Metamorphosism

Suits

Pass him on the street and if you notice him at all, he's just an average guy, forties, grey hair, likely as not in a dark suit, ambling along somewhere, in no hurry because he left at least half an hour early to get where he's going and has plenty of time.

But he has a secret.

After 44 years, he discovered something when his wife asked him which suits he needed cleaned at the cleaners and he said how should I know none of them are very wrinkled and she said smell them, which ones smell like they need to be cleaned and so he smelled them and you know what he did he fell in love with the smell of his suits.

No big surprise you'll say, someone who blogs for years on end, posting several times a day primarily about himself and his immediate surroundings is obviously in love with his own reflection but you'd be wrong, he's just crazy about his voice, maybe, or his surroundings or likes to type. This smell thing is something different.

None of the suits stank. He had to pick out a couple so his wife wouldn't find him odd, but none of them smelled bad. They all smelled great. They smelled the way his father's plaid Pendelton wool shirts smelled when our man was a small boy and his dad got home from work driving the lumberyard delivery truck or the logging truck or the other truck. His small wiry dad with arms so big women he had never seen bought him beers at bars, sending them over to him at his table, saying, I've always liked men with big arms.

A smell of wool, and man, with a little tobacco smoke - less than his dad's maybe, but still there, alas. He had never expected this. A dozen dark suits lined up there on their hangers, all smelling this great. It was like a door he had never noticed opening onto a big room in his life full of something he liked.