I Hate You, Donny Osmond
My first day of kindergarten and my initial attempt at making a fashion statement.
Chapter 22
With four older brothers, I rarely received any new clothes. My closet was full of hand-me-downs. Actually, because two of those brothers were twins, I often had duplicates of everything.
Two blue blazers.
Two pairs of penny loafers.
Two bathrobes.
Bottom line, I was never short of clothes.
Once a year, however, my mom would treat me to a few new things. That would be in August, before school started.
We called it, appropriately enough, “school shopping.”
And I loved it.
Our options for clothes shopping were pretty limited in my small Nebraska hometown. We did have a JCPenney store, though, and that was where my parents tended to buy most of my clothes. Every so often, however, my mom would splurge and drive thirty minutes to Omaha where our purchasing options were much better.
I remember wondering, year after year, if I had grown enough to wear bigger clothes. I progressed nicely through the routine boy sizes—eight, ten, twelve—until the year my mom told me she thought we should try a “husky” boy size.
Husky? I thought. Is she telling me I’m fat?
None of my brothers was overweight. Not a bit. So my biggest fear was the four of them finding out about my new “husky” size.
They did.
And, of course, they humiliated me.
Suddenly, school shopping wasn’t fun anymore.
Fortunately, that phase lasted only one year. By the following August, I was back to “regular” sizes, and I was hoping to find some “Donny Osmond” looking clothes—bell-bottoms, shirts with big, puffy sleeves, vests, and platform shoes.
We scored—HUGE—at the Sears department store in Omaha. I was, without a doubt, going to be the coolest looking twelve-year-old boy in my entire ZIP code.
And I couldn’t wait to go back to school.
I did not want to go back to work. Not. Not. Not. That feeling was very apparent to me as I stood staring into my closet, reacquainting myself with my work wardrobe a few days before my scheduled return.
I couldn’t remember the last time I had worn long pants. For three months, my idea of “dressing up” meant putting on the only pair of shorts I owned that didn’t have holes.
So I decided a few additions to my wardrobe might make me feel better. New clothes. New attitude. That always used to work when I was a kid.
Shopping, in general, isn’t my thing. Mall shopping, in particular, is definitely not my thing.
As I stood in the men’s dressing room in my boxer shorts debating over the 31-inch-long khakis or the 32-inch version, I knew the world I was about to step back into probably wasn’t my thing either.
For some reason, new clothes weren’t having the same impact they did when I was a kid.
And I still didn’t look anything like Donny Osmond.