A friend’s Facebook meme last month caught my eye. It was the image of a boy playing in the mud, and the caption read: “They didn’t know their clothes were hand-me-downs, or that their home was not a mansion. They had a family and had a dog and lived in the best place ever.”
I don’t know about you, but I knew I was wearing hand-me-downs. I was the youngest of four, and three of us were boys. Being the baby, I not only inherited shirts and pants and shoes and belts and scout uniforms, but I watched as our mother patched or repaired rips or tears to make the clothing more presentable.
I lived in the marvelous age of TV dinners, and iron-on denim patches to repair torn knees in blue jeans.
Not wanting to embarrass me, Mom would often turn the jeans inside-out and apply the iron-on patch as a backing to the rip, then turn them right-side out so only a bit of the repair was visible.
Regardless of the need to hand clothes down, we faced a problem in that my next-oldest brother went through an age when he wore sizes described by the Sears catalog as “husky,” while I remained skinny-as-a-bean pole well into my 40s.
(I thought the use of husky as a description of clothing size would have gone away by now, but a quick glance at sears.com shows that even in 2018 it is apparently still an acceptable word.)
By the time it came for me to go to school, my mother was sorely distressed with the public school system in Buncombe County, North Carolina. This was the mid-1960s, and mom said she’d heard her nieces say that the math teacher in the high school would write problems on the blackboard for students to attempt, then leave to go out to coach football during class time.
That and a suicide in the high school during school hours is what mom said made her pinch pennies and start me off at a private school in downtown Asheville.
(I attended there from kindergarten through eighth grade, on scholarship most years despite the fact I was, according to teachers, not “reaching my potential” and should “try more.”)
The school had a dress code. Boys wore buttoned dress shirts and slacks in spring and early autumn, and a blazer and tie every day during the winter.
My brothers didn’t have a lot of blazers and slacks, so most of my school clothes were bought new at Sears or J.C. Penney or Belk.
Clothes weren’t the only leftovers I received. Much of the ice cream I ate as a child could be considered hand-me-downs, if you can imagine that.
What do I mean?
Well, my mother worked a variety of jobs when I was young while she also studied to earn her college degree so she could teach.
She was 51 years old when she crossed the stage to grab her diploma, and she was immediately offered a job at a Buncombe County public school. That’s right, she went to work in the same system she wouldn’t let me attend.
Teachers didn’t make much then—similar to what we see now in states where teachers are walking out for more pay—so mom worked summer jobs to keep our heads above water.
One place she worked was in an ice cream stand owned and operated by family friends—Custer’s Last Stand, located between Swannanoa and Black Mountain in East Buncombe County.
She worked there most summers, and even on weekends sometimes while the weather was warm but school was back in session.
Mom and the others working at the ice cream stand were highly qualified in filling cones and bowls with the soft ice cream they sold, but sometimes gravity messed with them and the beautiful cone would fall sideways or collapse. So they’d stick it in a cup, set it aside, and begin again with a new cone.
Those unloved cones were pushed into the freezer, and at the end of the day mom was allowed to bring them home for her kids.
So I got hand-me-down cones.
As my siblings were older, often I was the only one at home to enjoy those delicious ‘mistakes’. Seldom were they more than a fallen vanilla cone, but once or twice I recall an unwanted hot fudge sundae or, mother of all pearls, a banana split.
Growing up with hand-me-downs helped make me who I am. Would I be a better man if everything had been new? I doubt it.
Would I have preferred every fallen ice cream dish to have been a banana split?
You betcha.
—Jonathan Austin