Blame it on The Suits

Today, I went to a wedding like every other I've ever been to. Well, it was a different in a lot of ways. It was the first wedding that I've been to where there was a full communion. It was an afternoon wedding, whereas most of the ones I'd been to before had been evening weddings. But it was like all the others in that it was a perfect union, a wedding where I couldn't be happier that that the two people had found each other, where it seemed all too right that they would be spending their lives together. It was a wonderful time.

And like all of the other weddings I've been to, I was badly dressed.

Yes, yes. It's another installment in The Story of Reid And His Ill-Fitting Suits. For the last wedding I'd been to last fall, I realized a week before that I didn't have a suit like I thought I did, and so I had to cobble together something from the suit-like pieces hidden in my closet. I ended up with a jacket with a hole in the shoulder and pants so baggy that they looked like something from MC Hammer's line of formal wear. It ended up okay, I guess, but I vowed that I would buy myself a nice suit.

But did I? Or course not. So once again, I was in piecemeal mode. It was an afternoon wedding, so I could justify it somewhat. I had some decent dark-green pants, and I combined that with a light-blue shirt, a new tie that I bought on the way to the wedding, and a brown belt and shoes. I had three sports jackets in the closet. One was dark blue, but too big. One was dark blue and was slightly too small. One was dark grey and the best-fitting, but had the hole in it and didn't go so great with the green pants. I went with the smaller blue one.

I wondered how long I'd had this jacket, since I couldn't at all remember where it was from. It wasn't until I was almost home from the wedding that I got an idea of how long I'd had it, and how long it had been since I'd worn it. I reached into an inner pocket to get my phone and found a ticket stub:

LES MISERABLES
JONES HALL
HOUSTON, TEXAS
SAT. JUNE 10, 1989 8:00 PM

Now, I'll admit that it gave me a certain satisfaction to be able to wear the same sports jacket that I wore when I was 17 and have it fit so that only a studying eye could see that it was a little bit too small, and the ticket was a fun little artifact to come across. But it made it clearer than ever: I need a new suit.