card in Lawrenceville, informing me they were out of larges … and asking me if I’d be interested in a medium instead.
But then I noticed a second email from Wild Card in my in-box. From the same person. Mentioning that if I wanted to try the medium, she’d send me a self-addressed return envelope in the slim (ha) chance it didn’t fit.
Who does that? Wild Card in Lawrenceville does.
Turns out, the medium suited me as kindly as Ralph Terry’s high fastball did Maz.
First time I wore it, I thought of a kindred spirit who would appreciate it.
Texted a pic of my proud torso to my friend Jeff.
His reply reeked of pure Pittsburgh serendipity.
Get this: turns out I actually know the person who designed the shirt.
Not only that, it was Jeff who introduced us a few years ago.
How’s that for a confluence?
Jeff shot me the number of his good friend, Nick, who I texted immediately, informing him of the wellspring of exponential Pittsburgh joy presently emanating from my torso.
“Ha … I think that’s my favorite, too,” Nick replied all the way from LA, where he now lives with his acclaimed-author-and-TV-writing- wife and family.
He summed up the inspiration for the design so perfectly and profoundly.
“Next pitch changes everything.”
Wow.
__
I’ve been walking around with Nick’s words in my pocket ever since our serendipitous exchange.
They keep grabbing me by my collar and shaking me awake.
We are all always only a pitch away from everything changing.
For the better … if you happened to be wearin’ black and gold on Oct. 13, 1960.
Or for worse, if you were wearin’ pinstripes.
Our existence is nothing but precious and fragile.
Yet always pregnant with possibility.
Which makes the choice of putting good into the world — even in something as temporal as a t-shirt — a sacred act.
As sacred as any kindness requiring intention … a self-addressed return envelope just in case, as an example.
If it wasn’t for the kind gesture of the person at Wild Card, I may not have ordered the shirt, and wouldn’t have thought of Jeff, wouldn’t have learned that I knew the designer, would never have sent Nick my gratitude, and would have gone a lifetime missing out on the golden wisdom he drew from Mazeroski’s heroic act.
Our tiniest gestures can be oxygen for campfires … that remind us that we’re connected in ways we can’t even imagine.
Next pitch changes everything.
Letters for Maggie 