The Mystery of the Ugly Vest
September 8, 2011
All week Alice has been puzzling over a wool vest Mr. Fickle has been wearing to the dining room, despite temperatures in the 90s.
It looks something like this:
Vest of many colors
She’s still fond of him, but she’s always been critical of Mr. Fickle’s wardrobe (see “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning”). This vest, she told me, “tops everything” he’s worn so far.
The Dapper Man, of course, is conscientious about his appearance and aware of how others dress. The other day he approached Alice and said, “You always look so perfect.”
This pleased her. She and the Dapper Man have been flirting quite a lot lately. She knows Mr. Fickle has observed them, but he doesn’t seem to care, although one day he swept into the dining room and kissed her on the cheek before going to his table.
She called me as soon as she got back to her apartment. “And do you know what I said when he kissed me? I said, Thank you! I’ve been scolding myself ever since. Why did I say thank you?”
She’s done this before, but I didn’t want to remind her.
Celia (see “Noteworthy”) has also noticed Mr. Fickle’s vest. The moment he walks into the dining room with his vest on, the topic of the notes she and Alice have been passing back and forth switches to this article of clothing. One note leads to another and, as so often happens with both writing and conversations, they always end up a great distance from where they started.
Alice: “He must wear it because he’s cold. But why not wear a jacket?”
Celia: “It’s almost a hundred degrees out. He didn’t come down to breakfast. Maybe he’s sick.”
Alice: “I’m always cold.”
Celia: “He never waters his plants. I have to water them.” (Celia’s apartment is down the hall from Mr. Fickle’s apartment.)
Alice: “I don’t have any plants, but I got some flowers for my birthday.”
Celia: “What kind?”
And so it goes until Mr. Fickle rises to leave the dining room, which brings them back to the ugly vest.
Finally, last night there was a breakthrough in the mystery. On her way back to her apartment following dinner, Alice happened to look up above the door that leads into the Rosary Room. A buffalo cut-out was stuck to the white wall. He was meant to be grazing but there was no grass to be had up there high above the tables and chairs, so he just looked stooped and disappointed.
Alice slowly turned her walker around to take in the entire dining room from this vantage point and saw cardboard cut-out cowboy boots tacked to a railing and a row of cardboard cowboy hats hanging on the opposite wall.
She thought about the week’s menu of chili, buffalo wings, pork and beans, baking powder biscuits and cornbread. “It’s a theme,” she told me. “Mr. Fickle is trying to look Western.”
The Place often dresses its walls in themes associated with holidays: flags for Memorial Day, bursting rockets for the Fourth of July, etc. In so many ways, The Place is like high school, or even grade school. It’s meant to be homey, but whose home was really like this? How likely was it that these elderly adults had cut out Valentines or paper turkeys and pasted them on their own dining room walls? Maybe they’d done it sixty or seventy or eighty years ago when they had children, but not recently.
Alice and I couldn’t figure out what holiday was being celebrated so enthusiastically by both The Place and Mr. Fickle this past week. After all, National Day of the Cowboy is July 28th.
If you know, please tell.
This is quite something. Tom Rousch with the original lyrics to “Home on the Range.” Wonderful old photographs; lots of decent looking vests and so much more.
For a glimpse of authentic Western culture as it exists today, visit the always interesting Western Folklife Center.
September 8, 2011 at 2:10 pm
Pendleton Round-Up Days?
September 8, 2011 at 2:12 pm
Thanks, Jane. Is that going on now?
September 8, 2011 at 2:17 pm
I’d really like to see the cowboy boots that Mr. Fickle would wear to complement that vest. I’m sure there’d be a clue there somewhere.
September 8, 2011 at 5:02 pm
Aha! I don’t think anyone thought to examine the feet. Thanks, Bob.
September 8, 2011 at 2:29 pm
Not sure about the vest–maybe a conversation piece.?
But I so enjoyed the video of Home on the Range! It was nostalgic for me, and I had never heard all those verses.
Such fun!
Thank-you!
September 8, 2011 at 5:01 pm
I’ve never heard them either, Carol. It’s a little slow but that’s probably so he could get in all the photographs.
September 8, 2011 at 2:34 pm
wear an ugly vest day?
September 8, 2011 at 5:00 pm
Maybe so, Kerry. Good guess.
September 8, 2011 at 9:19 pm
Was Rick Perry visiting the state?
Oh, god. That was a joke. It was even hard for me to type his name.
September 9, 2011 at 8:43 am
Nowhere in sight, Elizabeth. And here in Portland, even at The Place, he might have a hard time being a person of interest or influence.
September 10, 2011 at 5:31 am
Seems more like The Place was decorated for a themed kids birthday party than anything! Was it Mr. Fickel’s birthday? I love the moment where Alice notices the buffalo image and turns to takes in the dining room, that ah-ha moment. And the line about “poisonous herbage”, plus the frequent use of the word “seldom” in the song!
Oh give me a song
Where qualifiers belong
And seldom is frequently sung…
Not to mention the vest…I think I made one like that decades ago for somebody…poor guy…
September 10, 2011 at 11:07 am
I’ll bet he still has it and takes it out of the trunk at least once a year and thinks: Why didn’t I marry this girl?
September 10, 2011 at 10:35 pm
Nice to hear that cowboy culture made it to The Place. I think Alice needs some red cowboy boots to get Mr. Fickle’s attention.
September 11, 2011 at 8:41 am
I’ll tell her about this suggestion. Thanks.
September 11, 2011 at 9:44 am
I think it’s sweet that Mr. Fickle was dressing for the week’s theme, but I also agree that it’s so very grade school to have those theme-weeks and all the corresponding decor.
September 11, 2011 at 11:51 am
You’re right, Katie. It is rather sweet, a sign that he wants to be in the swing of things. I suppose some of those decorations anchor people in time because otherwise there’s a kind of sameness to the days. I just wish the staff could be more imaginative about how to do that.
September 12, 2011 at 3:57 pm
[...] Thinking about the old West reminds me that there’s news about Yvonne, the runaway Bavarian cow (see Cows Gone Wild). Yvonne had sensed her upcoming demise in the abattoir (such a pretty French word for “slaughterhouse”), and she made a run for it. People reported sightings of a lone cow wandering around in the woods. For some reason this made her a traffic hazard, and so hunters were given permission to shoot to kill. A rescue group, meanwhile, offered $1000 to anyone who would give them a shout if they saw her. [...]
September 14, 2011 at 6:31 pm
If Mr. Fickle wanted attention from the ladies, he sure knew how to get it! I’m sure that vest lit up the dining room with color and conversation. No idea why the Western theme, though. Perhaps someone associating summer = grill = campfire = cowboy? Or simply something to fill in the long spell between July 4 and Halloween.