An Old Gray Shirt

I know it’s not something to get emotional about. It’s just a T-shirt. And yet, I distinctly remember buying this particular T-shirt. Laura and I weren’t married yet. I was all of 19 years young and about to start my sophomore year of college. My parents and I had driven up to the strange land of Minnesota for a tour of the university I was transferring to that fall. Of course, I’d need some new clothes, so we went to a store not far from the hotel we were staying at. That’s when I bought a simple gray T-shirt with blue trim around each sleeve and the neck.

It was a fall of many beginnings. I had just started emailing a certain Spaniard. I was just starting a three-year journey ending in a degree in teaching English as a second language. I was about to begin attending a church that would impact my understanding of the universe and my place in it.

And I had a new gray T-shirt to accompany me along the way.

It’s aged along with me over these past fourteen years. It, too, is showing signs of wear. It’s been on three continents with me. It’s been in and out of countless suitcases. It’s traveled with me as I’ve moved from Iowa to Minnesota to Spain back to Minnesota and now to Central Asia. It’s had a spot in every dresser I’ve owned or used since 2006. It was there when I got married, when I graduated from college, when I got my first job, when I got my second job, and when I moved to a country few people have ever heard of before.

Several years ago I had to retire it from regular wear, and it took its place alongside my other pajama shirts. Last year, I think it was, one of the dogs got a hold of the shirt and tore a hole in the blue trim around the neck. The back of the shirt is a different color now than the front, probably from all the nights of rubbing up against the sheets as I sleep. I’m not sure how much more time the old thing has left. But it doesn’t seem like much.

And for a guy like me, that’s hard to take. This shirt is such a tangible link to the past. It’s a connection, a rope to hold onto that’s tied to days gone by on its other end. And what if the link breaks? The connection lost? The rope snaps? It feels like I’d lose a little piece of my history, a little piece of me.

Time moves by so quickly. We all grasp like madmen to hold onto every last moment, knowing we can’t get a single one back as soon as “now” slips into the forever past tense “then.” So we set up monuments to the past. Some people do it literally and get their faces carved into rock on Mt. Rushmore. Others build metaphorical monuments to remember the past by, like attaching a whole lot of meaning to an old gray shirt.

But shirts wear thin, and even the sides of mountains eventually erode. What will happen to me then and all I hoped to preserve of myself and my past? Will it be lost forever in the misty fog called my memory? Does a piece of me deteriorate along with the one thing that I had hoped would allow me to keep for just a little bit longer so many fond images from time gone by?

There is someone whose memory never fades and who doesn’t need tired T-shirts to remind him of the past. King David seemed to know him pretty well, and he seemed to be pretty certain that that one knew him:

[I]n your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there were none of them.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
If I would count them, they are more than the sand.
I awake, and I am still with you.

Psalm 139:16-18

So God’s got my past just like he’s got my future. He’s got every day written down in a book. Even all the days I’ve long forgotten. His thoughts toward me include a million things I no longer remember about myself.

To my soul at least, there is more comfort in being known like that than in my own ability to hold onto every last shred of my past. Holding on is not my job. Maybe someday he’ll let me read from his book old memories that I’ve forgotten.

So I’ll try not to take it too hard when I finally have to cut my gray T-shirt into strips and turn it into rags that we’ll use to scrub stains out of the carpet. I wonder if I’ll still remember the old thing when I’m 60. Regardless, God will. And maybe one day he’ll remind me of all the moments he and I and that old shirt had together.