one item that will never leave my wardrobe

This afternoon, I was sitting on the couch with my dad, a third-generation union electrician, after we both got home from work. I told him that yesterday I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time with my friend Kristina and then took the D train to Coney Island.

"I was there when I was an apprentice. It was ....real depressed then." My dad's internal map of the city must be cultivated from years of commuting at ungodly hours five or more days a week, working in buildings around the boroughs at their various stages of completion. Like any time I mention the city, he told me about seven million ways I could have gotten around and back to Penn or Jamaica stations, all in his thick & stereotypical Noo Yawk accent.

He jumped back to the topic of the Brooklyn Bridge and the waterfalls that were recently installed, "They tell ya all about them, but they don't tell ya where to see them!" Apparently, the last time my father put foot to Brooklyn Bridge was in a protest ("you were four yea-uhs old,") against some company that wasn't building in Manhattan. They shut down the automobile lanes for one day and walked across. "You don't realize how much it sways when you're driving," he said. Kind of exciting for a generally straight-laced kinda guy.

And, true to his six-foot-six and equally large, lovingly and exasperatingly blue-collar personality, "I got my picture in Newsday, well, you could see my head over everyone else's. You wouldn't have known it was me, but I was in the picture."

I suddenly realized I was wearing the perfectly worn in shirt I had dug out from Grandpa's dresser years earlier and kept in heavy wearing rotation since:


My friends call it "the scary baby t-shirt." I call it the softest, best fitting t-shirt I own, one that my dad got at an electrician's apprentice picnic in the seventies or eighties, before he had a house, kids, a regular spot at the local bar...a shirt that makes me a little more closer to thinking of my dad as human.