Give Me My Sports Coat

I don't often think of my age. I have better things to do with my diminishing supply of brain cells than to use them to try to comprehend that increasingly large number. But I do think about my obsolescence, thanks largely to a close relative who frequently suggests that everything about me, from my taste in cars, clothes, music, colors, furniture and restaurants to conventional wisdom, lifestyle and colloquial expressions is outdated. And hints that it always has been. For those comments I frequently strike her from my will, a retaliation she shrugs off, aware perhaps of the projected limited size of that inheritance or that I intend to spend it during my lifetime, on me, anyway.

What I thought was an insignificant remark about my wearing a sports coat as I played the role of a tourist in Madrid many years ago elicited a less than complimentary "Ooh la la" from her and suppressed giggles from CO'78 who, I suspect shares that relative's awareness of the emerging dominance of their generation.

They are mistaken about it being odd to wear a sportscoat in public, as a tourist, in Madrid or anywhere else, back in 1959. To prove my point I spent much of last night poring through my photos of that era (yes, there were cameras then) and picking out that ever-present sports coat as I went through life, not perhaps as a fashionista but certainly not as an oddballl.

That evidence will be tendered below, but first a note about 1959 in Europe. Sports coats and ties were as normal then as Tweets are now. Even in casual situations. Even at home. Even for the urchins selling newspapers in Dublin, tattered though those may have been. It was the time of "Angela's Ashes" in Ireland but those downtrodden males in that gloomy novel would all be wearing sports coats, I'd wager.

What I didn't mention in that letter was that the sports coat was made of Irish wool tweed. Now, that was madness in the sizzling heat of summer in Madrid, but it was the only kind I had. Given that I was living in Ireland at the time, and had absorbed the fact that summers there were not much different than winters except for the length of daylight, it hadn't dawned on me as I prepared for Madrid that all summers all over the world might not be like Irish ones. The dress code for the institution in Madrid where I would be doing research required a coat. Madrileños, I discovered too late described their climate as "three months of winter, three months of hell", and there I was sweating it out swathed in a wool sports coat. Mad dogs and Englishmen had nothing on me.

Undergrad or Tourist, a sportscoat was de rigueur










My roommate and I just back home from a normal day at the University having our supper.












On a picnic with classmates, or relaxed at home with my Irish host on any evening after work.

Even on a Sunday afternoon drive in the countryside to admire the scenery or pick wild blackberries....every adult male wore a sports coat.


But there was an exception: hitchhiking across Spain (it was still safe and a rite of passage to hitchhike in Europe) was a time for jeans and that duffel bag, with badges of places visited sewn on to it: