Will (that’s what we’re calling him these days; have you noticed?) has joined Trinity‘s sixth grade basketball team. He’s having a great time: practice two days (or more) a week, a game here and there. It’s great fun.
He had to get a dress-shirt for game days, so Bill took him shopping at Sears. They came home with a really beautiful shirt, one of those “French blue” ones that are so stylish. It came with a clip-on tie, but of course Bill would have none of that; he and Will selected a beautiful tannish sort of one with faint blue and yellow diagonal details to it. Bill has to tie it for him, and when he’s all decked out, he looks Really Handsome.
The shirt made its way through the laundry recently, and when I folded everything, I did what I usually do: pile the boys’ clothes in a laundry basket for them to put away. But the beautiful blue shirt was on the top, and I decided that, rather than wait for it to get wrinkled on its way to the closet, I would just go ahead and hang it up for him.
Just last fall, I pulled the children’s hangers out of Will’s side of the closet. His shirts seemed to drip off the little child-size hangers; the “shoulder” (if you will) of the hanger seemed to poke out at the mid-point of the collar-bone area, and I decided that this Just Wouldn’t Do.
But yesterday I noticed, as I hung his new shirt in the closet, that the adult-sized hanger isn’t really cutting it either. Because the shoulder of the hanger pokes the shirt out somewhere toward the top of the sleeve, maybe at about the midpoint above the elbow. Now Will’s shirts seem to hang there with oddly shortened sleeves, or maybe like the shirts on scarecrows, whose elbows are perpendicularly suspended, forearms swinging. The hangers in Will’s closet aren’t the right size. Not At All.
The thing is, I have no other options. They only make hangers in two sizes: children’s and adults. I’ve never seen an “adolescent clothes hanger” in the offing, have you? Let me know if you find one.
