It feels so familiar. Like I’ve worn it for years. I feel like there should be a liter soda bottle in one of the big pouch pockets, and a whole jumbo bagel with cream cheese brown-bagged in the other. And then I remember that almost a quarter century ago, I did just that with the Elk, the ridiculous oversized leather field coat that I bought in a fit of madness my first year in Nashville and wore in the coldest weather until I left DC for California.
This is also brown and hip-length, if NyCo rather than leather. It’s also a little too big with its liner removed. The hood is zippered up in the collar, not snap-off detachable. But the sleeves are generous enough to go over a sweater, and there’s a specific heat on the neck when wearing it in unexpected 67 degree weather, and it feels…
It feels correct, for want of a better word. It feels like my black AmGiant work shirt, or my plastic Birkenstocks: like something I’ve had all along, should have had all along. It feels like it fits, the way the rare cigar feels in my hand, or the equally-rare pie beer feels on my tongue or the iPhone SE feels when you pull it out: this is the natural order of things. As if there’s another edit where this brown Army surplus jacket is my companion through snow in the District and fog in San Francisco and London drizzle and Patagonia winds and twenty years of pictures.
And the more I think of it, I realize this is an anomaly. I had a coat this length for a couple years in undergrad, a Helly Hansen parka meant for Central Europe and lost before grad school. I had the rarely-worn International, the never-worn CERT coat, and the too-stiff and too-slim “engineer’s coat” bought with AmEx points from Land’s End and subsequently donated. But as natural as the hip-length field coat seems in my memory, the Elk is the only one I wore for any length of time, and it stopped being a thing once I got to California altogether.
Maybe that’s why I was casting about the last few years. Barn coat, Barbour coat, some kind of horse-poop-colored British waxed cotton thing or blanket-lined duck workwear. All I know is, I’m none too quick to take it off at work – or when I get home, for that matter. It’ll probably be too warm by February, but all the more reason to enjoy it now.