I don’t buy new shirts. Price might have
something to do with it. I don’t know. The last time I looked at the price of a
new shirt was probably 20 or 30 years ago and I didn’t like what I saw then.
These days I buy my shirts at the Goodwill store—not just because they’re cheap
but also because they have a better selection. If you’re looking for a cheap shirt in a department store—and I’m only talking relatively cheap—you’re probably looking at a T-shirt rack. But beware. T-shirts don’t come in the sizes that they used to.
Now they come in sizes X, 2X, 3X and Googol-X. The X size is equivalent to what used to be 40-Long. The 3X-size is equivalent to what used to be a nightshirt in colonial days and the Googol-X could double as a parachute.
I don’t normally tuck in my T-shirts but in the old days, if I wanted to do so it could be easily done. It was a way to change a work shirt into a casual shirt the way a secretary might unbutton a blouse slightly if stopping by a bar on the way home from the office. And if you didn’t tuck it in, it never hung more than three or four inches below the belt. Either way was a very neat look.
Today’s X-Line of T-shirts goes down to somewhere right around my knees. It’s nearly as impossible to tuck that much material into your pants as it was to squeeze a 4-man Boy Scout tent into those tiny bags they came in. Of course, you could get the tent into the bag eventually but it required two guys working very hard to roll it very tight and a couple of sticks from around the camp fire to shoehorn them into the bag.
