Earlier this year we retired my Race with Grace 10K T-shirt. Even by my lax sartorial standards (mismatched white socks) the poor old thing was unwearable -- faded, discolored, a hole or two. It was almost thirty years old, so it had a good innings for a T-shirt.
Digging through our clothing cache for a replacement, Mary came across a number of shirts I'd forgotten. Since leaving the corporate necktie world to work freelance my favored attire has been T-shirts and jeans. Which means I've rarely had to buy a shirt thanks to my collection of such shirts from road races and orienteering meets in which I participated.
Last week I sported a drawing of a tank from orienteering at West Point. The military academy owns thousands of acres of rugged land in New Jersey used for training and recreation and every year it hosted such an event to take advantage of its steep boulder-strewn terrain. I went out into the woods several times and avoided getting totally lost (orienteers are never lost, only "disoriented") and now it's fun to remember being up to the challenge, more or less. Strangely enough, my usually bad memory holds a thick album of snapshots showing the terrain I navigated in parks around the Northeast and even Canada.
I can remember details of road race courses too. Well, it isn't surprising that the leopard-decorated Jungle Jog shirt jogs my memory of running though a zoo. Even I couldn't forget that. My most memorable race T-shirt might be for the Green Mountain 10K Road Race sponsored by the Summit Ski Lodge. Running Times magazine (then the main competitor to Runner's World) paid me to travel to Killington, Vermont, to cover the race in part by running in it. The course was unforgettably hilly (not to say mountainous) but I did pretty well, probably because I didn't want to embarrass myself in front of all the competitors I'd interviewed for my article the night before. Oh, I said that "might" be my most memorable shirt because it seems to have been mislaid over the years. Maybe one day it will turn up.
There are some T-shirts for creative endeavors. One year I had an entry in the Annual Interactive Fiction Competition for computer games in the tradition of 1980s text-based games like Colossal Cave Adventure. In my game -- The HeBGB Horror! -- the player searches for a mystical lost chord in and around a (highly) fictionalized version of New York City's CBGB rock club. I finished in the middle of the competition, same as my road races. Not bad, considering I'd never even seen a computer program prior to my writing the game. The T-shirt lists all the entrants.
My Deadly Ink T-shirt was from the 2000 conference in Mount Arlington, NJ, where I appeared on a panel to promote our first Byzantine mystery novel One for Sorrow.
Mary also came across a T-shirt produced to raise funds for New York Post staffers who were fighting the newspaper's sale to a notorious NY slumlord. The shirt features a spiffy graphic of the paper's founder, Alexander Hamilton, with a single tear rolling down his cheek. The Post is best known as a tabloid with headlines like "Headless Body in Topless Bar".
The earliest surviving shirt dates back to my law school days. Our Entertainment Law professor gave the class "tour" T-shirts at the conclusion of the course. Professor Silfen knew what he was talking about since he represented many bands, including Aerosmith, REM, and Blondie. Debbie Harry and Chris Stein showed up one day to describe the evils of the music publishing industry to us.
I guess I could write an autobiography in T-shirts.
I hated having to discard my Race with Grace T-shirt. The race was named for George Grace, pastor at the Rochester First Bible Baptist Church, who organized the event and ran in it. The race took place on Thanksgiving Day and the T-shirt featured a pumpkin. One long sleeve displayed a Bible verse that runners, writers, or anyone else could take for their motto: "...let us run with patience the race that is set
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