A letter from a reader

At 63, I found my husband in the same gray fleece in every picture on my phone

The most I have ever written for other people to read is our Christmas letter, and Frank cuts that down to one page every year. I am not a writer. And I have never once thought it was my place to tell another woman what to wear, let alone what to put on her husband.

But three different women asked me about Frank’s polo at the end-of-season banquet for his bowling league on Saturday, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to just write it all down.

Frank is 67. He has bowled in that Tuesday night league for twenty years and he still keeps the score sheets. And for six years he has worn the same gray zip fleece to everything. The garden, the bowling alley, the doctor’s office, our granddaughter’s school play, his brother’s seventieth in Bastrop. It pilled at the cuffs in the second year, and the zipper has had to be coaxed since the fourth.

I did not notice, the way you stop noticing the wallpaper. It was our daughter who noticed. She was going through the photographs on my phone to find one for his birthday card, and she scrolled, and scrolled, and then turned the phone around to show me.

Mom, Dad is wearing that fleece in every single picture.

She was right. Christmas, the lake weekend, the baptism, the day the new back porch went up. The same gray fleece, zipped to the chin, in every one of them. In some you could hardly tell which year it was.

I will not pretend Frank chose that. Nobody sets out to look the same in every photograph for six years. It creeps up on you one cold morning at a time, and the fleece is always there on the hook by the door.

How it happens

Frank was never a slob. When we were dating he had a navy blazer with brass buttons that he wore dancing at Gruene Hall, and he polished his shoes on a Friday night whether we were going anywhere or not.

What changed was not him. It was the stores, and I think a lot of you will know exactly what I mean.

Go into any store and look at what they sell for men his age. On one side there are V-neck pullovers for men who play golf, in colors Frank would not be caught dead in. On the other there are fleeces, and more fleeces, in gray, in navy, and in a brown nobody has ever wanted. There is nothing in between for a man who would like to look dressed but would sooner walk home than wear a tie to a bowling banquet.

So he did what men of that generation do. He picked the one that zipped up and kept him warm, and he stopped looking.

What I had wrong

Here is the part I got most wrong.

I thought Frank did not care. Every pullover I had bought him since the children were small had gone into a drawer and stayed there, and I had taken that to mean he would rather be comfortable than smart.

It turns out that was never it.

The pullovers I bought him were the trouble. They were thick and heavy and he was too hot in them before the soup came. Or they had a round neck and he said he felt like he had come out in his undershirt. The fleece won every time because it was the only thing that did not bother him.

What he wanted, though he would never have put it like this, was something with a collar so he looked dressed, soft and warm without cooking him, that he could pull on over his head without a second thought. Smart or comfortable. It had never occurred to me he could have both, and it took me until 63 to go and look.

The polo is called the William

It is from Iris and Nora, a small boutique here in Austin that has been quietly dressing women like us for a few years now. I had no idea they carried anything a man could wear until I was looking for something else entirely.

It is called the William. A navy long sleeve polo with a little square waffle texture all over it, so it has something about it without shouting. It has a real collar in a soft tan check, and three white buttons at the neck with the same check running down beside them. It comes in gray, black, white and an olive green as well, which I will come back to.

The texture is soft, which was the first thing he said when he put it on, before he said a word about how it looked. It keeps him warm without him overheating by dessert. It has been through the wash four times now and kept its shape and its color, which is more than I can say for the fleece. And it goes with his jeans, his good gray slacks and the old khakis he wears in the garden, so there is no new outfit to buy to go with it.

There is nothing clever about it. It is a polo that looks like it was made for a grown man who still likes to look nice.

What happened at the bowling banquet

He wore it for the first time to the end-of-season banquet at the lodge hall, with his good gray slacks and the brown shoes he still polishes on a Friday.

Three women asked me where it was from before the brisket had come out. Three. One of them was Opal, who has run the kitchen at that lodge hall for thirty years and has never once passed comment on anything but the potato salad.

She said Frank looked like a man with somewhere to be afterwards. From Opal, that is a speech.

What I noticed more than the compliments, though, was that he did not spend the evening tugging at a zipper or running a finger around his collar. He stood by the coffee urn talking about the season for two hours and never once said he was too hot.

He had it on again the next morning for church, and on Monday for the tomato beds. That is the rarest kind of thing to buy a husband. The one he wears to the banquet on Saturday and to dig in the garden on Monday, and looks like himself in both.

Three things I have learned since

One. Go by his chest, not his usual size. Check the size chart against his chest measurement, not the size on the tag of his old fleece. Frank measured a 42 around the chest and the XL fits him the way it should. Get the tape measure around him while he is watching the ballgame. He will not notice.

Two. It does not need anything with it. The collar is already there, so there is no shirt underneath, no tie, no scarf. He pulls it on and he is dressed. For a man who hates a fuss, that is the whole appeal.

Three. He will pretend it was his idea. By Wednesday Frank was telling our son-in-law he had been meaning to get himself something like it for years. I let him.

About the price

I will be straight with you, because I am careful with money and I will not pretend otherwise. The price made me suspicious.

The William is $48.95. It was $98.00.

My first thought was that there had to be a catch, because Frank paid more than that for the fleece, and look where that got us.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle, and they have a sale on right now while the first of the fall stock comes in.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it a little more. One woman from Hamilton had written, “My husband lives in it now. I had to buy him the gray so I could get the navy in the wash.”

Then I ordered him the olive as well, for the garden.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sitting on my back porch with a glass of iced tea between us, this is what I would say.

If you have a husband who has worn the same fleece to everything for longer than either of you would like to admit, and who tells you every birthday that he does not need anything, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a polo will change his life. It will not. But there is something in seeing him look like himself again in a photograph that I had stopped expecting, and I would rather you did not stop expecting it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on right now, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first, which I found out because the XL in olive was gone by the time I went back and I had to wait for it. And the first of the fall stock is already going, and once this stock is gone, it is gone.

The fleece lives in the garage now. He has not asked after it once.

Peggy