Fogy Fashion News

I had occasion recently to attend a function where the attendees were required to dress up.  This was no problem for me.  I have two suits, one for winter and one for summer, and I plucked from my closet the summer one.  I wore my best white shirt and a nifty pink bow tie with flowers on it.  Annette had bought a simple dress of an attractive color and a pretty sweater to go over it.  I thought we looked nice. 

When I arrived at the shindig, I was as flabbergasted, as fogies often are, at how things had changed while I wasn’t looking.  I noticed the featured element of today’s style seems to be skin.  Total nudity will never be fashionable until someone discovers a way to make money out of it, but revealing garments are the rage.

 I suspect today’s dress shoppers are influenced by “Dancing with the Stars,” and the red carpet at the Academy Awards.  The trouble is the attendees at these televised events have bodies they labor upon daily with diet and exercise.  If these methods fail, there are procedures collectively known as ”work.” Limbs, necks, tummies, and breasts are shapely, firm, and upholstered with flawless skin. 

This is not the case with some of the women present at the do to which I was in attendance.  They seemed to have chosen garments that the reminded them of professional beauties without considering what the revealing elements were liable to reveal. Skirts that my out-of-date vocabulary might term micro-mini fluttered provocatively above legs that had long been absent from the treadmill.  One damsel seemed to have been recently jumped upon by a large dog as there were red scratch marks up and down her thighs.

Many of the gowns seemed to have been acquired at considerable expense, but they were cheap compared to those worn by the celebrities their purchasers wished to emulate. There was no designer to match dress style to body type.  No seamstress made alterations so the fabric lay in attractive folds over the flesh it was meant to conceal. One woman bulged alarmingly inside a diaphanous dress that must have been extremely difficult to zip up. It was cut low, revealing almost all of her enormous  breasts, the right one of which was decorated with a rose tattoo, which may have been provocative twenty years ago.

When I got home, I regarded myself naked in the bathroom mirror. I was glad my trousers had been held up by suspenders instead of a belt which would have pinched them in at the waist.  I was glad my shirt was not of the tapered European sort. My jacket covered my torso pretty well, but had been worn unbuttoned lest it strain at the midriff.  Despite my relative satisfaction, I was possessed by a resolve that lasted long enough for me to make do with black coffee and toast for breakfast

Oral Hygiene

Having achieved fogiedom, I've lived a good many of my years without the benefit of an oral hygienist, but times, as they seem to keep doing, have changed.  After a session of scraping and digging below the gums, the woman informed me from behind her surgical mask that I had bad oral hygiene.  I was about to tell her she had no business calling me a dirty old man, when I reflected that my teeth, like the rest of me, aren't what they used to be.  I asked what I must do.

“Do you have a timer on your tooth brush?” she inquired.  I didn't even know there were such things, but I pretended I hadn't sprung for the option.  She told me I should brush my teeth for at least two minutes; I should floss for a minute and then rinse with mouthwash for one minute.     My rebellion was quelled, and I gave it a try, but not without doing the math.

I now brush for two minutes.  I don’t need a timer on my toothbrush, any more than I need a telephone that can find the nearest pizzeria, but I have a watch.  I floss for another minute and rinse for a minute.  I figure I spend another minute getting things out of the cabinet and putting them back.  Annette likes it if I clean the sink. 

So I spend five minutes twice a day.  That makes seventy minutes a week.  Now with fifty-two weeks a year that makes 3640 minutes a year or 61 hours.  Allowing for eight hours of sleep, I dedicate the waking moments of 3.81 days per year cleaning my teeth. 

All right, I've exaggerated a little bit. I multitask and put away the toothbrush, floss and Listerine bottle while I’m sloshing the mouthwash around , and on some mornings  I make the excuse that I haven’t gotten anything between my teeth since I flossed the previous night, so I skip that chore.  So let’s forget the 81% of the fourth day and round it off to three days.  It’s still a lot of the time I've got left before what Saul Bellow called “the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act.”  

I’m reasonably healthy so If I give myself an optimistic ten more years, that’s thirty days.  Do I really want to spend a month at the bathroom sink? So far I've knuckled under, but I’m thinking it over.  I didn't rebel much in my youth.  In the fifties I had a brown leather jacket, not a black one, but it isn't too late to misspend my old age.