Work Shirt

January 14, 2019

“Emergency!” The 1970’s screen version of firefighter paramedics, excited both my stubbornly male nature and the empath inside.

But the screen was blind to the details of smell and taste and my childhood table lacked nurses or paramedics to fill out that pallet.  I sat with scientist-farmers and doctors with PhD’s instead of trach.-tubes and scalpels.  As my career become more intense, realizations I was not prepared for, peppered my senses.      

There was this shirt I’d take off my patients.  It started clean, the heavy cloth, warm and soft on the inside. Time would add a thick smell that was as unique as it was familiar.  Old men, their work shirts stained by profession, body and lunch.  The dank chicken soup blended with the acrid curry of sweat all bound with paint or glue or some chemical whiff.

In the beginning I found these shirts overwhelming and candidly, disgusting.  Filled with the detritus of hard life, its aura invaded the work of compassion with repugnance.  Job bound, I would root around in pockets to collect ‘valuables’.  Finding the rank burnt roach as flat as the pencil used to write hieroglyphs on scraps of brown paper and dust and dust and dust and old food wrapped in tissue from yesterdays nose.

These old men, after decades walking on-point for family and community, I stripped.  Unable to resist, having succumbed to injury or illness, I learned they did not give these shirts up willingly.  The pain of scissors on cloth was far worse than pulling a shattered arm through its sleeve.  When possible, such cloth was kept on –  a talisman to hold effort and effect against the sweat smelling of new pain or fear.  As they sat surrounded by the white of my world, the dander of theirs shed itself exposing the dust of their trade craft.

This cloth enclosed them, bathed them in familiarity giving normalcy in the surreal swirl of my world.  There, a familiar button would be opened or closed by an ancient spousal hand knowing too late its precious nature.  Cursing the shirt in the light of day for all its foulness. Then, in the darkness, clawing pain into steady strands of sacred cloth.  And finally, exhausted, clutching this vestment in stunned loss.

It came to me that these shirts were treasures of the kingdom of love; no different than a ring or a historic dress.  Prostrate to pain, her hands would crush this shirts aura deep into face painted with tears and spit.  Inhale.  Then again.  Shirt, now totem, carrying the waning incense of father and husband, dissolving some sacred border.  And there she consummates their love again.  Inhale, again.

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I’m late through the door, the blue-plaid cloth, fibers adorned with paint and snot and blood, holds my days work.  Now my sterile scrubs replaced, this shirt is alive, holding my heat against the world with frayed ends and pilled soft pile.  Organically bound to me, it will disgust some young nurse or paramedic.  Perhaps burning it to remove the dank intimacy wafting into nose and mouth.

But now, at my dinner table, the aura of life is complimented by the feel and sound of children and wife.  I am grateful for having satisfied both man and empath on the other side of the screen that “Emergency!” brought me too.

But then, without asking, the dinner table has vanished and is now cot and sterile lights on high with staff and sounds.  I am there again, stripping that shirt, now aware of its treasure.  But dinner laughter is dragging me back, I’m aware the family has moved on.  I hang, disembodied between sacred spaces; seeing my wife, she seeing me.

Swaddled in heavy plaid cloth, bruised and blue the acrid smell and taste still lingering, I quickly excuse myself.  Not today; I say as my hands strip the buttons now feeling like a prison.  Not today.  Deeply inhaling home and house and dinner, I sit.  To complete my story, I will to fill it with the taste and smell of that shirt.