The Personal Artifacts We Carry With Us Through Our Lives
Why I keep wearing board shorts when there’s no seaside in sight.
A good friend of mine told me a story about when she was a child and her family moved from Florida to Wisconsin. I don’t remember which cities. I only remember her saying the first year in Wisconsin was cold, even by Wisconsin standards.
She said her mother packed the family’s summer things into a closet in the hallway. My friend, missing the heat and sun of Florida, would walk into the closet and take the top off the bottle of sunscreen to sniff it. She wanted a reminder of what summer smelled like.
I feel the same way about board shorts. No matter where I live, regardless of the proximity to the ocean, I have several pairs of board shorts in my wardrobe. Recently, I wore one of my favorite pairs to a lovely little garden terrace in town. When I arrived, I tried explaining my fashion choice to my friend, a woman who usually over thinks what she will wear and how she wants to be perceived.
She stopped me when I used the term board shorts. She’d never heard of these ‘special surfing shorts’ and was perplexed why a grown man in the middle of a landlocked city thought this was appropriate attire. While her sartorial choices can be provocative at times, she’d…
