Whittling Away with Dick Brooks - Thrift Store

I hadn’t been for a visit to my favorite thrift store lately so in a lull in the usual rush of senior activity and since it was nearby and I was out and about anyway, I decided to pop in for a few minutes.  I put the groceries I had just purchased in the back of Casper, The Friendly Kia and motored to my destination. I entered the thrift shop and was greeted by the smiley behind the counter.  I like stores where they know you.  I headed for the men’s section and started perusing the shirt rack.  I love the clothes I get here, they aren’t stiff.  They have had a life before and are now soft and comfortable and have the advantage of being a couple of dollars apiece and the money goes to a good cause, how can you beat it? I thumbed quickly through the T shirt section .    It’s not really T shirt weather and my drawers are full of them, some dating back decades.  Got plenty of flannels and sweat shirts too, so I flipped through them rapidly and got to the dress shirt section.  I started through them, got lots of blue ones, yellow and white—got them.  Who wears bright pink?  Barbie maybe.  Then what to my wandering eyes should appear but a beautiful dress shirt, the same one that I had admired a few days before in one of the myriad catalogues that appear with great regularity in our mail box.  The catalogue shirt was $45 so I had reluctantly flipped the page but here it was before me for $2 and it looked like it would fit.  I took it off the rack and checked the label.  It was an 18 with 32 inch sleeves.  I couldn’t remember if I was an 18 with 32 inch sleeves or a 32 with 18 inch sleeves.

There is no changing room in the thrift store so I left it there.  At home later, the shirt came up when I was looking for a topic for my morning ponder.  Life would be much easier if we could standardize things.  I have no problem with getting my T shirts to fit.  I know that I’m an XL.  Most people know if they’re S-M-L-XL or WL (wide load).  So why don’t manufactures mark all clothing with one of the above.  If I were a woman I’d never be able to get dressed, they have different sizes for almost everything they own.  Why don’t they standardize a whole bunch of things like ink cartridges so any one would fit any printer or make chargers that fit any brand of phone or why don’t we switch to the Metric system like the rest of the world so I could use the Irish cookbook I bought this summer at a yard sale.  There are advantages, if women had clothes marked like T shirts then their husbands could shop for them and life as we know it would be a simpler thing.  

Thought for the week—The latest survey shows that three out of four people make up seventy five percent of the population.

Until next week, may you and yours be happy and well.

Whitte12124@yahoo.com