March 19, 2025Among Other Things
I bought her two pairs of wide-leggèd jeans at Target last week.
For the longest time, like a year, I’d asked random women on elevators
where they got their wide-leggèd jeans, and report back to her.
“It’s a great look,” I’d say. “You’d look great in them,” and she’d say,
“I have something like that,” and I’d say, “No you don’t,”
and it would go on like that, with no wide-leggèd jeans in her closet.
So we’re in Target last week, picking out Legos for her grandson,
and there they are, wide-leggèd jeans, dozens of them, racks and racks,
in black and creamy white and olive drab. She couldn’t escape;
I stood outside the changing room while she tried them. I hadn’t done
that since my daughter and I, on Saturdays at the mall, shopped
at Madewell, and while I waited outside the heavy-curtained dressing booths,
I’d watch the young store clerks refolding clothes that had been tried
and rejected. I loved to watch them fold sweaters, jeans, anything really;
they were so bored, so deft, with plain, unconscious competence
in their soft fingers smoothing the fabric ahead of the fold. And there,
at Target, as I waited outside the dressing room, I watched another guy
sort of my age leaning with his elbows on his shopping cart handle clicking
his phone till his wife came out, and a young woman stuck her head out
one of the doors and called to her mom to come see, but her mom
didn’t hear, so I turned to the mom, and I said, “Mom, she needs you.”
I like stuff like that, where I fit into life. Then my gal emerged
in white socks, holding up the tail of her blue chambray shirt
exposing the waist of those creamy-white pants. And yesterday,
I picked her up to go to my sister’s house for dinner and she’s walking
down her driveway towards my truck wearing those wide-leggèd jeans
and a black tee and her white hair all scrunched into waves like she likes it.
She knows she looks good, and she wants me to see, so she holds
her arms out like a wine-bottle opener, then lowers them slowly,
which draws my heart right out of my chest. But the weird part, and this
is the part I’m reluctant to tell, is how, in my life, which has been going on
for a while, when one of these moments where something I’ve wanted
but thought wouldn’t happen occurs, like these wide-leggèd jeans,
or meeting my gal in the first place, when happiness is like a brand-new shirt,
my mind calls out the name of my first friend Andy, who withdrew
very early from life, how this happiness makes you think about that other
happiness you had and it’s not like I see his face. It’s just his name
anymore—Andy—that comes to mind, like kissing the spine
of a prayer book and reaching out to touch the passing Torah.
from #86 – Poetry Prize