LETTERS FROM HOME: THE EXCESS BAGGAGE OF OLD T-SHIRTS AND MYSTERY BOXES

Sept. 24, 1998

Dear Julie,

DC was rearranging some drawers when she came across a cache of my old T-shirts and wondered if some could be given to the Salvation Army. This was like Patton asking Rommel if he'd like to give up some of his land.

Especially coming from a woman who has filled our basement with boxes of things that are only rumors to me.

Besides, these aren't T-shirts, really. They have transcended that role. They're more like artifacts of my life.

Just because I can't wear them any more due to fit or stains or flimsiness doesn't mean they have no purpose.

Consider:

-- A Joni Mitchell T-shirt from the 1960s when she made me swoon singing "A Case of You."

-- A muscle shirt I look ridiculous in acquired in New Orleans during one of Neil Young's crazier tours.

-- A much-too-small T-shirt I've never worn from the Stone Pony, the working-class bar in Asbury Park where Bruce Springsteen played his first gigs.

A limp shirt that bears the name "David's Books" and the image of someone you'd guess to be a reader. It was obtained by my friend David in Ann Arbor when we were estranged and is a reminder to me of the transformative power of forgiveness.

-- An Arcata T-shirt with a picture of the enormous tree a block from your grandmother's house. That tree is my connection to those days in that fine old house, to the lopsided bookcase I helped Lynn build, to the quasi-chocolate mousse Debbie made for my 34th birthday, to the Jambalaya and Los Bagels, the freaks on the square and fog bank on the hills.

-- Another treasure from the Poets of Arcata series. Jerry Martien is pictured among the rocks off Trinidad. It is impossible for me to think of Arcata without this image appearing, perhaps because his words so often moved me and made me see the worth of artists who describe reality different from the way most of us do.

Newer but already a member of the museum is a Field of Dreams T-shirt from the farm in Dyersville, Ill., where the movie was filmed. Going there restored my faith in baseball the way Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa are doing for millions this year. I wanted this one next to my skin so often that it has become frail from washing.

Other T-shirts are on their way to the institutional drawer: The pink ones DC and I wore during Reggae on the River, when we were part of a security patrol that kept Garberville safe from Deadheads.

Tomorrow is our fifth anniversary. I was going to be in Chicago at a golf school earlier in the week so my plan was for us to spend our anniversary there. We like the art institute and the blues and jazz clubs.

But DC knows that September is the best month for travel deals, and she discovered that it's currently cheaper to fly to a certain international city favored by lovers than to Phoenix. Since neither of us has asthma, the choice was easy.

We don't speak the language and don't have much of a plan. But as DC says, "There are so few adventures left anymore."

En route, I will wonder whether my attachment to those shirts may represent insistence on an independence I have been unable to relinquish in marriage. And whether DC's mystery boxes are part of herself not yet shared with me.

Here we go, five years along and still only beginning the adventure.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.