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Dressing appropriately can be efforts in futility.

Throughout most of my 50 working years, I was obliged daily to wear uncomfortable suits, tight-collared shirts and useless bits of cloth called neckties. I didn't like it for me, and I didn't like the fact that I had to be sure every male who reported to me was similarly dressed. The women in my department had somewhat more free choices, but usually wore conservative business dresses or suit-like coats and skirts. We looked like a bunch of super-conservative store dummies.

There were a couple of two-year-plus interruptions in my appropriate clothing requirements during that time when I served in World War II and the Korean War. At age 17, my first Navy uniform was a traditional, but silly-looking sailor suit and sillier white hat. I wore it proudly when on leave or liberty, with the constant hope it would attract girls. In the war zones, I wore dungarees with that same silly hat dyed dirty blue, or often with a heavy iron bucket on my head.

Fortunately, by the time I was recalled for duty in the Korean War, I was a CPO and wore a somewhat sharper Navy blue officer's uniform when in public. In the war zone, I was in combat khakis and sometimes sweating under the same kind of helmet. During those years, I never thought much of dressing appropriately for my age, because Navy regulations dictated everything I wore from head to toe at all times.

Now that I'm retired, I dress as I please. I live in the desert, so for ten months of the year, I'm in tattered shorts and t-shirt. For the other two months, I wear a ragged jacket over my tattered shorts and t-shirt. I still have dress-up duds in the back of my closet for when I have to attend events that require the old coat and tie costume. Fortunately, that only happens once or twice a year.

While I'm aware of current fashions, I doubt if I'll ever dress appropriately in contemporary clothing. I don't own any baggy trousers that are four sizes too large, so that they hang down far enough so the waistband is around the lower part of my gluteus maximas. I don't own an oversized sweat shirt with sleeves five inches beyond where my fingers can reach. Nor do I own any baseball caps that I can wear backward.

And for the record, I don't give a rodent's gluteus maximas about dressing appropriately for my extremely advanced age.

Learn more about this author, Ted Sherman.
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