The Old Days, take 2

When my mother came to visit a couple weeks ago, she brought an old pair of boots – Rockport hikers that I acquired in fall 1991 for my first trip to Europe. They carried me from Poland and Czechoslovakia pretty much all the way to my first pair of Docs, and served some useful time even after that until I moved to where there’s not much need for insulated hiking boots. They’ve got laces I don’t recognize, some repairs to fraying stitching (and a lot of fraying stitching not repaired), and their third set of Vibram soles, and I had to put an old pair of sports shoe insoles into them to account for the fact I bought ’em a half size large to accommodate the big thick wool socks. And they are now the oldest footwear I have in my house.

That same autumn, I got my first Redskins hat – plain grey wool twill with a burgundy bill, script Redskins across the front, ever-so-slightly retro feel to it. It’s the oldest hat in my house now – despite the presence of two or three newer ones, like my Pentagon-patch Skins cap (the go-to for anything commemorating my DC family). Within the same month, I also splashed out for a Redskins jacket – a quasi-retro cloth varsity jacket that commemorated the (then) two Super Bowl victories. It’s way too warm and way too gaudy and way too not-waterproof to actually wear out here, and a tad on the small side, but it’s the oldest piece of outerwear in my collection here in California.

It should be obvious at this point that my autumn of ’91 was a big regeneration point. I don’t know why the transformation happened then, but it did – although I had claimed the Redskins the previous year, this was the year I sold out from game one on (and was rewarded with the third Super Bowl victory). This was the year I discovered football prior to the AFL, discovered Glenn Miller, discovered the old 1920s yearbooks, and really discovered what would come to be known in my house as “five space”.

Which brings us to the oldest thing in my wardrobe. A couple of years ago, my mother gave me her dad’s old watch, but I hadn’t really paid much attention to it until recently. Back in 1991, my maternal grandfather was the deceased relative that I reminded everyone of, and was the closest thing I had to a spirit guide of sorts – and if I’d been given this watch then, I probably would have thoroughly lost my S. Because it’s not just any watch – it’s an old Movado Tempomatic, Swiss-made, with nary a battery or circuit to be found. It’s a purely mechanical automatic action – you put it on your arm, and the movement spins a weight that in turn winds the mechanism. After a while, you take it off and set it to the correct time – and then put it back on, where it keeps time without battery, winding, quartz, or a hint of electronics. It’s unbelievably simple – not even a date window, no form of illumination whatsoever, and the cheapest Spiedel stretch-band you can imagine.

Simple, Swiss, family-connected, mechanically ingenious, and the oldest thing I own to wear – it’d be tough to conceive of anything more perfectly suited to me. As much as we talk about high school around here, it’s plain that the kid in 1991 is still me – and vice versa, although he never would have expected twenty years of mostly misery from supporting the Skins. Or seven years living in DC. Or listening to Sonny and Sam while driving down Highway 1 in California…

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