MonkeyPants

Suited.

With my brother and Carol getting married later this month, I’ve been excited about a lot. But as always, there’s been some stress.

One thing that’s been stressing me is that Dad had to buy a suit. He thinks he threw his old one out. Not a suit guy.  Anyway, he couldn’t find it, so he had to buy a new one.  Why would this be a stress for YOU? I hear you ask.

Well, Dad’s colorblind.  And that one suit that served the non-suit guy for 30 years was what he thought was charcoal grey, but was actually a very deep green.  He bought it to marry my mom, and I think she always meant to ask about it, why he had a green suit, but she never did, because he wore it so seldom, and when he did put it on (weddings and some funerals, and usually bargained down to a tweed jacket and slacks) she was always preoccupied with the minutiae of the events themselves, or wrangling kids, or whatever, that she never got around to asking.  When she found out, she called me in a tizzy.

“Do you know your father thinks he has been wearing a charcoal grey suit for 30 years?”

Of course, I didn’t know. I’d seen him in it maybe twice in my life, and I never thought about it. My dad has a green suit. So? He wears a jacket and slacks to anythng fancy.

So today I went to the suit store and looked at the classic charcoal with blue pinstripe my father chose, and all the little gears in my brain shifted. It’s classic. It’s a little English Morning dress. I could totally see my dad in that suit, and I wish my mom could see what an excellent, non-green choice he’d made!

But Dad had charged me with choosing a tie. So the salesman and I  went to the tie display. And the salesman was all, “This is a  stripe that will work with this suit.”

Um, no. I thought. This stripe with my dad’s suit looks like he’s an extra in a Broadway play about stockbrokers.

“No,  he’s more subtle.  He’s a very quiet person. There’s too much pattern,” I said.

He whizzed around the tie display. “This one is a very subtle paisley. This one matches. Here’s one that is a little tone-on-tone.”

One was loud enough for the Pride Parade. Another was a glossy satin like a cable channel televangelist would wear. One made me think that the wearer probably would owe allegiance to the Russian mob. WTF was the guy thinking?

So I told him I’d go and think it over, sice buying a tie is a hard decision. And tomorrow, I am going to go buy the solid-colour tie I have in mind. A smoky cobalt-ish blue.  I’m going to The Bay, because salespeople never bug you there.