White Pants, Perchance?

white pants

Last week my friend Cornelia did a major clearing out of her wardrobe. As she is quite tall and elegant in a northern European way (and I am quite not) I wasn't anticipating any hand-outs, but a few items unexpectedly found their way to me, and it was fun. One was a pair of crisp white pants, which required only a simple alteration for a surprisingly good fit.  I haven't worn a pair of white pants since a Long Island summer night in 1966 when I donned tight white jeans for a drive-in movie date with Bob Beringer, a tall, skinny boy a few years older than me who poked his spearmint-tasting tongue in my mouth when he kissed me, which was new, but he was very smart and quoted Bob Dylan, which was also new, and I was totally infatuated with him for three days until he sent me a letter in which he announced that I was a nice person and someday someone would love me the way I deserved to be loved, but alas, for him there was still only Rosemary. 

Whatever. I am ready for white pants again. That wasn't even all of it.  I also acquired a green print wrap-around dress. It's just clingy enough, but  a dress with movement, a dress I could dance in, if only I danced. And there was a light cotton orange shirt...which makes me feel like it's 1955 and I'm eating a popsicle in Prospect Park...and a couple of other tops, all of them different from my typical choices. Wearing them I can be classier, more confident, slightly Cornelia-esque.

It was fun, too, to see the lovely vintage jacket Cornelia was wearing when she first met her husband. I don't recall what I wore when I met Monte, probably an ill-fitting job interview suit because I was being shown around an office at the time, but I do know that our first "date" was a trespass hike in the Irvine hills, and I wore a striped tee-shirt, red and brown, that I'd had since 1970s Syracuse. To be honest, it was ugly, but I only recently allowed that shirt, frayed and sheer with age, to be torn into cleaning rags.

It's funny how much history and sentiment old clothing contains, and yet how good it feels...how newly light...to now and then get rid of stuff.And I will never forget sitting on Cornelia's bed, just like sisters might (but without the tension and painful history), looking out onto her gloriously ramshackle garden, including lilacs in bloom, frowsy and fragrant.

The very next day, inspired by Cornelia,  I decided to clean out my closet too. I mercilessly weeded out two-thirds of the garments crowded into it and organized the remainder into categories and colors, all on good wood hangers, facing one direction. There's room in there now, and you can see everything at a glance, and it looks deceivingly like the closet of a compulsively tidy person. Needless to say, Monte (who actually is a compulsively tidy person) approved and was very helpful in the endeavor, vigorously giving thumbs down to almost all of the articles in the "maybe" pile.

Whatever did not go back into my closet was destined either for donation or resale. I crammed the best of it into an enormous wheeled suitcase and an overflow shopping bag and shlepped it all downtown to the shop on State Street that gives you cash on the spot for your gently worn attire. Boy, was that humiliating! A pale woman in her 20s briskly went through my offerings, rejecting all but two paltry blouses and one never-even-worn pair of desert boots.

"Really?" I asked. "You don't want this vintage lilac crochet top with the embroidered flowers that I haven't worn since 1988 but always thought I might?  Or those black  jeans with the very wide bell bottoms I bought for forty pounds in a consignment shop in England? Or the green leather jacket?  Not even the green leather jacket?"

Nope. Nor any of my other favorites. Apparently my wardrobe choices are not suitable for their market. But once you clean out your closet, there's no going back. I wheeled the suitcase up the street to the thrift store, where at least I got a thank you.