Monday, October 8, 2007
I never understood why people dress up their children.
Here’s the image: a knee-high-to-a-pig’s-eye businessman with an abnormally large head framed by the worst haircut his mother could choose for him and gigantic blue eyes smearing chocolate all over the shirt cuffs that probably cost his mother a lot.
This picture haunts me every time I put on a suit, because that little chocolate-smudged businessman was me, age 6. The suit was blue and had a powder-blue shirt and clip-on bow tie (which to this day I still think was the coolest article of clothing I ever owned).
I look like Tom Thumb in the photographs my parents show me. It was a friend’s wedding, sometime around 1991 or so. The bride looked like Princess Diana by way of Wichita.
nutgraf
I don’t much like funerals either, come to think of it. I plan on skipping out on all of them from now until eternity.
Anyway, I remember the novelty of the suit and the stern talking-to my mother gave me about keeping it clean. I also remember an altercation with the ring-bearer (a snotty little cuss with whom I had a fight at the reception—I showed him what-for).
I don’t like weddings. I’ve been to two in my life. That first one when I was too tiny to care about anything but running in circles until I fell down and rode the wave of dizziness to nirvana. The second wedding was that of my eldest cousin. I was 16 and big enough to wear one of my dad’s old suits.
Other than weddings, the only other times I wore suits growing up were funerals. Again, I’ve only ever been to two. One was a neighbor lady who died when I was 10 and the other was my grandfather, a Korean War veteran who was cool because he was the only grandparent I had who walked with a cane and used to take me fishing in MacArthur Lake. I recall crying like a banshee with a sinus condition through the whole thing. I’m pretty sure my extended family was annoyed by it.
I don’t much like funerals either, come to think of it. I plan on skipping out on all of them from now until eternity. I will attempt to live forever just so I don’t have to sit—or rather lay—through my own funeral.
It’s amazing to me that I’ve developed a love of wearing suits. But to this day, the perversion of that first suit makes me cringe whenever I see matrons of honor leading their small children by the hands on their way to the chapel; the boys in suits that you can tell they don’t want to be in and the girls wearing white cotton gloves and facial expressions that ask the silent question, “Why am I wearing gloves when it’s not snowing out, Mommy?”
They’re cute, but miserable. If it weren’t for the cake I don’t think kids would ever submit themselves to “children’s formal wear.”
Smith is a Rose Hill graduate student in English.
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