The ties that bind never lose their import
Spring cleaning is usually a major bore and a major chore.
Find a large plastic trash bag. Head for the main closet. Identify t-shirts and socks that no human being ever will (or ever should) wear again. Stuff the stuff into the bag. Repeat.
And then head for Amvets or Goodwill, drop it all off, feel virtuous, go home.
But this past spring, the ritual annual purge brought me up short. As I scuffled through a drawer, I found it:
My father’s favorite necktie.
It wasn’t exactly ugly, but it certainly wasn’t beautiful. Some pink, some robin’s egg blue, more white than anything else. All of it blended into a swirl that only a soft ice cream machine could love.
Can we say delicately that it isn’t to my taste? But I had fished it out of his bureau four days after he died, and had promptly forgotten that I had it.
I pulled the tie out of the drawer — never worn by me in the nearly 50 years since my father’s death — and began to remember.
He wore the tie with his favorite gray suit, at least three days a week. A child of the World War One era, he would never loosen it, even on the hottest days, even when he had come home from work.
“A gentleman always looks like a gentleman,” he would declare, as he bent down to give his two sons a Daddy’s-home-from-the-mines kiss.
He had worn the swirly tie on many important family occasions — high school graduations, weddings, bon voyage dinners, even funerals.
It was his. It was him.
But now it was decades later, and a voice deep inside me was telling me to shove the tie into the waiting trash bag.
It was just a tie, the voice was telling me. It isn’t the man himself. It’s taking up space. It’s gathering dust.
If I threw it away, I wouldn’t be throwing him away.
But I couldn’t do it.
I rummaged around in the same drawer. For some reason, I had saved my father’s wallet.
I flipped through it. His last driver’s license was there. In the picture, he’s wearing a necktie. That one.
Then my eye fell on the photo that I had nailed to the wall many years ago.
It shows my father walking down the steps of a building at the college where he taught. I had looked at this photo a million times, but something told me that I needed to do a closer inspection.
I found my glasses. I peered carefully at his upper chest.
Yup. He was wearing the swirly tie.
Was this an omen? A sign from above? I needed more evidence. So I found the old family photo albums.
Flip, flip, flip…There he was, in the late 1940s, at some sort of family dinner. Three guesses what was around his throat.
Flip some more, flip some more….By the late 1960s, his hair had gone all white and his neck had begun to mottle with age. But at a farewell party for some colleague of his, there he was, hoisting a flute of champagne. And wearing the same tie.
These days, it’s routine for adults to travel abroad. But for several reasons — most of them having to do with a shortage of dollars — my father never left these shores until he was nearly 50.
Someone shot a photo of him as he boarded the Queen Mary, en route to England. He was wearing a huge smile — and the necktie that I now held in my hands.
They say that no one ever dies as long as someone is still alive to remember him. Since I’m planning to live forever, my father has nothing to worry about.
But how best to remember him? I have a tape recording of his voice — that’s not a bad way. I have letters he wrote to me while I was in college — those still bring smiles and tears. I have the portable typewriter he gave me before I started my first job — it’s now a relic, but a very meaningful one.
And I have his favorite tie. I still have never worn it. But I could.
Because I closed up the trash bag full of shirts and socks, and refused to put the tie into it. Instead, I hung it on a peg in my closet.
It’s there for good. So, in a way, is he.
Bob Levey is a national award-winning columnist.
