I leave for work by 6:45 AM daily, so I see lots of high school kids hanging around bus stops on my way in. There are the usual faces - the owlish, bookish ones, the glamour kitties, the guys trying with varying levels of success to glower menacingly, and the band kids (piccolo seems a better choice when you think of the inconvenience of toting a French horn and its case to school) all clustered, peering down the street for their orange chariot. No matter how cold it is, kids today wear - at the most - a hoody on the coldest days. And they don't even shiver. Nor is the hood on the hoody to be employed for covering one's melon. The hood hangs there, as useless as Dick Cheney at a gathering of people who never shot their friends in the face.
Back in the days of my bucolic childhood (see my essay "Shovelin' The Tundra" from National Geographic, January, 1960) we would bundle in more layers than an Inuit nudist. Corduroy pants, wool socks, heavy wing-tip shoes or Weejuns, a button-down shirt, a cranberry V-neck sweater, a wool scarf, leather fur-lined gloves, and a heavy Mackinaw were de rigueur for bus stop apparel and also for walking home from detention.
Just this past Sunday, I added to my extensive collection of Mackinaws, parkas, topcoats, car coats, anoraks, windbreakers and lined jackets by finding a brand-new Carhartt Duckcloth Chore Jacket
- brand new - at an antique store for just 25 bucks. There had to be a story for why someone would sell a new 85-dollar jacket for 25, and so I deftly inquired as to why it wound up for sale. "Did someone have a boyfriend my size who didn't want this?" was how I opened the conversation, which did not go much further. I gleaned from the reply that the coat wasn't all that the big guy didn't want. I just hope he's not out in the cold somewhere.If he is, he should try a hoody.
4 comments:
As if we had a choice about all those layers of clothes. My mother wouldn't have let me out of the house in just a hoody. So where are THESE mothers?
I used to tell my mom that the reason I hated to wear a coat is because once you got in to some climate controlled environment then you had to lug the damn thing around....we went round and round...this went on in to my adulthood...now I notice that my 14 yr old twins are the same way...."ohmygod, it's gonna be 62 tomorrow, where are my madras shorts,,,hey those are my capris! mommy, which skirt should i wear tomorrow?" WTF?
I've seen those hoodie kids, too..I think they may be a cultural archtype! Kids today are both denied choices and given far too many other choices...The juxtaposition is obvious in what parents allow their kids to eat, wear and do in their spare time.
I say, no one is gonna freeze to death (at a southern bus stop anyway) but they just might die of mortification from being forced to wear a hat and gloves...HORRORS!
Finally, please let me send out this public service announcement to my fellow southerners: A TOBOGGAN IS A SLED NOT A HAT!!!
AJ: LOL!
My mom wouldn't have let me out in a hoody either, but the kids that I see darting around in a hoody are never shivering; they don't seem the least bit cold! AJ - I have to confess to being so out of it, I don't know any other meaning for toboggan other than sled. What hat is named for them? How lost am I?
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