CLOGS

I am not a fancy dresser. My attitude toward clothes is pretty much governed by one criterion: convenience. I look for clothes that will last so that I don't have to buy into the planned-obsolescence roulette game: a good pair of workboots, jeans or painter pants, flannel shirts (tee-shirts for the summer), and a useable suit for interviews and the occasional formal party. I have never had the body or the mind to play the clotheshorse scene. With my 29-inch inseam, 32-inch waist, and size 40 coat, I am not what anyone would consider svelte, sleek, suave, or snappy. And never having had great quantities of money to spend on clothes, I've never acquired the addiction for designer appearances that some males and many females have. My mother used to buy my clothes: I wore what was in the closet.

A couple of times I decided to break out of this rut. When I was a teenager in the infamous 60s, I bought a pair of hip-hugger pants, with a zipper about three inches long, and a string of beads. But the beads came unstrung quickly, scattering wildly over the floor at a high school dance, and the hip-huggers felt as if they were in imminent danger of sliding down to my ankles at any minute. I could never co-ordinate the picture of the free-loving adolescent hippy with the geography of my body and my tastes, so I settled for Ken Kesey novels and incense. The only other sartorial excursion was when I bought myself an Edwardian-cut suit, with the slightly flared skirt at the waist and the clanging bell-bottom pants. I looked like Disraeli when he was accused of looking like a French dancing master. Out it went, and so it goes.

In all my clothes-wearing life I have never run into anything like stares or questions about what I was wearing and why. As I said, I dress mainly for convenience and comfort, and that usually means a fairly low-key look. One summer, however, I decided to buy a pair of clogs because I was tired of the chore of tying shoes, a conspiracy for time-wasting and frustration if ever one existed. (That is also partly the reason I have a beard, for the simple fact that I hate wasting the time on the barbarism [pardon the pun] of scraping my face every day. A slight trim is all the tonsorial reconstruction I need.) Suddenly I started getting comments and stares about these wooden shoes.

People are not as shy about this as you might expect them to be; they feel quite free to comment openly. Children are perhaps the worst. I

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