The end of red flannel pajamas

Ten or fifteen years ago my friend Tom gave me a pair of red flannel pajamas for Christmas. I think he bought them a size too small for himself, but they fit me perfectly.  Red flannel with white deer.  Very cozy, warm, comforting. I wore those things a lot.  Living in Inverness, one needs flannel pjs so I wore them to bed often. At some point I got rid of the top (too hot, I think) but the bottoms have been with me non-stop.

Flannel pajama bottoms are more than just pajama bottoms. They are like small-grade sweat pants. In Inverness I had no hesitation about going to the grocery store in those pjs with a crappy sweatshirt.  I took them to Europe every year (in the days of Europe travel) because there was nothing better than coming back to the hotel room at the end of the afternoon and tossing off my jeans and putting on the red pajama bottoms. They were like lounging pants.

When I come home from work, I always change my clothes and in the colder months I often opted for the red pjs as my in-house non-work outfit.  Those red pj bottoms have seen me cook, clean, lounge.  They have been to more than a dozen countries, have been worn on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning for the past dozen years and have always been my go-to comfort pants.

In the past couple of months I have noticed that the fabric was getting very sketchy: thin and weak.  I gave it notice but nothing more than that.  I foolishy figured these red flannel pajama bottoms would be around for another ten years.  Not happening.  Tonight, sitting down on the couch, the tension that is caused in that sitting down action made the cloth rip apart.  Not on the seam, but in the cloth itself.  It had simply gotten too old, too fragile, to continue.

Sad, yes.  A metaphor perhaps for growing old, being too fragile to continue to hold.  I loved these pjs but tomorrow they will go into the trash and I will go to Ross or TJ Max and buy a new pair.  They won't have the history that the red pjs have but they may last another ten years or so, hopefully.  Or not.

No big deal, but hey, thanks Tom for the gift those many years ago.  The red flannel pajamas served me well.  I wore them with you many times, at home and abroad.  Thank god cloth doesn't speak, but it would be kind of cool if they had their own passport.

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