As I was staring out the tall windows at the stoopid inversion haze this morning, a bunch of new Ties o’ the Day came knocking at my front door to brighten my day. I had heard a UPS-type knock at the door, and was excited to find a package addressed to me on the welcome mat. Behold! Here are two of the six new additions that have come to live in my collection today. The Tie Room runneth over! As does my necktie joy.
Like paisley, houndstooth is always a funky pattern to wear. Let me tell you, it is impossible for a houndstooth pattern to be boring or bland to the eye. It’s been quite a while since I’ve invested in new ties, but I found these on a clearance sale on a golf clothing website as I searched for wacky golf pants that look like me. I wasn’t impressed with the pants I found on the site, but I just had to have these neckties. I’ll be showing off more of my new, “golfy” neckwear finds tomorrow.
I can’t wait until my copper Bow Tie o’ the Day begins to get its green patina from being exposed to the elements. When I’m not wearing it, I should probably store it somewhere humid—like in the bathroom by the shower. Or perhaps I should attach it to one of Suzanne’s outside flower pots by the sprinklers, through Spring and Summer. Or both. It’ll take years for the green patina to grow and refine its full-blown protective layer, but a snappy copper bow tie deserves to reach its full artistic potential. It deserves to turn green and evolve into its own historically fashionable greatness over time. Bow ties are people too, you know.
I’m sure I have felt just about every human way there is to feel in life, many times over. One thing I don’t remember often feeling is bored. I can find something interesting to occupy my mind in anything and everything. As evidence of this fact, I present this photo—in which I am wearing my Stan Laurel face and a bejeweled, fancy Bow Tie o’ the Day, while happily reading Henry Petroski’s history of the toothpick. Yes, I really do find even the evolution of the modern toothpick captivating. Based on the length of Petroski’s THE TOOTHPICK, toothpicks have had at least 353-pages of stick adventures throughout their existence. Go, toothpicks!
I was stumped today about what to post on TIE O’ THE DAY, and suddenly my phone beeped. It was this picture of my first brother-in-law, Kent, gussied up in his church clothes. I had recently gifted him this teed-up-golf-balls Tie o’ the Day, because golf is his passion. In recent years, when Mom would come up north and stay with Kent and BT for a couple of days, he and Mom would watch golf on tv together for hours and days—while BT was off doing her own thing, which usually involved books and/or genealogy. And then, Kent and Mom would go grocery shopping together. Kent is the originator of our family saying: “How the Hell-en are you?” It’s what he’d say whenever he’d call Mom to check on her, beginning way back in the 70’s.
Anyhoo… BT/Mercedes says Kent received several comments about his tie today—I’m assuming at church. That makes me so happy! I want you to know that I love my neckwear collection so much that if I think a particular tie would have a better life around someone else’s neck, I wistfully—but gladly—give it away. A tie might not live under my roof anymore, but I still have the memories of the time we shared together. I love a tie enough to let it move on to a more fitting destiny. The tie’s welfare is the most important consideration.
High-tops Bow Tie o’ the Day knows it’s true. If it’s Saturday, household chores will get done. It’s a habit I don’t see myself changing at this point in my life. I’ve mentioned before how that Primary song about Saturday being a special day gets stuck in my head every Saturday. It always has, and it always will. I was brainwashed into doing housework with that song. Oh, it’s okay. I have no illusions about the inner-soundtrack of my Saturday mornings ever being anything different. I used to fight it, but I don’t anymore. However, I’m always at the ready to add to the Saturday playlist in my noggin. Along with the heavily rotated Primary song of my youth, “Saturday,” there are songs like “Saturday Night” by The Bay City Rollers, and “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting” by Elton John. One of my fave songs to have stuck in my head on a Saturday is Tom Waits’ “The Heart of Saturday Night.” And there are plenty more Saturday-reference songs to add. If you’re a better Utah Mormon than I am, your Saturday playlist can include every song on the SATURDAY’S WARRIOR soundtrack—randomly shuffled, or in order! Whatever music is stuck in your head while you’re checking off tasks on your Saturday to-do list, it is imperative that you sing out each song with exuberance and pride. The quality of your voice isn’t what’s important. What’s important is to sing loud enough to let the next-door neighbors know you’re choring and you’re happy about it. Above all, remember where you came from: Primary.
Bow Tie o’ the Day and I have been ruminating on the ideas of purpose and passion today. Naturally, for me, that meant I dug up one of my haggard copies of Annie Dillard’s book of essays called TEACHING A STONE TO TALK. The first essay in the collection is called “Living Like Weasels,” and it references the story of a man who once shot an eagle out of the sky. (Bad man!) Upon examining the freshly dead eagle, the man discovered the dry skull of a weasel with its jaws attached to the eagle’s throat. It seemed a reasonable assumption that the eagle had at one time pounced on the weasel, and the weasel had swiftly and instinctively swiveled and bit the eagle’s throat. The weasel lost its life to the eagle, but its dead jaws remained clenched on the eagle’s throat for who-knows-how-long until the eagle itself fell prey to its executioner, and all that remained of the weasel was its skull’s clenched jaw. The weasel latched on, with all of its instinctive weasel purpose and passion, most of its body falling away piece by piece over time. The weasel flew high, even to its own end. But imagine what unbelievable things that dying weasel got to see—if only for a few moments—of the world from up in the sky, where it had never before been in its tiny weasel life!
The essay ends with this call to find our own purpose and passion:
“We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—even of silence—by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting….
“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”
Chew on that. Ponder those images. Then ask yourself if you hold that tightly to anything? Got purposes? Got passions? If you’re lucky, you know exactly who you are and what you’re about. You’re already flying.
Every January, I pay a fee to retain the rights to the domain name for my TIE O’ THE DAY tie blog (the “tblog”). Each year, the process has gone smoothly. This year, however, someone else wanted the rights to tie-o-the-day.com. I don’t know if it was for an individual person or a business or some other type of organization, but somebody—for some likely nefarious purpose—was attempting to kidnap MY domain name. They created a speed bump in my domain name renewal process. For a few days, I was a tad worried that my little neckwear website would be lost in the internet’s junkyard forever, or would belong to someone who is not me. When faced with the possible impending loss of my domain name, I immediately did what I do: I did some research and I made some calls. I spoke with The People In Charge O’ Things. I was ready for a fist fight, if necessary. Ultimately, because I had all my paperwork, receipts, and certificates in order, no interloper was able to steal the domain name from me. My beloved tblog can keep its rightful name. Whew!
Not only did I declare today a Pajama Day around the house, I also declare today the day I begin to embrace the plethora of conspiracy theories that surround us. I am determined to say goodbye to reason, scholarship, science, and common sense. No longer will I be a run-of-the-mill sheep. I will, from this point onward, be a conspiracy theory sheep. The more crackpot the conspiracy theory, the more likely I will be to believe it. In fact, I henceforth refuse to believe in anything that is NOT a conspiracy theory.
Bow Tie o’ the Day is not convinced of my new-found conviction. Bow Tie tells me my newly adopted belief in all things conspiracy will last about 15 minutes. Personally, I’m betting my conspiracy theory phase was over before this paragraph even began. 😉
Sometimes I am not in the mood to decide between two equally swell neckwear choices. Sometimes I am compelled to find a way to wear both. Fortunately for me, when I wake up in a necktie-plus-bolo-tie mood, I have the perfect Tie o’ the Day to satisfy my yearning. I have this wonder.
You’d be surprised how often I wake up in some type of double mood. I think it has something to do with my being bipolar, and not so much about any indecisiveness on my part, or any refusal to compromise my present vibes. Whatever the case, a tie like this is a perfect example of what makes my neckwear collection distinctively “me.” It is also what will make selling my collection more problematic when I decide it’s time to let the neckwear go. The right buyer will have to be remarkably like me, and what’s the likelihood I’ll ever find someone like that—besides me, of course?
I’m still experimenting with the limits of my golf pants. This total look is eye-catching, I do believe. I’m eagerly awaiting a delivery of new golf pants, but until then, here’s more of the one pair I already own. My Arkansas cowboy boots add a powerful vibe to my attire, and the bright paisley shirt is the cherry on top of my relgalia. The colors and squares of Tie o’ the Day semi-subtly echo the plaid pants.
The pose I’m offering up harks back to Delta High School’s storied and legendary wrestling program. I cannot speak for how it is now, but when I was in high school, you could not escape the long arms of the wrestling program. Region Championships and State Championships were standard for DHS. If a wrestling competition was in town, that’s where everybody was. Remember: this was back when there were only 5 channels on television, and cell phones had not yet been born. If you wanted to watch something happening live, or just hang with a friend, you showed up at the wrestles.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was learning valuable wrestling lessons from all the matches I watched. Years later, when I was teaching in an all-Black, west Baltimore middle school, I was regularly witness to near-daily physical fights. Most teachers—male and female—were hesitant to attempt to break up fights, opting instead to wait for the school police officer to show up with pepper spray and handcuffs. And I understood why nobody wanted to jump in. It was risky business for any adult, especially for a short white girl from Utah. But I was never comfortable merely standing by during a melee, and I quickly learned that I had skills I had heretofore been unaware of. Wrestling seemed to be in my blood. Somehow, I knew wrestling holds. I could slither into the middle of a fracas and skillfully take a fighting kid down. Eventually, students called me the White Coyote. I still don’t know if it was meant as a compliment or disrespect, or both. But the word “coyote” reminded me of Dad, so I was always fine with the name.
