[[[excerpt - jersey]]]

	Katharine Coldiron
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So when our stuff got shipped to us in London four years ago, including many boxes of old clothes, I found myself sitting amongst dozens and dozens of t-shirts, each of them with a string of meaning attached to it. The green t-shirt from when I took an electronics course which I barely remembered. The two Michelangelo t-shirts my dad had gotten me, both of which were decorated with images from Michelangelo’s work, the images printed like strange flexible plates that made the shirts incredibly uncomfortable. The t-shirt, unwearably large, they’d given me for free when I visited my future alma mater. The Simpsons t-shirt I got back in 1989, which I used to change into proudly every Sunday evening. There was a St. Thomas t-shirt that my mom bought during her honeymoon, which had white jointed lines suggesting seagulls and literally no meaning for me. The tiny Kids’ Comfort Station t-shirt, a daycare center for sick children that I adored when I was small, which had faint stains from when I had thrown up on it. My two Camp Morehead t-shirts. One of them had moldy stains (odorless after many washings) from when I spilled hot chocolate in my camp trunk and was too young to understand that I needed to air out the shirt in order for it to dry. I kept that one as well as the clean one, because Mom and Dad had paid for them both and it was a waste of money to throw out a perfectly OK t-shirt that only had a few spots on it. There was my old Run for the Children t-shirt; I hadn’t participated in the Run, I was only six, but the back listed the sponsors. One of the sponsors was S.G. Ballard, the company run by the man who had restored the house where I lived at the time. Such were the tenuous reasons I had kept some of these t-shirts, and the reasons why they’d been shipped across an ocean for me to unpack them.

But there were other reasons. Time: I had been dragging these from house to house as we moved and moved for so many years that they meant something to me as a group. No one except my parents has known me continually for longer than five years, and these t-shirts have been mute folded observers for sometimes much longer than that. Money: My parents were obsessive about waste, and if these t-shirts were remotely useful and had been paid for, they should be kept. Sentiment: I was affectionate about some of the events that these t-shirts commemorated or represented, and hence I was affectionate about the t-shirts. And the most amorphous, most important reason of all: Dad.

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