My Father’s Suit

My Father’s Suit

So far as I know, my father only ever owned one suit. Some of my earliest memories are of Daddy getting cleaned up, showered and shaved, and putting on his dark blue suit that Mama had pressed, along with a long-sleeved white shirt and a tie. Plus the black lace-up dress shoes that Mama had polished.

Most of the time when Daddy wore his suit instead of his khaki work pants and worn work shirt, he was on the way to a funeral to be a pallbearer. Daddy was young and big and strong and the funerals were for the parents of his friends—the old-timers. He also wore the suit to jury duty, and to weddings, and on New Year’s Eve when he and Mama went out to paint the town. Mama used to try to get him to buy a new suit, especially when he gained about twenty-five pounds and had to squeeze into the pants.

“Hell, no, I don’t need a new suit,” he’d say. “This one isn’t even broke in good.”

So Mama tried to keep the suit presentable. Once a year or so it went to the cleaners, and every couple of years there’d be a new long-sleeved white shirt, and when the styles changed radically, Daddy’d wear a new tie he got for Christmas.

When he died, my sister Mary and I gave the undertaker the only suit we found in his closet. It can’t have been the original one. But I’ll bet it was only number two or three.