Written Friday, February 23, 2007
Seattle, Washington

ROBE ODE
A DECLAMATION ON THE OCCASION
OF THE SPRING MOLTING OF A HUMILIATED MAN

Behold!
This garment that limply lies before me was recently relinquished by a friend. (He shall not be named here lest he consider a lawsuit for defamation.) This raggedy-assed piece of blanket-with-sleeves once was a bathrobe. Or so he claims. Hard to believe.

Color? On close inspection what was once a finely-fused plaid of greens, blues, purples, and blacks now looks like a wearable bruise. Think the shades of a roll of cemetery turf after a burial at night. Think the colors of decay, rot, putrescence, road kill, dried gravy, and the mucus from a bad cough in a pre-dawn fog.

Condition? Pockets torn at the corners, sleeves frayed at the ends, threads hanging from elbows, and holes burned by cigar ash or hot bacon grease. The backside worn thin at the butt, the collar worn smooth, the misshapen lapels hanging at eccentric angles. The dressing gown from hell.

In sum, ugly.
Portable despair.
A mutant muumuu.
The caftan of catastrophe.
The dressing gown from hell.

A nursing home would not allow this garment to be worn in its halls. The Goodwill would refuse it. A homeless person would be embarrassed to be seen on the street wearing it. A rodent would not nest in it. It might serve as a Halloween costume if you wanted to go to a party disguised as leprosy.

Why do I have it? My friend works from home as a blogging maven on the net. He spends whole days swaddled in this grubby gown. I often call in to say hello when out walking. It’s depressing to visit him when he’s wearing his disgusting bathrobe. And since he is a bachelor with everlasting hopes of a new female companion, it was my duty to explain he would lose friends and repel lovers if this was his idea of sartorial splendor. He should feel ashamed, embarrassed, mortified, and disgraced. In short, I humiliated him. 

An intervention. A confrontation with truth. That’s what friends are for. To avoid further ego abuse, he brought the robe to my office, hung his head, and forfeited the bathrobe to me. But only, I found out, after having first taken it to our local seamstress to have it resuscitated. She refused. She wouldn’t even touch it, thinking it was something he had run over in the street. She told him he needed counseling.

In shameful despair, my friend brought the bathrobe to me with the same reluctance one would give up an old-and-faithful-but-decrepit dog to be put to death by a vet. The robe must die, but my friend did not want to be there when it happened. When I refused to consider having it freeze-dried or taken to a taxidermist for mounting, my friend knew it was finally over for the bathrobe. The End. Rest in peace.

I know. This is a mean-spirited rant. But the fact is undisputable: this bathrobe is finished, judged and condemned. I should have burned it in the backyard and buried the ashes that very day.

But I have a soft heart and an open mind. So the bathrobe lies helpless on the table beside me now - a pile of pity - a defendant in a court of final appeal. It cannot speak for itself, but I reluctantly concede that a case can be made in its defense.

For one thing, the bathrobe has a history. It is an artifact of a life. In the spirit of objectivity, I asked my friend to tell me its story. Bought in New York in 1992 and given as a gift by a lady to my friend. In its fifteen years as the first garment of the morning and last shroud in the evening, he estimates it has been worn 5,110 days. And has traveled with him from Westport, Connecticut, to Brooklyn, New York, Laguna Beach, California, and now Seattle, Washington.

It has been worn in the company of several girlfriends and one wife. Worn in times of joy and sorrow. Worn at many meals - in elegant company and miserable solitude. Worn on dark, depressing winter mornings, sunny spring days, and late at night. It is a mute keeper of the past. Something to count on - a reliable presence - always there, like a faithful, undemanding pet. Hung on a hanger, I can see the bathrobe conforms to my friend’s peculiar shape, like a molted exoskeleton.
This is not just a bathrobe.

And he, of course, is not the only one who owns one.
Me, too. I admit it. I have a bathrobe. Shoddy, but still serviceable.
Perhaps you, as well?
Whenever I am a guest in someone’s home and need to use the toilet, I can count on finding a similar garment hanging on a hook on the back of the bathroom door. These are the clothes of comfort and ease we wear because they are the smallest version of a sense of “home” we have.

There are other examples in our wardrobes. An old shirt, ancient jeans, a pair of house-slippers, a battered coat we wear only for errands or to the grocery-store or a late-night walk alone.
I saw a neighbor down the street this morning out pruning his trees in a leather jacket that could not be bought in a store. It takes many years, many life events to get a jacket to this shabby-but-noble stage. It’s a safe bet he has a bathrobe, too.
These are not company clothes, but what we wear when alone - when we want to feel secure and warm and comfortable.

These are ritual garments for wearing in the Temple of the Ordinary Day.

By now my friend is missing his bathrobe. Each day has seemed just a little out of kilter for him, as when an old companion moves far away to another city. A part of fifteen years of his life is missing.

So. No. I won’t throw my friend’s bathrobe away. It has been washed, folded with care, wrapped in red silk, tied with a ribbon, and placed in an antique box. I added a wish bone I’d been saving for good luck.
An act of affection for him and his robe - something else friends are for.

I will return it to him, along with this piece of writing.
He will laugh when he reads the first part, and tears will come to his eyes when he realizes what has been given back to him.  Looked at carefully it may be seen as a very small comfortable room he has lived in from time to time, now reconfigured. What once was a dead bathrobe has returned as a keepsake, a talisman, a household god in a box - a keeper of memories.