The Last Emotional Connection

Vietnam Wall - Washington DC

November 2003

I’m wearing the pants I wore on a trip to Washington DC back in 2003. At least I think they’re the same pants.  They look the same as what's in the photo. I’m going to say they are.  I wore them on a trip to DC with my younger brother. He was interviewing for medical school. I was there to annoy him and split the costs. He’s now a PharmD, and I’m still annoying.

It was on that trip that we crashed the rental car. We needed a rental car so we could pay the $10/day fee to let it sit in the hotel garage while we used the subway. Driving in thick traffic from the Baltimore airport to our luxurious Day’s Inn near Embassy Circle, a Pakistani man turned right into our lane and our car. We were very lucky. We were lucky we weren’t hurt, which is pretty hard to do when you’re hit in the fender by a car going ½ mile per hour. We were also lucky because the man didn’t speak English, didn’t have a driver’s license, and the car he was driving was borrowed from a friend. I'm fairly certain he didn't have insurance either. Somehow we managed to exchange information. I notified the rental car company. When we drove the car back to the rental lot at the end of our trip, the lot attendant told us we shouldn’t have bothered reporting it. He said, “It’s barely noticeable,” as he smeared some dirt over the dent. I appreciated his dedication to customer service.  A month or so later the rental car company called to tell me that I wasn’t liable for the accident. Accident? What accident?

I’m sorry to reminisce over old clothes again. I really don’t have this emotional co-dependency with clothing. My wife left several boxes and bags of my old clothes on the porch for the Multiple Sclerosis Society to pick up this morning. It really didn't bother me.  It only took my son, my wife, and the two drivers of the MS truck to pry me free of a box of old clothes. I was sobbing and screaming, “How can you do this to me?!?!” My son went inside the house; my wife followed and shut the door behind her. The MS drivers hopped in their truck and left me sitting there, alone, without my memories. Does anyone know what happens to clothes collected by the MS Soceity?

I’m down to my last pair of saved jeans. The Washington DC jeans. The ones I’m wearing today. I guess I’ll have to start hitting the thrift stores again.