Everybody Gets A Tee-Shirt

I can never bring myself to throw away tee-shirts. As long as there are sleeves, a collar, a lack of stains and I wouldn't be ashamed to been seen wearing it in public, then I just can't get over the mental hump that will lead me to donating it to someone. This is especially tough for me when it comes to shirts that are either championship shirts for local sports teams (I wore my Celtics' 2005 Atlantic Division Championship tee-shirt with pride) or shirts that I consider to be 'lucky', of which I have several. (You know, for a guy with a lot of 'lucky' articles of clothing I don't have that much actual luck.) Then there are the sentimental shirts from either clubs I used to be in at school, teams I used to be on or places I used to work. The point is, they really start to pile up after a while but I still just can't give them away.

The other factor is the "maybe" part of my brain. Maybe I'll lose 5 pounds and that shirt won't be so tight. Maybe I'll need a shirt I can wear when I have some painting to do. Maybe there will be a radio contest for "oldest shirt in your drawer" with a kick-ass prize I can win. It's just the little voice in the back of my head that will not allow me to donate shirts, even as I have to move them around when I run out of drawer space. What's ironic is that I have a rotation of only about 20 tee-shirts that I'll actually wear and the rest never see the light of day - they just sit on a shelf in my closet, taking up space. Well, not anymore.

My dad went through his closet recently to began to whittle out some room and ended up finding a lot of clothes to donate. I was inspired and when I heard the local Veteran's Association was going to be coming through soon I figured I would hop on the bandwagon and finally give these shirts to someone who might actually wear them. Now, I highly recommend that before you do any spring cleaning you watch a single episode of Hoarders, because it really cuts down on the decision-making time. Without much thought, consternation or hesitation I started plowing through the piles and ended up with 51 tee-shirts to donate. And yeah, I still kept a few old Super Bowl 36 tee-shirts and my St. Catherine's intramural basketball shirt that wouldn't fit my thigh at this point, but I made a huge dent, opened up some valuable space in my closet and it just looks a lot cleaner. Plus, when was I ever going to wear a shirt from The Gap again? Now, if only I could ever bring myself to think about donating old jerseys...