love in wear-and-tear

While I was home for the holidays, I caught a lot of flak for my old ESF hoodie.  It made me sad.

It is, perhaps, not much of a hoodie in the most functional sense.  It is big and hangs off of my frame.  The material has become thin.  The fuzzy inner lining that makes new sweatshirts so warm and cuddly has worn off, compressed and almost pilly.

There is a comfort in that hoodie.

I bought it when I was a freshman.  Unlike the brown hoodie (arguably in worse shape), it was not bought because it was a cold and windy day on the hill and I needed a coat.  I bought it the first time I walked down to Small Stores and poked around.  It lived up to its name, a tiny little store in a tiny little converted classroom in the basement of Marshall Hall.

I wasn’t sure which hoodie I wanted, but I felt this vague push toward owning some college merchandise.  Buy one and represent.

I tried some of the sweatshirts on in that store, trying to get a feel for what I wanted.  I didn’t want ESF represented in some flashy color.  I think I knew that I wanted a green hoodie, because it was a green college.  I couldn’t figure out which size I should buy.

Eventually, I think I was drawn to the plain design on a zip-up hoodie, SUNY ESF across the front, and the hoodie was a sort of muted pine green.  I slipped into it, and it was enormous.

I loved it.

There’s something about a huge hoodie.  It feels expansive and warm and safe; there’s room in it to wrap it further around yourself.  The cuffs were always a little bit loose, the elastic fading even then.  I bought it, smiling at the woman behind the register.  She sent a lot of emails – it was even a sort of campus-wide joke – but she was a legitimately nice person, really sweet.

Since my freshman year of ESF, a lot of things have happened, and that hoodie came with me to most of them.  Its cuffs have loosened even further, gaping across my hands when I wear it.  Life spent rubbing them across paper as I study and accidentally spraying them with various caustic substances in lab hasn’t been good to them, and the seams are loosening, the holes growing.  I can put my thumb through one of the sleeves’ seams.

The pockets also have spots where the fabric has worn away, whether by acid or just by wear and tear, and the whole thing hangs even a little looser on me than it did seven years ago.  Seven years is a long time.

I think it looks well-loved.  It isn’t an article of clothing that would be appropriate to wear to a nice night out or to a business-casual type affair, but then again, it’s a sweatshirt and it already knows its place.  It reminds me of the years spent on the hill, the friendly place that ESF was, the tiny campus and the familiar faces.

It doesn’t make me nostalgic, but something about it is still important to me.

(credit where credit's due: Davey helps me with "writer's block" sometimes.)