The Pants

I think my dad got these pants in 1976 – the year of the USA’s bicentennial– and wore them on every patriotic holiday after.  We were shamed by them as children (“The one in the red, white, and blue seersucker pants? No, that’s not our dad”). But when we grew up, we came to look forward to them, in an eye-rolling sort of way.  In addition to enjoying the reactions he’d get for wearing them (both dismay and delight), I think my dad, a life-long exerciser, loved to show that he never grew out of them. This picture was taken the year before he died at the age of 83.

I’m enjoying this memory today on a day when, to many of us, America seems like a joke. At least these pants are actually funny.