Stripped
There are countless ways to describe it.
I would call it tan. Others would say mushroom, oatmeal or sand coloured.
My friends call it ugly.
Pictured: not me
It’s been one of my favourite coats for 11 years and after an intervention i recently parted with it. I took it a little harder than i thought. I was genuinely surprised. I honestly thought the jacket was bland and inoffensive. But even my least fashion savvy friends banded together, emerging from the woodwork to tell me something a long the lines of ‘we love you but that jacket needs to go.’
One friend sensed my attachment to the coat and in a very nurturing tone asked, ‘when did you buy it? Does it mean something special to you?’ After a decade together how could it not?
My mom bought it for me around the time Saddam Hussein was captured. I was interning at a TV station and needed a ‘grown up’ news reporter coat. My mom wanted to buy me a more expensive one but i didn’t feel it was worth the money. It was a great day shopping, laughing, and dining together. And i recall a salesman telling me i reminded him of Audrey Hepburn. I do not care if he was lying. That’s not really important. It was before i moved away from home for good. Sure i was alone with no friends or family, but i had Coat.
Me and Coat then moved to a small city so where i worked at a radio station. It was only a few months old when I met my friend Dustin. After a wild night of karaoke with friends, we talked till 4 in the morning until my throat was raw and i lost my voice completely. I can’t remember what the hell we were talking about except that i was laughing my ass off the whole time because he’s really funny, and that he had a similar coat.
We talked about how shitty our coats were. The tag always hung out the back, the pockets already had holes in them. They looked high quality suede until the first wash and then it was all crunchy, weird and clearly not suede.
But still Coat and I ventured from Alberta to BC to New York and back again. She kept we warm but not too warm. She had a hood to shield me from rain, snow and that gross wind one experiences when the skytrain or subway approaches. And i’ve only had to hand stitch the pocket holes 2 times.
I have a pink winter vest, an avocado rain coat, and a floor length jean jacket (try not to be jealous) but Coat will be hard to replace.
♫ ♪ We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun.
But the Coat and the song,
like the seasons, all have gone ♫ ♪
Straddling The Edge 