The Mayor's Old Clothes

In this excerpt my father is showing me samples from his newly acquired wardrobe of Salvation Army Thriftstore castoffs.  Now retired and bored, he likes to get dressy for his trips to the local Senior Citizen Center where the residents have dubbed him the "Mayor".  Their sarcasm escaped him.  I'm about 13 at the time.


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                         Look at this, my old man cried, jabbing his finger into the label inside his new sports coat.  Once it had been red.  Now it was old and ghostly pink.  Frays gathered on the elbows.

            Abercrombie and Fitch!  It’s a beautiful jacket!  Where can you find something like this?
           Wrapped around a corpse in the bottom of a coffin, I told him.
           Today my old man is a corpse in the bottom of a coffin.  There is no marker over his grave.  Just earth and grass.  I don’t know what jacket he is buried in, if any.  There is silence, and blackness, where he lays.  What is he dressed in?  The funeral home said they would dress the body.  With what?  He had nothing.  He must lay wrapped in a sheet, and nothing else.
          What corpse?  What’s the matter with you, boy?  This is a sharp coat.  Look at this!  It fits great.  And I got a neckerchief to go with it.
          My old man yanked a bright blue handkerchief from the breast pocket of the jacket.  It shone like silk, but it couldn’t have been silk, because my old man paid a quarter for it.  With his knobby claws he snapped it into a short tie that hung around his neck like a loose lady’s choker.
         This is the way you wear it, he announced with pride.
         No, I thought, that’s the way you wore it forty years ago.  But to my old man, there was no difference between forty years ago and today.  He lived in the black and white world of Channel Nine, Channel Five, and Channel Eleven.  Maybe, I thought, if my mother could afford a color TV, my old man might realize the passing of time.
        It looks like shit, I told him.  My old man growled and stormed away.