"I Will See You On White Trash Wednesday"

General MacArthur said something perplexing to me in his farewell address; “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” What exactly did that mean? After all, we all die someday, right? And why should who we were and what we left behind ever fade away? I think what that brilliant, but now senile, old man had actually meant to say was that “Old SHIRTS never die, they just fade away.” Truer words were never spoken. Jerry Seinfeld added his two cents years later by stating “ Men hang on to their shirts until each individual shirt molecule is so strained it can barely retain the properties of a solid. It actually becomes shirt vapor. We don’t ever throw it out, we just open up a window and out it goes like dandelion spores.”Such was the case with Danny’s old shirts. It was one semester up at USU, while attending the same Institute class, that Matt and I came up with what we would term “White Trash Wednesdays.” Each Wednesday we would get up early to search the remote corners of the closet or the uncharted spaces of the dresser drawers for that perfect shirt. It’s hard to describe exactly what kind of shirt we were looking for, but once we found it we just knew it was right for “White Trash Wednesday”. Sometimes I went for sheer ugliness, like the shirt my mother had made for my Grandmother before she was to be a contestant on the Price Is Right, all decked out in large neon letters and gold glitter paint. Sometimes I went for sheer grunginess such as the Grateful Dead shirt that had so many holes in it that it was being held together by safety pins. Though Matt had produced one fairly good winner in the form of an ugly neon-green Logan Regional Hospital Parrot shirt found used as an oil rag inside the barn, his efforts had been waning for a while. Perhaps, I thought, he was too worried what the girls would think. I had long ago gotten married and was past caring about my day to day appearance. No, more than likely he just found it tough to compete with decades worth of Morrell hand-me-downs. I had pretty much given up on “White Trash Wednesday” half way through the semester, when I caught a site of something that will forever be burned into the back of my retinas; It looked like Matt was walking into the room with just jeans and a garment top on. I rubbed my eyes and there it was again. Oh no, not this dream again! At least I wasn’t the only one who had come to school without dressing, this time Matt had come as well. I looked down like I always had in such a dream, expecting to see myself only in garments before looking back up at a thousand smirking girls! But this time I was fully clothed. What was going on here? All of a sudden it dawned on me that Matt was actually wearing a shirt! I squinted my eyes to make out the letters NASA as Matt inched closer. So old and worn was the shirt, that just a faded red collar and those four letters remained visible to the naked eye. I stuttered through the congratulatory comments to Matt , still in awe of his victory, and asked him where he had found such a marvelous trophy? “Oh, I finally broke into my dad’s closet, he has tons of these old shirts!” I drooled onto my desk and sat the rest of the class period pondering the treasures that awaited us once we got back to Matt’s place. We raced home from school and threw open the closet doors. There they were! This was the Mormon kids equivalent to finding his fathers porn stash! I grabbed the Mickey Mouse shirt that was so worn it looked like it was about to slip through the hanger that held it at any second. I put it on, imagining the last time that shirt looked somewhat new. “I bet these were given out the first day Disneyland opened!” I gasped. “No, it’s gotta be older than that” Matt said. “ Maybe it was worn by Walt Disney himself to commemorate the finalization of his first cartoon, Steamboat Willie, back in 1912?” However old it was, and only carbon dating could let us know the real truth, I was in White Trash Heaven. Many semesters have passed since those wonderful Wednesdays, but I’ll never forget that one special day Matt’s dad handed him the forever-reigning trophy. You were spot-on Mr. MacArthur, some shirts will never die!