An honorable retirement

Back in Paris recently, I was asked to consider saying goodbye to a dear old friend of mine.

It was an uncomfortable moment, for I had known for some time that the day was coming when I would be so advised. For some time now, I've been unable to deny that although we've been through some great times together, my friend is rather the worse for wear. Wrinkles and blemishes abound where once there were none, there are even a few permanent injuries here and there, and not all is quite right anymore on the inside either. Perhaps things could be fixed to some degree, but my friend will never be young again, and you know how so many people feel about subjecting one to great indignities just to prolong a not-very-happy life a bit longer. I had a feeling things would change in our relationship once I got to Singapore anyway, so I was able to fight the urge to part ways with my old friend.

I am talking, of course, about my leather jacket. It's beat, but it's served me so well for so long, how could I give up on it now? A shoe salesman I stopped to see in St. Michel didn't see it that way. "It is worn out!" he said in classic too-precise non-native English. "Look at these new ones I have! Half off and they go with your new shoes!"

They did, too. But an old friend is an old friend. Oh, I admit it helped that I had no business buying a new leather jacket - even on sale - when I was a poor student who was just a month or so away from moving to a city just a few miles from the equator. But mostly it was a matter of loyalty to old friends.

We do go back a while, after all: all the way to Christmas 1998, the end of a year that started out rough but ended very well indeed - just the sort of precedent I'm hoping to follow a decade later, actually. It was a gift from my incomparable Great Aunt Lillian, once she forgave me for being a Democrat. Aunt Lil has since gone to heaven (even though she was a gym teacher - hope she's not too lonely up there), which is another reason not to part with it. But that's only part of its sentimental value. It's been with me through all kinds of weather since that Christmas day. It joined the ride just in time for those heady last days of the International Student House era, and the many road trips with Sarah, Pat, Lathan and Barbara - Shenandoah, Annapolis, Harper's Ferry...and Niagara (inside joke - I don't mean the waterfall, though it's been there too). It saw me to Yale and back to DC, with all those chilly winter afternoons organizing for the union in the Grad Ghetto in between, countless trips to New York, three times to Canada, and one frigid New Year's in the hills of North Carolina (Cold Mountain was a good book, but the title is an understatement), through all the thick and (mostly) thin of my second round in DC, on to Taiwan (where the zipper broke and it spent most of the two years on the extra bedroom floor), to Denver (where I finally got the zipper fixed), and traipsing across much of Europe with me since then. The scuffs and discoloration and the holes in the lining are just badges of honor picked up along the way.

I won't be needing it here in the tropics. But I sure as heck won't need a replacement either, and I can't think of one good reason to throw it out. When I moved into my room here, it was the first thing I put away. I very reverently hung it on a hanger at the far end of the closet where I hope my old friend will enjoy a peaceful retirement in this nice warm climate.