Do you have a shirt that makes you feel groovy?

“Do you have a shirt that you really love /One that you feel so groovy in?

“You don't even mind if it starts to fade / That only makes it nicer still.

“I love my shirt, I love my shirt / My shirt is so comfortably lovely.”


The folk singer Donovan penned those lyrics back in the late ‘60s, but the sentiment expressed therein rings as true today as it did nearly four decades ago. Does to me, anyway, in large part because I do have a shirt that I really love, one that’s almost as old as Donovan’s homage to casual menswear.

I purchased it the summer of 1976 at a Detroit Goodwill store, three days after our nation celebrated its bicentennial. It’s cut like a Hawaiian shirt, made of 100 percent cotton, and it’s yellow.

When I first bought the shirt, it was waaaaay too big for me; I employed it as a sort of quasi-jacket, usually over a T-shirt. Over the years, the shirt has shrunk considerably, because these days it fits just fine.

A few buttons have fallen off here and there; I’ve replaced them with new ones that more or less match the originals. The bright yellow color has faded—after an estimated 2,080 washes—to a watery sunflower.

But as Donovan said, that only makes it nicer still.

I wore the shirt a lot back when The Lovely Mrs. Taylor and I were dating; to the movies, at picnics and barbecues, even the family pool party. Mrs. T (who back then was still known in some circles as “Julie”) never expressed an opinion about the shirt one way or the other. I assumed that, like me, she really loved it.

Then we got married.

All of a sudden I started hearing comments like, “You’re not going to wear that, are you?” or “Yellow is not your color!” or “Can I cut this up for rags?”

Every time my favorite shirt went into the laundry hamper, I had to remain vigilant until it was returned to the closet. On more than one occasion, I discovered it folded away with the old clothes marked for Mrs. Taylor’s spring yard sale.

“Oh,” she would say, the picture of dewy-eyed innocence, “do you still want that old thing?”

“Yes,” I would say. “I want to be buried in that old thing.”

“It looks like somebody already was.”

And so the shirt war rages. Mrs. T devises ways to dispose of the shirt, I heroically rescue it. She’s Snidely Whiplash, I’m Dudley Do-Right, and my poor shirt is cast as Sweet Nell. If she could, Mrs. T would tie my shirt to the train tracks and wait for the 10:15 express.

In fact, it recently came back from the laundry room looking exactly as if that had happened. On the right side near the bottom hem, about a dozen little holes have appeared. How they got there, Mrs. T says, is a mystery. They look like the work of her father’s shotgun to me. I didn’t even know Mrs. T could shoot.

But if she thinks a few little pellet holes are going to keep me from wearing my favorite shirt, she’s nuts.

The big New Year’s Eve party is coming, and I have my outfit all picked out.



More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.