Years ago my first boyfriend, my first great love, had an unusual reaction when I relayed sad news:  I had lost my favorite shirt in a tragic river tubing accident. The blue and yellow striped one had drifted away.

He snarled and said, “GOOD. I hated that shirt.”

I discovered that he (I already said it I guess) hated the shirt and had for more than a year. But not at first, he confessed. Only after I kept wearing it over and over and over and over. Apparently it bugged him. Once he saw how bummed I was to lose that beloved lucky shirt, he tried to buy me a similar shirt in consolation, but it was no good. Ironically, his replacement shirt became a lucky shirt itself because the shirt reminded me of him and our happy years together.

I have about eight favorite shirts at anyone time. Well, ten. Maybe eleven.

There’s my Lucky Saturday shirt, which I wear when I staff New Warrior Training Adventures. I have a Lazy Day shirt, and I always have a favorite navy blue shirt, I just always do. My favorite Go For Walks flannel shirt. I have three favorite dress shirts. All Lucky Shirts eventually cycle out of use because even I have fashion limits in wearing favorite clothes. However, my shoulder has to pretty-much be poking through the threadbare material before I retire a Lucky Shirt or cannibalize it into rags. Even as rags, I still get to visit a Lucky Shirt and remember when I used to wear this particular shirt daily.

I thought my first boyfriend was a little kooky but over the years, it has been confirmed by friends and total strangers that I have ‘a thing’ with my shirts. Earlier this year, the beautiful serving girl at my favorite cafe said, “Hey what’s wrong with you? You changed your shirt.”

“What?”

She turned around and called the restaurant’s owner from the kitchen.

“Hey Bess, he changed his shirt. It’s not the striped one today with the long sleeves. He’s wearing something different.”

Bess came out from the back to check out the novelty.

“What’s wrong?” Bess asked sharply.

I can’t believe people notice those little details, like how many days you wear your shirt in a row. Or, you know, whether you shower or not. Once, Stephen tried to present the unreasonable argument that people shower every day and I kept saying, “Not if they don’t feel like it,” while avoiding eye contact.

We all have our odd quirks and strange habits, even if we’re reluctant to admit it. I actually like people with odd habits. This is different from people who WORK HARD to convince us all their life is exotic and strange; that’s usually quite boring to me. I prefer people who have odd Saturday morning rituals, or play goofy games with their spouses, or hide things on their kids. I knew someone who loved $2 bills and insisted on using them to pay for everything. He almost never used an ATM; he had to go to a bank every time.

You really have to know someone, watch them, to discover their odd quirks and habits. To notice what clothes they favor, expressions they use, how they rub their face when anxious, or how defensive they get when you ask about their car. Quirks. And in our fast-paced lives as adults, it’s harder to find time to notice all these quirks in everyone you meet.

I staff the New Warrior Training Adventures (NWTA) because it’s a time when I slow down and pay attention to the looks on mens’ faces. I give myself time to see their strange quirks, their oddball habits, and we laugh together about how good it is to be seen, even when being seen reveals you’ve got issues.

On our most recent NWTA weekend, it snowed. Some of the Minnesota guys (ahem…I may have been involved) grabbed out-of-state staffers for a special “Minnesota greeting” which meant rubbing snow in their faces. We attacked a man from Texas, two from California, and finally gave up and started throwing snow at anyone, in-state or not. I got beaned with a snowball which exploded upside my head.

Minutes later as we all were breathing heavily in our staff meeting and swearing at the snow melting down our shirts, one man said, “I haven’t played like that since I was a kid.”

His face held joy and grief as he volunteered that quirk about his life, and his eyes held the recognition that he could speak in this vulnerable way to the 30 listening men and not one of us would laugh. He trusted. So the 30 men listened and nodded and I bet we all thought of the last time we laughed and played hard.

Men who I staff with are my Lucky Shirts.

We are each our own unique colors, striped and solid, old and young, gay, straight. We have been roughed up by life and show that in various degrees of wear and tear. Some shirts are loud, and some are quiet. Some men have been doing this work for 5 months and others for 30 years. I see these men only a few times a year, wear them on special occasions. We laugh and play together but it’s not always hilarious.

This past weekend, I spoke quietly with a staff man whose heart was consumed by grief, and he cried a lot with me, which I think he hates to do. But he cried because it was better to be seen crying than to carry this misery alone. He’s also a Lucky Shirt and when I see him again next time, I will throw my arms around him, joyful to be reunited.

When staffing is over, I inevitably feel this sense of loss, like I have lost my favorite blue and yellow striped shirt in a river tubing accident. I miss my Lucky Shirts, even if I just met them three days ago. Sure, I will see some of them more than twice a year. But we all have careers and families and emails to answer, leaves to rake, laundry to do, etc. so it’s hard to stay connected in that intense, familiar way.

When I staff a NWTA, I slow down for a weekend and peer into other mens’ faces, look quietly, and see whatever is there. It’s damn good to be seen, too. On Saturday morning of this past NWTA, I was strolling towards the main building for an afternoon activity when my friend Stephen yelled at me from 20 feet away.

“EDMOND! YOU’RE NOT WEARING YOUR LUCKY SATURDAY SHIRT!”

He was right!

I flipped around, raced back to my bunkhouse to get it.

I only get to wear that shirt a few times a year and I was damned sure not to miss out on that opportunity.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 8:32 am and is filed under Gratitude. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.