Old t shirts

Last week I got a phone call from the Lupus Foundation. They didn't want money. They wanted me to put out a bag of old clothes for them to pick up. Sounded easy at the time but it forced me to choose among my most prized belongings. My old t shirts.

After throwing in some old pajama tops I never wear and some socks with holes in them I came to the t shirt containers. I have two large storage containers I got at KMart a few years ago and there they were. In forty years of buying and being given t shirts as presents, surely I had a few hundred I could give away. 

It turned out to be not as easy as it sounds. Matt Nokes in a Detroit Tigers outfit almost made it to the Lupus bag but I thought "One day it might be valuable". Perhaps he will do something noteworthy in a few years and I can sell my t shirt for hundreds of dollars. All of the trips I've made over the years were represented in the loot. Tokyo, Nova Scotia, Scotland. My title Data t shirts from when I lived in Denver stayed. A t shirt saying "President Bill Clinton salutes the can-do spirit of East Texas" stayed but Bodacious barbecue from Austin got tossed. I almost tossed my Weird New Jersey t shirt but it too stayed put. 

A Bud lite t shirt from the eighties got tossed. So did a bright orange t shirt from the Butterfly Festival from a few years back. I was always afraid to wear something that loud. Still a lot of my old t shirts got saved. A good session in the machine and they'll be good as new. And I promised myself to put some forgotten shirts in the rotation for the summer.