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Is the soul of a person in their clothes?

I don’t believe I’ve ever been closely involved with ‘fast fashion’; I’ve never been accused of it at any rate; in fact the word ‘fashion’, whether slow or fast, has never been linked to anything I wear to my ever-diminishing invitations to dinner parties. I don’t know whether it is used behind my back, or by those who gather around the sink having volunteered to collect the dinner plates in preparation for the dessert, but perhaps they’re a different crowd than the one with whom I am allowed to associate.

Anyway, ‘fast’ anything is seldom used to describe the elderly; fashion even less, I suspect. But I live alone nowadays, so with the exception of Wednesday morning coffee club at the local mall’s Food Court, there are no critical eyes appraising my choice of clothes for the day. And it’s not for any lack of choice in my closet; there’s stuff in there that hasn’t seen the light of the morning sun since I retired. If anything, I’m more addicted to ‘slow’ fashion -well, slow to recycle it to the Value Village people at any rate.

Still, I suppose even keeping clothes long after their best-before date does little to solve the problem of disposal -no matter how old fashioned, no matter the myth of recycling old fabrics, most of it eventually ends up in a nearby garbage dump or in a far distant country where it is burned out of sight and out of mind. Its absence is meant to appease my guilt very likely. Of course, that only works if you’re trying to recycle a faded shirt, pajama bottoms worn thin with age, or pants with cuffs and only a bit of lint still hidden in the pockets; they’re all perfectly useable depending on the needs of the recipient we tell ourselves, arrogantly proud of expending an extra effort on the poor.

But I usually make a point of recycling any used clothing for which, together with my souvenirs, I can no longer make room in my suitcase at the end of a foreign vacation. I wash it, fold it neatly, and then carefully place it in a plastic (sorry) garbage bag and thence into a used clothing bin usually found at sundry shopping malls. With the problem solved, I feel inordinately proud of how I, too, am helping the disadvantaged of the world.

I recently had reason to doubt the value of my beneficence, however. I was in a little town just off the main North Island highway in New Zealand and decided there was no longer any space in my carry-on luggage for my return flight to Canada. As it was winter in Vancouver and my leather sandals were, well, long ago broken in, I thought I’d leave them as a gift for a deserving beachcomber because even the luggage I was consigning to the airplane cargo hold, was also over the weight allowed.

They were my favourite sandals, though, and although they were a bit rough around the edges, aren’t all sandals after a walk or two? And besides, who looks at sandals on a beach, eh? It’s the scantily dressed human parts sticking out above the footwear that I think attract most of us. Anyway, perhaps I’m just rationalizing my preference for those who can get away with walking the sandy shores with less clothes on than me.

I wiped the leather and smoothed off the scuff marks and having no gift wrap or anything, carefully wrapped the sandals in a clean MacDonalds paper bag. I’d seen a charity clothing store along the main street and figured it must be similar to the Value Village outlets back home in Canada. I wandered in to the collection area and smiled at a woman sorting some grubby-looking clothes from a big container.

“Do you accept used sandals?” I asked when I’d watched her long enough to assure myself she was an employee and not a customer.

She straightened up from the box, stared at me rather suspiciously, and then nodded her head -I find that is usually a reassuring sign. “Sandals? Yes, of course. We’re a beach culture, eh,” she said rather derisively, then stretched her arms and massaged her back while she studied me. “You’ve got a funny accent even for a Pakeha; you American?” she added, sounding bored with me already.

I tried not to look offended. “Nope, Canadian…”

“Toronto? I’ve got a niece who lives there…”

I shook my head. “Vancouver…” I replied and then reconsidered when her face fell. “…But I used to live just outside of Toronto along the Lake Ontario corridor leading to Hamilton…”

She didn’t look pacified. “My niece lives in Toronto.”

I tried to twinkle my eyes to let her know that I didn’t mind if her niece had chosen Toronto. “I can understand her decision: it’s Canada’s biggest city, I think. Lots to do there…”

“Too big! She’s thinking of moving to Sakscatchewond or some place. She’s a librarian and…”

“Saskatchewan,” I interrupted gently. She glared irritably at me for correcting her. “It’s one of our Canadian provinces, eh?  I was born there actually,” I added, hoping it might help to bond me with her family, or something…

“My niece still lives in Toronto,” she replied, not wanting to repeat the ‘Saskatchewan’ word unnecessarily.

“Anyway, I’m glad you can use a pair of sandals for the store. I didn’t really want to make my suitcase any heavier than it is already.” I tried to hand the MacDonalds bag containing my sandals to her, but she merely pointed to a large metal container sitting next to a set of rolling doors leading to the little lane behind the store.

“Trying to help us poor folks down here in Aotearoa, eh?” It’s the Māori word for New Zealand: ‘the land of the long white cloud’.

She did not smile when she said that. Nor did she thank me for my sandals, and surprisingly hadn’t initially greeted me with the traditional welcome: kia ora. I wasn’t sure whether she was Maori but either she didn’t enjoy working at a charity place, or disliked having to talk with the people who rationalized disposing of their unwanted and often unusable items to help ‘the natives’.

“Put the bag in that big bin over there and I’ll deal with it later, eh?” She pointed at a large rusting metal container across the room, and without a further glance at me, she bent over the big container that had originally occupied her, and started sorting things out again.

While her head was deep in today’s donations I walked over to the bin she had pointed at. There were odds and sods of obviously damaged goods piled untidily in heaps lying in it. In fact, there was a distinctly unpleasant smell coming from it. I’m pretty sure it was the company dumpster, ready to be wheeled out onto the lane behind the store for the evening pickup. But I decided not to say anything.

I was, after all a Pakeha a non-Polynesian foreigner, although as her head disappeared into the bin she was sorting, I was pretty sure I heard her say the word Pakeha as if she were swearing.

I sometimes wonder what actually happened to those sandals, though…

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