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My Father: The Style Icon

Flamboyant and Timeless

By 𝕾𝖆𝖎𝖓𝖙 𝕵𝖆𝖒𝖊𝖘Published 3 years ago 3 min read
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My father was the funniest person I’ve ever known and the most annoying soul my mother had ever met. He loved her with a fire brighter than the sun’s surface. Temperamental as a bull, he complimented my mother’s occasional passiveness. A Taurus, born in the early summer months of 1957, the man never did anything calmly or without a stubborn undertone. He was steadfast and kind, but most of all, he was always greedy for a laugh. His humor got on every last one of my mother's nerves but made me laugh so hard that I’d have to sprint to the bathroom before I peed my pants. I've always been envious of what could’ve easily been his stand-up comedy routine. I was enamored when he took his dentures out and sat them on my mother’s shoulder while she innocuously sat on the floral print loveseat in our living room, attempting to watch an hour of General Hospital. Her reaction was always a violent gagging sound and a jump, launching them off her shoulder onto the cushion of the chair placed opposite the loveseat.

“Damn it, Jamie!” She’d shrieked in an identical tone every time. I wasn’t supposed to laugh as hard as I did, but I couldn’t help it.

I wished my teeth came out so I could do it too.

My father was short in stature, less than two inches taller than my mother, who was five foot four. He was built with a Greek statue's arms and the legs of a malnourished chicken. He was strong, and the only thing reserved about him was his interaction with people he didn't know. He was outgoing and charming around my mother, but she took the reins if we were around strangers while he hid in a shell-like a newborn turtle.

He dressed in a flamboyant fashion that I aspired to imitate when I grew older. Cut-off denim shorts with an inseam shorter than a dollar bill were seemingly all he owned. He donned cropped tank tops that exposed his hair-filled belly button, wool socks, and hiking boots. Rural Missouri was not the place for hiking boots, so I never understood the correlation. Alas, my mother couldn’t convince him to change his mind, let alone his style, so she and I accepted it. He spent his days either in the basement of our home or outside mowing, working on a car. He could be caught at any point in the day wandering aimlessly around the perimeter of our property looking for something to trap, fix, carve, or remove. I envied his desire for fresh air and nature, though I constantly desired to be under my bed, hiding from the rest of the world in solitude.

My father lived his young adult years in the seventies, the “me decade.” It was the time between the white-hot sixties and the faux pas that we now know as the eighties- all decades before I’d ever meet him. The fashion of the seventies brought about the liberation of the man’s man. The flamboyant short shorts, high socks, and in my father’s case, the hiking boots burst into mainstream society, replacing the slacks and cardigans of the sixties. I’ve reminisced on a time that I never experienced, imagining my father’s hair-covered legs sliding into a pair of cut-off denim Levi shorts for the first time, finding their permanent home. Though I wasn't present then, I'm more than confident that that moment sparked a genetic predisposition for flamboyance that, unknown to me, would be passed down almost two decades later.

To me, the cut-off denim short shorts of the seventies have never gone out of style and never will. Ragged, torn denim short-shorts are not only nostalgic to me; they are sentimental- a reminder of my father, who has been without us for over twenty years.

He wasn't just a fashion icon to me. He was everything.

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About the Creator

𝕾𝖆𝖎𝖓𝖙 𝕵𝖆𝖒𝖊𝖘

Dark Humorist. Writer. Memoirist.

For all things freelance, fiction, and business, or for a dose of dark humor connect with me on LinkTree. Joshua St. James is the founder of Saint James Writing.

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