Black leather jacket
Many many years ago in a faraway exotic land called Maine*, a woman and her husband were strolling around the Bangor Mall, when a rack of black leather jackets caught the woman’s eye.
I’d been trying to get Peter into a black leather jacket since before I married him.** Our mad weekend, when we decided on thirty-six hours’ acquaintance to get married***, happened the end of July, and–it being a warm July in Maine that year–Peter didn’t meet my venerable biker jacket till it was too late.† The end of the first year after I moved over here we went to Florence†† and Peter bought me a black leather jacket on the Ponte Vecchio.††† Well, Italian leather, you know, and Florentine leather at that: it doesn’t get better.‡
Peter bought me the jacket because he’s a nice man and I wanted one‡‡ and it was my birthday soon. And then he had to watch me wearing it all the time, so the idea of black leather started to sort of, you know, percolate in. But he kept saying he wasn’t the black leather sort. I kept saying, I married you, you are.
And then there we were in Maine one winter and Peter was a bit chilly. You know the man had got through over sixty years of life on this planet and never owned a proper coat? I’d breached this illogic a few years before when there was snow on the ground in Plattsburgh, NY, where we happened to be, took him into the local LL Bean equivalent and bought him one of those ubiquitous khaki green waxed cotton zip-out-liner jackets. He didn’t struggle too much. And he even wore it when we got back to England.
So I figured I was making progress on the outerwear front. And now we were in Maine where there was like a foot of snow on the ground and the khaki jacket even with its liner zipped in was demonstrating its limits. Here, I said, stopping abruptly at the rack of black leather jackets, try one of these on. –The element of surprise, you know. There’s another aspect to this particular rack of jackets: they were, as black leather goes, cheap. Being a Florentine jacket wearer at this point I could tell at twenty paces that they were cheap, but Peter has another peculiarity, which is that while he’s happy to spend money on me, he gets all twitchy and nervous if you try to spend money on him.‡‡‡ And I thought, as cheap jackets go, these look pretty nice. Staple him into one of these, let him start to like it . . . and I’ll be able to get away with buying him a nice one later on.
And then the dratted jacket lasted like fifteen years. Curses, foiled again. I spent fifteen years feeling deeply embarrassed any time we went anywhere together both wearing our black leather jackets, because it was obvious to the least observant eye that my jacket cost approximately forty-six times what Peter’s jacket cost, and–pardon my snarling–but I already look like a trophy wife, okay?§ I don’t need to look like a greedy trophy wife.
This year, finally, Peter’s ridiculously cheap black leather jacket disintegrated in a brisk, no-nonsense manner. And the search has been on for a jacket that would please both Peter and me looking at Peter. This latter is an important consideration, trust me. I mind how things look, and Peter is hopeless.§§ Peter at least knows he’s hopeless, so he hasn’t crept off and bought himself a black leather jacket, although he’s been trying to drag me into black leather jacket shops for months and, for Peter, who is not a frustration-expressing type, has expressed a certain frustration in my strange failure to cooperate. Give me a break! The Man Who Is Impossible to Buy Presents For! I’m going to miss this golden opportunity?!?
I ended up buying him two§§§, so he could choose. There’s this to be said for having a birthday around Christmas–it’s a lot easier to arrange a returns receipt that lasts longer than a week. And two black leather jackets were the large floppy present referred to previously that had to be tied up with string so I could some wrapping paper around it/them. However–typical Peter–he didn’t notice there were two of them.¤ They were each in their store bag, you know? He looked in the top bag, discovered a black leather jacket, stood up to try it on . . . the other bag fell to the floor with a thump and he never noticed. Sigh. This is what wives were invented for, of course.
He is very happy with his new jacket. And I’ll get the other one back to the shop–probably tomorrow–in time for some other frantic woman with a Man Who Is Impossible to Buy Presents for to find it in time for Christmas.
* * *
* Where hedgehog has been having adventures, posted under Tool Use:
Southern Maine is still entertaining electric-utility trucks from Michigan as of Tuesday morning. My house got power back about an hour ago — the outage here was almost exactly four and a half days — and mirabile dictu the digital service was there as well. It’s been difficult to sleep for the past three nights because of the atonal roar of generators all around … now the generators are silenced and the baying of packs of hungry chainsaws is heard throughout the land. For four days, it seemed as though everybody in town was eating three meals a day in the local “townie” restaurants, as an alternative to crouching shivering around a solitary candle eating Trail Mix (or so they claimed). The lines were out the door and around the building. . . .
And for those who weren’t fortunate enough to have generators… it’s time to throw away the entire contents of the refrigerator and the freezer. Mercifully, trash day is Thursday.
What does this have to do with tool use? I’ll tell you: The most important, ubiquitous, and loved object in my part of southern Maine in the past four days is the Hat Light. There are two flavors — one is a headband that supports a sort of miner’s light, the other is a thin flat plastic object that actually clips on to the brim of a Red Sox cap. They have several “white” LED’s and they shine for many hours and they have temporarily become a Reminder Of Our Suffering Together and a default conversation-starter while standing (with all the other Unkempt) in those very long lines at the townie restaurant. There weren’t enough Hat Lights to go around, and I’m thinking that Hat Lights are going to be a great Christmas gift for many of the Light-Denied around here from whom Day Labour is demanded… So that’s my nomination for Useful Tool of the Week.
I love my miner’s headlamp. It is so useful for picking up dog crap in the dark. Two hellhounds, two leads, dog crap disappears like you wouldn’t believe and I promise that a fascinating person–not just any old person but a fascinating one–will be coming past our embranglement^ at that precise moment, and I don’t care if it is past midnight and this town shuts down at about 9:30.
^ http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1847038,00.html
War of the Words: can fubsy be saved? Embrangle, shockingly, is also under threat
** The wedding photo visible in ‘about’ demonstrates that he wasn’t an instant convert to long(er) hair either. And then there was the concept of jeans. He’s even got a pair of All Stars, although he never wears them. You win some, you lose some.
*** This is a slight compression of events. But only slight
† This is what happens when you decide after thirty-six hours, etc: Surprises.
†† Manhattan friends were having a birthday party. In Florence. Yes. New Yorkers are like that.
††† I’m still wearing it.^ Well, of course. It’s finally starting to acquire that desirable patina of age. It’s taken almost twenty years what an RAF pilot could do to a jacket in about six months. I’ll pass on the bombing raids and coming home on one wing and a bit of singed string however.
^ Anyone who came to the signing last month: that black leather jacket
‡ It doesn’t get heavier either. You don’t notice it when you’re wearing it, of course, and I like watching strong men stumble and fall over when they go to help me on with my coat.
‡‡ I think I’ve told you the venerable one still hangs in the attic here. But it’s an artefact rather than an article of clothing.
‡‡‡ Yes, this is cute. But less cute than you think, if you live with it.
§ Peter is a quarter century older than I am–and I brush up well, even now–and there it is. And it took me years to feel, and not just think, that people who want to make that assumption can eat hot s— and die. I’m still angry at some of the treatment I’ve had and some of the remarks that have been made . . . but those are stories for another time, or maybe not. Anyway.
§§ Any homeopaths out there, Peter is a Sulphur. One of the notorious old ‘rubrics’, which are a kind of symptom-picture, in recognising the Sulphur personality is ‘thinks his rags as fine as silk’.
§§§ Credit cards really are wonderful. Dangerous, but wonderful.
¤ This is the man who regularly loses keys, wallet, change, jackknife^, etc, by losing track of his own pockets. When he was deciding on his jacket yesterday he hesitated over the one he finally rejected because it had more pockets. I like the pockets on this one, he said. A spasm passed through me: I had only been looking at the style^^, I wasn’t thinking about the pockets. No, no, I said. The other one is much nicer.
^ Although as he insists on carrying a tiny one, he really has only himself to blame. Mine, if you slap your pockets looking for it, you will find it.
^^ Naff, naff, naff–there are an astonishing number of naff leather jackets out there–naff, uggggh . . . oh. Yes. This one. –And then there was the young man at one shop who offered to demonstrate what the jacket I was looking at would look like when draped on a manly frame (I’d been trying it on myself, just to see it with legs and arms sticking out, which you don’t get on a hanger). And yes, in fact, having him put it on was a great sales technique. I almost told him so, but I decided that being told you’re cute by a woman old enough to be your grandmother is probably not a friendly act.
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