Category: Essay

We are now fully into Cricket Season, a time of year which takes in the second half of summer and the first part of fall. I heard the first of the chirping critters two nights ago. Then, on a walk yesterday afternoon, I heard several more.

I was delighted to hear them, because given what has happened to much of our other insect life, such as Honeybees and the Monarch Butterfly, it wouldn’t have surprised me had the Cricket fallen prey to habitat destruction, pesticide poisoning, or any of the other myriad plagues visited by human beings on the animal kingdom. To tell the truth, I was beginning to be concerned at not having heard any Crickets yet, though admittedly I was out of town for the second and third weeks of July, and might therefore have missed the official opening. Normally, Cricket Season in these parts starts about three to four weeks after the summer solstice and runs through to a week or so after (Canadian) Thanksgiving.

Why do I find Cricket Season so significant? To me, its opening sends an important signal–a signal that, even in the midst of summer’s heat, cooler weather and better sleeping nights are coming. It sends a message to the weary brain that after the torpor of June and early July, it can start to wake up again. A wake-up call in the best and truest sense of the term. Creative thought and intellectual endeavour are once again possible. I suspect it’s no accident that the two days since I first heard a Cricket were my best writing days since May. And the louder and more vociferous the chirping, the better will be my writing days.

Have you heard any Crickets yet this summer? If you have, what message have they been sending to you?

Sociological reasons, reasons we might lump together under the head of diversity, should not by themselves suffice to put an individual into a position, particularly one of great power and importance. The individual must be intellectually and emotionally capable of doing the job in question–these two are not always the same. And the individual must be qualified, based on prior experience in the area. The individual must also be of fit moral character, possessed at a minimum of basic integrity and decency.

The case of Andrew Jackson comes most readily to mind here. Here, clearly, was a man whose rise to the Presidency occurred primarily if not entirely for reasons of socio-economic diversity. Whether he was intellectually capable of being President is debatable. What’s beyond debate is that he lacked the emotional stability needed for such a demanding job. Frequently, throughout his adult life, he would fly into fits of rage, for little reason or sometimes none at all. Very possibly these fits were attributable to two serious head injuries he suffered (one in a duel, one of many he would fight throughout his tumultuous life). This back story may arouse our pity; it did not make him any better suited to hold high office.

It is on the score of his moral character that Jackson falls farthest short. His treatment of Indigenous Americans can only be termed genocidal. So barbaric was he in his treatment of members of this group that it was only a little bit of a surprise to learn, in Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, that he kept a bridle for horseback riding made of the skin of an Indigenous person. Is this really any different from the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews they had slaughtered? Nor was his treatment of African-Americans any better. In a newspaper ad seeking the return of an escaped slave, Jackson offered, in addition to the normal reward, an additional 10 cents per lash, up to a maximum of 300 lashes. If you don’t believe me, check out Jackson’s Wikipedia biography, because that was where I learned this fact about him. This is the Common Man many Americans still revere? It speaks volumes that Jackson is, by a country mile, Donald Trump’s favourite past President.

Sole reliance on sociological considerations without regard to intellectual, emotional, or moral ones made this deranged psychopath President of the United States. Yes, it probably was time that the country had a common man (or woman) as its President. But couldn’t it have picked one possessed of a bit of human kindness and basic decency? Or, at the very least, one who was sane?

That this man is still revered in many American circles, and that his face is still allowed to adorn American currency, tells us all we need to know about the country’s utter moral and intellectual bankruptcy. Clearly there is some important national narrative that needs to be served by continued glorification of this criminally insane butcher. . .a narrative which glorifies Jackson’s brand of anti-intellectualism and militarism, while suppressing the more civilized, more humane alternative narrative offered by the federalism of John Quincy Adams, an abolitionist who believed government should engage in public works and promote the arts and sciences. But as soon look for the proverbial needle in the proverbial haystack as look for fair or objective treatment of the federalist narrative. Where, after all, would the defense budget be if anyone in power had ever paid anything approaching adequate attention to that narrative? And who would be available to provide apologies for America’s treatment of its Indigenous and Black people?

Removing Andrew Jackson’s face from the $20 bill and replacing it by that of a member of one of the groups he abused throughout his life would not solve all the problems around Jackson and the suppression of the anti-Jackson federalist narrative. But it would be a start, and perhaps the harbinger of bigger and better things. I hope I live long enough to see the names of John Quincy Adams and Alexander Hamilton included in history curricula alongside those of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Only then will we start to appreciate just how destructive Jackson’s influence has been on American political life.

Believe it or not, at a time when there are so many more important things to worry about, there are still people who profess disbelief or even declare themselves shocked when they learn I don’t iron. And not only don’t iron but can’t iron–couldn’t if my life depended on it.

“You mean–“

“Yes. I do mean!”

My deficiency in this area makes not one iota of difference to my quality of life. It has been so long since I went anywhere where the sharpness of the crease in my trousers or the crispness of my shirt collar mattered that I can’t remember the decade, let alone the year. Possibly back in the early Chretien years? But what does it matter?

What does anything about ironing matter, really, unless one is a symphony musician or conductor, or a headwaiter, or an entertainer who spends a lot of time on the rubber chicken circuit? In all of which cases, the odds are that the individual in question can afford to have the items in question sent out, to be pressed professionally.

In my view, no one should ever iron anything unless he or she is being paid to do it. Quite simply, it’s the work of a galley slave.

My motto today, as it has been for decades, is “If it’s important enough to have ironed, it’s important enough to be sent out.” I have no more use for an iron in my house than I would for a drill press, a turret lathe, or a circular saw. Granted, I suppose that if I had to, I could use an iron as a light weight for shoulder and arm conditioning. But a 5-pound dumbbell answers to that purpose far better, and takes up less space into the bargain.

How did I come by my blind spot on ironing? Honestly, and at a very early age. As a boy, I saw my family’s sweet, kind cleaning woman, Izelia, a black woman who’d been brought up in Georgia, tackling huge piles of ironing every week. Occasionally one of my school shirts or one of my sisters’ dresses would find its way into the ironing basket. But mostly, that basket was filled with sheets (all white in those days) and my father’s shirts for work (also all white).

Although Izelia would often hum a little song to try to keep herself cheerful, I could tell she didn’t enjoy this work one bit. My younger sister, who spent more time observing Izelia than I did, claims she more than once saw her deliberately burn herself with the iron. Never having seen this happen, I can’t say whether this was true or not. But it would not have been beyond the realm of possibility.

Seeing poor Izelia quite literally slaving away, week after week, on these huge piles of sheets and shirts, I vowed, at the age of no more than 12, that ironing would never become part of my life.

Only once did my resolve crumble, and then only briefly. As a freshman at Amherst College, I was preparing to go out of town to a prom with my new girlfriend, when I noticed that my summer suit was badly in need of pressing. For this occasion, an unpressed suit really would not do. I located the iron and ironing board available to everyone in the dorm, and gingerly started to work on the suit jacket’s collar. Within 15 seconds, a trail of smoke was rising from the collar.

If an unpressed suit would not have done, a charred suit really would not have done. In terror, I stopped work and unplugged the iron. As it happened, one of the maids employed to clean our dormitory happened to be walking by at just that moment. I explained my plight to her. In two minutes, we had struck a deal. She would iron the suit, and I would give her $2. Fifteen minutes later, I had hung the suit back on its hanger. I was able to proceed with my trip to Ohio without further incident, at least of the sartorial variety.

This would be the last time I even attempted to iron anything. Had I ever been remotely tempted to do so, which I most assuredly was not, the memory of that plume of smoke rising from the collar of my nearly-new Brooks Brothers suit would have been more than enough to stop me.

My one remaining encounter with ironing saw me involved not as a participant, but as a spectator. Late in my graduate school career, I’d become involved with a fellow graduate student named Louise (not her real name). It was a passionate but stormy and seriously troubled relationship.

One dank late November afternoon, at a time when Louise was on my case for pretty well anything and everything, I came back from the university to discover her furiously ironing a big pile of underwear.

“Louise!” I said. “What the hell are you doing?” Even Izelia had never gone so far as to iron our underwear. I’d never in my life seen anyone do such a thing. Noticing the frenetic energy with which Louise was attacking the underwear, I began to wonder if she was seriously mentally ill.

“It’s important to be careful about your appearance when you go up to the Department,” she said.

“I don’t see what underwear has to do with that,” I said. “Nobody’s going to be looking at my underwear. If they are, they shouldn’t be!”

“It matters!” she insisted. “Everything about your outfit matters. Besides, ironing is a great way to release tension. D.H. Lawrence used to do it. I think you should, too!”

Not deeming this last comment worthy of a reply, I put on my coat and hat and stormed out the door, saying “I’ll come back when you’re ready to listen to reason!” If only I had thought to say, before marching off to the nearest bar, that since Lawrence only lived to age 45 and was not the happiest of campers during those 45 years, he hardly seemed a useful role model!

Later–much later, in fact–I would learn that up through the 1960s it had been fairly common, though by no means universal, for Maritime women to iron their family’s underwear. But the discovery did nothing to change my attitude toward ironing. If anything, it reinforced my view of ironing as a kind of penal servitude. And I would continue, and have continued, to regard ironing underwear as an expression of some kind of mental illness.

Thankfully, the episode with Louise was the last time I ever saw anyone ironing underwear. If I ever see such a sight again, I shall run as fast as I can in the opposite direction.

Somehow, though, I suspect I’ll be spared that sight. Craziness, these days, takes different forms.

Those critics of my work who express their dislike of it by telling me I should “Say what I mean!” are very far from taking their own advice.

The last thing in the world such people want is for an intellectual like me to say what he means. That entails nuance. Irony. Qualifications. Shades of meaning. Even (God help us) humour. All anathema to those adherents to the “Dick and Jane” style guide.

What is it that they mean, then? What they mean is that I should rewrite my work so that it is immediately available to the average 8th-grade dropout. Simple words and simpler sentence structure. No paragraph longer than four sentences. No literary allusions or (God forbid) figures of speech such as similes and metaphors. And (again) no nuances, qualifications, or shades of meaning. In their view, anyone who doesn’t immediately opt for either black or white isn’t saying what she means. Grey is not a permissible colour in these people’s palettes.

In a word, they want me to dumb my writing down to somewhere near moron level.

Those kind, generous, but demanding editors who are really interested in having me say what I mean, more clearly, would never phrase their request in such a way. Such editors–how few of them there are, but how welcome they are when they do appear–tend to operate through hints and gentle nudges and indirection; their manner is almost always diffident. They point to a sentence or a paragraph and ask “Do you think you could put in a supporting fact here?” or “Would it be possible to say this more clearly?” I don’t always find such questions easy to answer. To me, the piece was good enough as it was. But invariably, once I’ve answered the question to the editor’s satisfaction, I’m amazed at how much stronger the piece is. What the editor has done is take a good piece and make it even better.

For such editors, I’ll happily endeavour to say what I mean. Anywhere. Anytime. If I can.

While not many providers of technology or technological services will go to the brazen extremes of the IKEA corporation, and boast about how difficult their product or service is to use, this pride in technological complexity is there, for those willing to look for it.

Consider all the computer technology-related stuff you use in a day, or a week. It’s clear that most of it was designed with the pleasure and convenience of its designers in mind. It’s also clear that most of these designers are likely under the age of 40. How else to explain the minuscule fonts serving as buttons or labels–fonts which in more civilized times were only used for the truss ads in the back pages of Sunday newspapers, and which almost anybody over 60 finds next to impossible to read even with glasses? Twice during the past week I’ve had to use a magnifying glass to read such fonts–this although my eyesight is 20/20 once corrected with costly progressive trifocals.

It’s obvious, as well, from the complexity of instructions around such things as converting print books to e-books that the people who write these instructions love complex technology, indeed revel in its complexity, even (and perhaps especially) in its ambiguity. If the tech designers and authors of such instructions had been thinking of their users, most of whom are older people with limited knowledge of and less liking for complicated technology, they would have taken care to keep things simple and absolutely unambiguous. But no. They were thinking of themselves, and designing their technologies and instructions for people who love spending hours poring over a screen pondering the imponderable (if not the impossible). Most of these folks, I dare say, probably don’t have much in the way of a life. If they did, they wouldn’t be putting this sort of stuff out there for our exquisite torment. They would have too much real stuff to do to be interested in creating mind-boggling cyber complexity.

There’s another, yet more sinister reason why most computer technology is complex and difficult, and is likely to be kept that way, or worse, for the foreseeable future. By keeping things complex and in need of frequent replacement and refurbishment, those in the tech industry guarantee themselves long-term employment. That, I’m sure, is why programs are “updated” every few days, whether we the users think they need improvement or updating or not. Got to keep the industry in work, don’t ya know?

The near-religious desire to create sexy technology as opposed to useful technology, which is always simple, is, I’m sure, also a factor in many countries’ monstrous defense budgets–particularly that of the U.S. When technology doesn’t need to meet any tests of economic efficiency or utility, why not go all out with the bells and whistles? No one, it appears, is going to stop you. But this is another subject, for another time. . .

What the CBC, in particular CBC Radio 2, provides us with is a sense of cultural occasion. On CBC Radio 2, we celebrate great musical achievement or great musical lives lived; we mourn our lost cultural leaders. Together.

Those who say that you can hear the same music on private sector radio miss the point. Yes, on Stingray Channel 546 you can hear classical music 24×7. And I will often listen to such music, in preference to the Kapuskasing roadhouse hurtin’ music that is filling up entirely too much of Radio 2’s time these days.

But what you can’t do on Stingray, and will never be able to do on Stingray, is join together with other fellow devotees of music, or theatre, or literature, to celebrate cultural triumphs and mourn cultural losses. It is this sense of collectivity that, albeit in severely attenuated form, CBC still provides. And it is this collectivity that the far right, in its zeal to defund CBC, is seeking to destroy. Make no mistake. If the far right has its way, this country will have no more cultural collectivity. Then it will be open sesame to the Rush Limbaughs and Tucker Carlsons of the Canadian political-cultural universe, whether or not they bother to disguise their sentiments beneath a pea soup accent.

With the death, on Nov. 21, of poet, anti-war activist, and men’s movement activist and writer Robert Bly, the country has lost one of its few remaining heroes. Bly was 94. Though he had long suffered from dementia, he kept on writing poetry well into his 80s.

As a young anti-war activist myself in the late 1960s, I was inspired by Bly’s anti-war poetry, and by his willingness to show outright anger at the government and politicians who had allowed the criminal Vietnam War adventure to continue, as he did at a Baltimore reading I attended.

As a middle-aging economics researcher in 1991, confronted by another outrageous war (the Gulf War), and also facing the imminent death of my mother from lung cancer, I was both inspired and moved by Bly’s pivotal book about men, Iron John. Its key message, that men needed to be more in touch with all their feelings, resonated deeply with me. I recently (as a septuagenarian) re-read the book and found it just as inspiring and even more moving than ever.

Almost as soon as the book was out, people were accusing Bly of being anti-woman. I would only suggest that such an interpretation of Iron John is total rot. Throughout the book, its protagonist shows himself to be a man who cares deeply about women. Anyone who could seriously believe Iron John to be an anti-woman production either didn’t read the book, or at least not at all carefully, or is blinded to the book’s merits by his or her preconceived notions as to what masculinity should be.

With Iron John and Neil Diamond’s songs, a man in this society can go a long way.

With Iron John, Neil Diamond’s songs, and the right woman in his life, a man in this society is as close to having it made as a man could well be, assuming reasonable physical health.

With A.H. Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being, Iron John is one of two non-fiction books that provided me both practical guidance and the courage to persevere in the face of huge difficulties.

Bly’s death is obviously a huge loss. But his legacy will continue to inspire and enrich us for many, many years to come.

Nov. 25, 2021

If my mother were still alive–which, given her lifestyle, would be beyond a freak of nature–she would be 100 years old today. Supremely unlucky through most of her life–her parents divorced when she was 4 and she spent her childhood and adolescence being shuttled, first from relative to relative and then from boarding school to boarding school–she was perhaps nowhere less fortunate than in her “choice” of a birthday. Not only was March 15 the notorious “Ides of March,” and cursed on that basis, but it was, at least until her mid-30’s (at some point in the late 1950’s), income tax day in the U.S. While other women could have expected to be taken out for a birthday dinner, or at least have a special one prepared by their husbands, she had to spend all of her birthdays, until the tax date was finally changed to April 15, frantically scrambling through drawers and cardboard boxes looking for receipts and tax slips so she and Dad could make the midnight deadline for postmark of the tax form. I can’t remember if they even ate dinner on income tax day.

It has now been very nearly 30 years since Mother died, on March 31, 1991, having just barely attained the biblical threescore and ten. Given her four-pack-a-day smoking habit, she was probably lucky to have lived that long. The mother of a good friend of mine from college days, also a heavy smoker but probably not as heavy a one as Mother, died, also of lung cancer, before reaching age 45. But it was that same woman, who essentially spent the final five decades of her life committing slow suicide through self-asphyxiation, who was years ahead of her time in nutrition, proclaiming and in her own cooking practicing the virtue of cooking vegetables just to al dente, long before anyone else I knew had thought to do so. And it was that same woman who, despite never being able to muster the discipline to complete her own Ph.D. in sociology, even after I offered to help ghost-write her thesis, who raised three children who went on to obtain doctorates, including one (yours truly) who very nearly obtained a second doctorate.

There are many things I could say about Mother on this occasion of her centennial. To put down even a small fraction of those things would require far more space than I have available here. So I’ll simply identify my most important legacy from her: the recognition that life is extremely complicated, and that before we start passing judgement on a person for the life that they’ve lived, we should be sure we know the life fully and in complete context. From my post-retirement involvement in theatre, I’ve learned a similar lesson. It’s probably no accident that Mother loved theatre, and that my lifetime passion of it was first nurtured by her, when she took me, even as a small boy, to Broadway shows and musicals.

Just this past week, I decided to part ways with my long-time high-end clothes merchant, L.L. Bean.  I’d been at least an occasional Bean customer for over 40 years.  You’d have thought the decision would have been tough after so many years, but in fact, it wasn’t.  I found it surprisingly easy.  Truth is, I didn’t leave Bean’s.  They left me.

          Back in the Jimmy Carter years, when I first started shopping at Bean’s, the Bean label meant something, and I was proud to wear it.  Above all, that label meant durability and reliability.  The company’s catalogues, which I may say made quite passable winter evening reading, would often contain stories about customers who had returned items with defects after five, ten, even fifteen years, and received a full refund or replacement, no questions asked.  My own early experience with Bean items bore out that proud claim.  A Tattersall check dress shirt I’d been given in my mid 30s lasted a full twenty years.  Even then, I could easily have got another decade out of it, but for one sad fact.  By my mid 50s, I’d gained enough weight that the shirt no longer fit properly.  With much regret, I gave it to Goodwill.

          A pair of herringbone tweed pants I was given at about the same time as the shirt lasted even longer.  These pants, durable and altogether extraordinary enough that I celebrated them in an essay I published a number of years ago in The Globe & Mail, hang in my closet to this day, a proud if now only occasionally worn part of my wardrobe.  Last fall, they marked their 40^th anniversary with me; occasional alterations have enabled them to adapt quite nicely to the shifting demands of a now-expanding, now-contracting waistline. It may be worth at least passing mention that the pants were made in the U.S.A. and bore a union label.

          Seeing me wearing these pants at the office on a -20° January day, a colleague remarked that they reminded him of the pants his grandfather used to wear for duck hunting.  Some might not have been pleased by such a remark.  It didn’t bother me in the slightest. I was actually slightly flattered that my colleague had noticed the pants’ most essential quality—their timelessness.  Certainly company founder L.L. Bean would have been flattered.  He’d gone into business specifically to provide warm, durable clothing to be worn outdoors in Maine’s harsh winters.  Had he still been alive, he might well have used the remark as a testimonial for the catalogue.

          Unfortunately, old L.L. is long gone.  So, too, at least from Bean stores and catalogues, is anything even remotely resembling those grey herringbone pants.  These days, you’re lucky to find all-wool grey flannels there.  Over time, the once-proud purveyor of indestructible, warm outdoor wear has morphed into a vaguely countrified, more than slightly yuppified supplier of casual and informal clothing to the young and beautiful people of the world.  Even if most of the catalogue pictures are still shot in Maine, there is no longer anything distinctively “Down East” about them.  They could as easily have been shot in Ohio or Minnesota.

          As L.L. Bean migrated farther and farther away from its core business concept, I found that it had fewer and fewer items of interest to me.  My disillusionment with the company began around 2010, when I ordered a parka to replace one I loved, and that was still totally serviceable after nearly twenty years, except for a broken zipper, which would have cost more than the parka was worth to replace.

          The price tag for the Bean parka was steep, but I figured I’d at the very least be getting a comfortable and serviceable garment that would last me for many years.  If anybody knew parkas, I figured, it would be L.L. Bean. It turned out that I was sadly mistaken.  The first thing I noticed about my new parka, on receiving it, was that the box in which it had been shipped was absolutely enormous. The second thing was that it had been made in Bangladesh.  What did the Bangladeshis know about parkas, anyway?  I would soon see!

          The Bean parka, as I found the first time I wore it, was half again bulkier and at least twice as heavy as the Canadian-made parka it was meant to replace.  It was so bulky that when I wore it for driving, it was difficult to get the seat belt around it.  And it was so very, very heavy that simply putting it on was a challenge.  The garment’s massive weight bearing down on my shoulders aggravated the already severe arthritis I had in both of them.  I probably should have returned it, but the garment had no actual defect that I felt would justify a return; it simply wasn’t right for me.  As well, the postage for a return would have been prohibitive.  In disgust, I gave the parka to a Sally Ann, and eventually wound up buying a much lighter winter jacket which, while not perfect, at least didn’t make my shoulders ache with its weight every time I put it on.

          I hadn’t realized it at the time, but my little parka escapade would be the beginning of the end for me and L.L. Bean.  By around 2015, there were just two items for which I really needed Bean’s:  their cotton flannel sleeping shirts, which at the time I could only obtain at Bean’s, and their Oxford cloth button-down collar dress shirts, which for some inexplicable reason I could not obtain in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I was then living.  Slowly but inexorably, these last two bastions would crumble.

          In 2016, a Bean shirt then less than two years old ripped down its back seam.  I had the rip repaired, only to have the experience repeated less than six months later.  When a new rip appeared, in another place, I threw the shirt away in disgust.  By this time I was used to the fact that Bean’s shirts in the Obama years would not last anywhere as long as the old Tattersall shirt, from the Jimmy Carter years, had.  Still, I didn’t think it unreasonable to expect to get five or six years out of one of those shirts, especially since I had quite a few of them and even as the quality was going down, the price wasn’t.  The only thing that kept me buying those shirts from Bean’s was the near-impossibility of finding an Oxford cloth shirt in any colour other than white anywhere else.

          It would be the sleeping shirts—by the Obama years the one Bean item left bearing any resemblance to the company’s storied past and its old core business—that would finally drive me away from Bean’s for good.  For about a decade, I would order a new one every couple of years.  While I wasn’t pleased that the El Salvador-made shirts tended to wear out after four or five years, I was prepared to live with the fact. 

          Sometime around 2017 or 2018—I can’t place the year exactly—Bean’s simply discontinued their men’s sleeping shirts.  By this time, I’d discovered a new source of supply—the Vermont Country Store.  The only catch was that, unlike Bean’s, VCS didn’t provide free shipping to Canada.  So steep was the shipping charge, in fact, that it increased the total cost of the garment by about 50%.  For me, at the time, this was a non-starter.  I dusted off my improvisational skills, checked the Bean catalogue to determine what would be the equivalent women’s size to my XXL, and started ordering Bean’s women’s plaid flannel nightgowns.  To all intents and purposes, these were the same garment as I’d been wearing for years, though the women’s nighties lacked the men’s breast pocket and were a bit snugger around the arms.

          Then, early this year (2021), one of the women’s nighties developed a tear.  Worse than the seam rips that had afflicted my Bean shirts earlier, this was a major tear near the armpit.  I wasn’t (and am still not) sure whether it will even be possible to repair the torn nightgown, which was less than two years old when I discovered the tear.

          The tear reduced me to two serviceable nightgowns, which is simply not enough, given that during our current pandemic I will often spend entire days in a nightie.  With a sigh, I went to Bean’s online catalogue, only to discover that they had discontinued their entire line of women’s flannel nightgowns.

          Could this be for real, I wondered? Surely flannel nightgowns must have been a big-selling item.  I’ve certainly ordered enough of them, in their various guises, over the years.  But no, it was no mistake.  The nightgowns were, and are, nowhere to be found at Bean’s.  Which left me with no other choice than to order  replacements at Vermont Country Store, exorbitant shipping charge and all.

          Though I deeply resent having to pay $45 U.S. in shipping for two nightshirts that between them could not weigh more than about three pounds, the inevitable switch to VCS is not without its positive side.  First off, I’m back to men’s nightshirts, which are better tailored to fit my body than the women’s nightshirts from Bean’s were.  And second, and more important, VCS guarantees its nightshirts for life.  I don’t expect my nightgown nightmare to be repeated, but if it is, I’ll be given a replacement, free of charge.

          That guarantee is worth quite a bit to me, actually.  It takes me back to the good old days of L.L. Bean.  Who knows but that in the near future, Vermont Country Store may simply acquire its old rival outright?  My sleeping shirt saga suggests it may be well on the way to doing just that.

And what about those Oxford cloth shirts? I haven’t found any yet in my new home of Gatineau, Quebec. But I feel fairly confident of finding some, when I need to, in nearby Ottawa if not in Gatineau itself. Meanwhile, I’m wearing more flannel shirts these days, and fewer dressy Oxford cloth ones. My current ample supply of the latter seems likely to last me several more years, even given the greatly reduced workmanship and longevity of today’s clothing.