Drawer Filled From Blood, Sweat, Tears

Thank you for (donating blood, volunteering for our benefit, running in our race). Here’s one of our commemorative T-shirts!”

Oh, that’s not necessary. No, really. I mean it. THAT’S NOT NECESSARY.

I just performed an inventory of my dresser, and I discovered to my horror that I already own 26 T-shirts. As my exasperated wife has asked me on numerous occasions, how can a person even fit 26 T-shirts into one T-shirt drawer?

The answer: You wad them up, you cram them in, you scrunch them together and then when you try to close the drawer, you still end up with little rolls of T-shirt sticking out the top, like those little rolls of fat that bulge out over your waistband. And that’s only 22 of them. Four of these T-shirts are strewn carelessly on the shelf of my closet, because the designated T-shirt drawer is so full it detonates when opened.

Do you have this problem, too? I’ll bet a lot of you go way beyond 26. This is not unusual in an America that has made the T-shirt into a high-fashion art form. France has the ball gown, England has the top hat and tails, and America has the “I’m With Stupid” T-shirt.

It hasn’t always been this way. Once, in a more dignified time, T-shirts were strictly undergarments. They were white, they were plain, and fathers wore them under button-down Oxfords. Occasionally fathers wore them alone, but only to mow the lawn and only if no one was looking.

That began to change in the ‘50s when Marlon Brando and James Dean began to show how tough a guy could look in a plain white wad of cotton. But the phenomenon didn’t really take off until the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when people began to plaster messages across T-shirts. At first these messages were political — “Fight the Power” — or platitudinous — “Have a Nice Day!” — but soon they became commercial — “The Pepsi Generation!”

And before long somebody figured out that the T-shirt could also be commemorative. You could hold a race, or a party, or a benefit, and you could hand out T-shirts as a sort of prize. So now the T-shirt is not just a walking billboard, it’s a walking souvenir.

This is how I came to have a T-shirt problem. Nearly a third of my T-shirts, nine to be exact, are Bloomsday T-shirts. These shirts are not only a staple of my wardrobe, but they commemorate the fact that I have performed the grueling athletic feat of covering 7-1/2 miles of demanding road course with an elite 50,000 or so babies in strollers, grandmas and heart-transplant patients. Many people own more than twice as many Bloomsday T-shirts, which explains why people in the Inland Northwest are more likely than average to suffer from T-shirt proliferation.

Yet that isn’t the entire story. As I survey my wealth of wrinkly T-shirts, I see that I also have two T-shirts from the blood bank, commemorating the gift of blood, two from the Heart Institute, commemorating the gift of health, and one from the Microbrew Frenzy, commemorating the gift of drinking lots of beer.

Then there are a bunch of other miscellaneous shirts commemorating everything from radio promotions to the New Year’s Eve Party we just attended. Perhaps my favorite of all is a big black T-shirt with a photo of Howlin’ Wolf on the front. This commemorates a trip to historic Beale Street in Memphis, although in typical American T-shirt fashion, it wasn’t my trip. I never set foot in Memphis. But a friend did, and he bought me the T-shirt, and now everyone thinks I went there.

I’ll never get rid of that shirt, nor will I ever get rid of my Bloomsday shirts, but I am now under orders to winnow my T-shirt collection to drawer-fitting size. I have identified a dozen or so I could probably live without, but what am I supposed to do with them? Can I sell them? I can’t believe there’s a market for my old crummy T-shirts. Can I give them away to charity? I can’t believe there’s a market for my old crummy T-shirts even when they’re free.

Meanwhile, I am looking forward to Langlauf, the cross-country ski race that I lose every year. The race is coming up on Feb. 7, and once again, they plan on giving out cool little commemorative pins.

They never give out T-shirts. For that, I thank them, from the bottom of my drawer.