Wire: a Wardrobe Essential

My Grandpa is, well, thrifty. He uses things until they are worn out. Or, rather, until they disappear. Not because they've been lost, or someone has stolen them, or thrown them away. They disappear because they have actually been used until there are no atoms left in them. Seriously. Some things appear to exist continually, but in reality, each fiber, each molecule, yes, each atom, is actually replaced through time until the thing now is not at all the thing it was at its creation. Take Grandpa's belt. Yesterday, I was standing in the kitchen waiting for Grandpa to get the front half of his body out of the refrigerator so that I could find whatever it was he was looking for in there. It was the pork and beans right in the front. But the point is, while I was waiting, I was left to look at the back half of him, and my eyes settled on his belt. What used to be a belt. It's still partly a belt. But it's composed not so much of leather anymore, as of other elements such as, well, duct tape, of course, but also less common belt-making materials like the common staple. Staples. Hmm.

That put me in mind of grandpa's long underwear. Not something I really like to think about. But a while back when he was gone on a bus trip to Tuscon, which is not where he ended up, by the way, I collected all his clothes and subjected them to a couple of long trips through the washing machine. If I couldn't recognize an object as a known article of clothing within 30 seconds or so of studying it, I discarded it (shhhh, don't tell!), but if it still gave the general impression of some thing I'd heard of, such as long underwear, I kept it. This long underwear, well, most of it looked pretty ok. It was the union-suit type, which buttons up the front. But this set was missing some buttons. Now, I've known plenty of men to replace buttons, particularly less visible ones, with safety pins. And at first glance, it seemed grandpa had taken the same course. But upon closer examination, I found that he'd gone a step further, back to the basic element, the essence of the safety pin: wire. His long underwear was wired together. With wire. Wire. Grandpa stores wire of various gauges and tensile strengths, and also rust-levels, in strategic places across the farm. If you need a piece, you're sure to find one to your exact specification within 20 feet of where you stand. Just check the nearest fence post, and if that fails, try the lower branches of a nearby tree. You should find several loops of wire at the ready for reuse. Safety pins, on the other hand, are not so easy to come by. You might even have to find Grandma's sewing box, or at least venture into the house, to find one of those.

Perhaps the most important article of clothing in Grandpa's wardrobe is that garment known as the "coverall." Grandpa has many pairs of coveralls. Some long sleeved, some bibbed, some insulated, some light-weight. What do they have in common? They share an ever increasing ratio of duct tape to original textile content. Duct tape appears at first in certain zones, particularly in the thigh region, where tools are apt to cut or tear at the fabric, and hay bails chafe at the skin, and at the knees, where hours of crawling under farm machinery take their toll. Since duct tape is basically indestructible stuff, it is natural that the areas between duct taped zones wear out long before the tape itself, and soon the taped zones begin to merge. In the end, a garment entirely composed of duct tape and entirely devoid of the cotton which gave it its shape emerges and stands free, grease-covered, manure-covered, beloved.