My Shirts

In the summer of (I'm pretty sure) 1993, I worked as a cook for a summer camp run by New York State's Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). At the time, they ran four of these camps, and I'd hoped to get a cook's position at the camp where a friend of mine from Ashokan had worked in the past and would be working again that summer. But their cook wanted to come back, so I headed up to Saranac Lake instead.

We were only sorta/kinda DEC employees as we were seasonal and didn't have to wear a uniform, but as the head cook, I was provided with a uniform shirt for times that I was using our line of credit at the local supermarket so I'd look all official. I've held onto that shirt ever since, passing it by through many weedings-out of my closet. I don't exactly know why. I loved parts of the job -- mostly the parts in between cleaning up after one meal and prepping for the next because I spent most of that time in the lake that was 15 feet from my kitchen. And my friend Nancy. Love that woman, but have lost touch over the years.

But I really disliked other parts of the job. Like the fact that the camp director essentially ordered me to serve meat at every meal because the staff complained at the end of the first week. I had -- horrors! -- not served breakfast meats and had made one MEATLESS DINNER! At an environmental education camp! What was I thinking?! Later in the summer, I got ticked when two of the biggest meat-eaters on staff were complaining about camping in the West and being woken up by cows in BLM lands. Hello? They weren't dairy cows wandering around on public lands for days on end. They really couldn't see the connection between their meat-eating ways and the cattle grazing outside their tents. Still bugs me that they were both getting degrees in environmental communication. Bleah.

I've worn the shirt exactly once since 1993 -- for a Halloween costume sometime around 2001 or 2002. It seems like time to get rid of it.

Then there's this beauty. It's missing most of its buttons (and much of its color, for that matter). It's in sad, sad shape. But at one point in its life, long before I met it, this was a rich, deep blue known to volunteers around the world as "kibbutz blue". Yes, this is a genuine kibbutz work shirt from Kibbutz Ramat David, my home for about 9 or 10 months between 1998 and 1999. I rarely actually wore this to work. It was missing buttons when it was assigned to me. But I loved living and working on the kibbutz. I did sometimes wear this shirt over a tank top, so I've probably worn this shirt in the kitchens, the dish room, the pear orchard, the blasted, no-good, stressful, never-want-to-work-there-again persimmon orchard, and the gardens.

I could reminisce about life on the kibbutz for a long time. There were the small hedgehogs who lived in the lawn outside the volunteer housing. Love! There was the Holocaust survivor who tried, the first time we met, to find a common language between us. Hebrew? Not really. German? Nope. Russian? Seriously? Then she left the room with the teapot she'd come to fetch. Five minutes later, she was back, a gleam in her eye as she proclaimed, "Yiddish!" with a huge grin and a laugh. There was the other Holocaust survivor who I was visiting the night the Berlin wall came down and we watched the news together. There was our wonderful postmaster, yet another Holocaust survivor, who could barely contain his excitement the day an express package arrived for me from my sister. I have never signed so many places to accept an package, but Zvi was not going to miss out on any of the pomp and circumstance involved with a USPS Overnight Express flat-rate package.

My kibbutz was old -- pre-state, in fact, settled in 1926. It wasn't one of the country-club kibbutzim, but managed to slog along with income from the dairy, the orchards and fields, and a metal-working plant that constructed agricultural machinery. It was full of good people who lived in small houses, accepted small allowances instead of salaries (mine as a volunteer was the equivalent of 32 dollars a month), shared about a dozen cars between 400 people, and broke bread together at breakfast and lunch almost every day. Sometimes, the reality of life in Israel set in -- men shared guard duty and the volunteer coordinator -- a very close friend -- once handed me his Uzi so he could play my guitar for a few minutes. I don't think he noticed how pale I got with it in my hands, although he did notice how pale I got when assigned to cook big slabs of cow's liver for 450 people at lunch one day. He marched over to my supervisor and told her she could not expect me to cook meat like that as a vegetarian -- find someone else to finish it! She did, I was grateful, and knew only at the end of my stay that as a fellow vegetarian, he had also decreed that I would never, ever be assigned the job of helping load chickens destined for the slaughter house. It was an all-hands-on-deck kind of job, but my hands were exempted. Again, I'm grateful.

I haven't quite decided what's happening with these shirts. They're not fit for wearing, really, so I don't think the thrift store wants them. In the next few days, you'll have the pleasure (?) of reading about my wonderful bags. But those have already departed to their new life. One of my coworkers has a niece who makes handbags out of canvas bags and I've given them to her.