Coke bottles and love stories

in memory of Patty, 1994-2008

In 1994 I went shopping with my friend A. and his father Mr. O. at an expensive camping store. A. and Mr. O. helped me find a Patagonia pullover sweater. "It's recycled material," Mr. O. said: "it's made of old Coke bottles." I was in love.

The sweater was, in fact, a near replica of A.'s own Patagonia. This was to be my year of copycat purchases: at the Army & Navy surplus store I bought the Whale's burgundy wool sweater, and at a tattoo and leather shop I bought my friend J.'s bumper sticker, SAVE THE PLANET - KILL YOURSELF. The sticker was on my car for exactly one day: my friends saw it and called me a follower, and that night I scrapped it off. The burgundy sweater lasted about a year and then got lost somewhere in Kentucky.

A.'s old Patagonia was brown and had a neck zipper; my new one was green and had snaps. The feel was the same, however, and it was the feel that sold the sweater. It was fuzzy and squishy and thick and light. It was warm but cold, I'd been promised: light enough for spring, heavy enough for winter. It was even supposed to keep you alive when icy wet.

For the next 14 years Patty was my close and constant friend. It would be tempting to say that everyone who's ever met me has seen me in my Patty; it is more accurate, but barely so, to presume that my few readers know the exact sweater I am writing about, without my having to post a picture of it.

Patty was with me on my first big road trip out west, and in it I hiked and rafted and canoed and kayaked. It came with me to Israel, where I lost what little God I had left in me, and then to my childhood summer camp, when I returned to it as a counselor; I was wearing Patty on the night when, for the first time in my life, I went stargazing with a girl at her invitation; I was still wearing it when she said she was disappointed in me.

Patty was with me as I fell in and out of love with a hundred wrong girls, and it was with me when I finally found the right one. It went with me to my first and second colleges, and on more hikes, and on more international travels. I'm wearing Patty in the last photograph taken of me together with my Zadie. And I brought it on almost every trip I made to Michigan throughout my father's dying, and I was still wearing it last month when with my mother and I picked out his gravestone.

Patty was practical and Patty was reliable. The second-to-top button broke, the fabric stretched out and flattened somewhat, but otherwise it held itself together. Light enough for spring, heavy enough for winter. In it I had gotten icy wet, but with it I stayed alive.

There comes a time in every decent man's life when he must surrender his will to his wife's. Some men do this knowingly, but most believe that they never gave in: they claim sovereignty to the end, even as their coffin is sealed and encased and lowered and buried over.

Whichever scenario will play out for me, I don't care much about what I'm wearing, so long as it's comfortable, but my wife-to-be does, and Patty did not suit her tastes; and I know, for all my fetishes and anthropomorphisms, that the few memories I have which haven't been reduced to husks and stock stories and punchlines--the real history resides in me, not in recycled Coke bottles.

And so this week I left Patty at Good Will. The sweater meant something to me, but the wife means more.