Relative Something

Happy October!

It’s that time of year. Even though it should come as no surprise, even though we have had plenty of warning, how many of us are finding ourselves stepping out into the chilly morning air without a jacket? How many find themselves improvising some tool with an edge to clear the frost off the windshield in the morning darkness? Maybe we just choose to live in denial and stretch the last vestiges of summer warmth a tiny bit beyond its reach. Why dig out the window scraper until after you have already faced a need for it at least one time?

I am lucky enough to be able to park my vehicle in a garage overnight, so I don’t need to look for a window scraper until much later in the fall, when it gets cold enough to frost up the car before I’ve left work at the end of the day. But I do need to do some hunting to find my jacket(s). The problem is, which one am I looking for? Why do I have so many jackets? For all the jackets that I do have, what comes to mind when I think about it is, all the ones I don’t have. I don’t have a jean jacket. I don’t have a leather jacket. I don’t have one of the long overcoats that fits over a suit. That’s always a shortcoming I face on that one night of the year in the winter when I go to a formal event.

But even for all the jackets that I don’t have, I still have so many jackets that I have a difficult time selecting which one to wear. It had me wondering, how many jackets is enough? I had a similar thought while in Nepal. I didn’t see any indication that people there had a variety of coats from which to select. Conversely, I remember thinking it a bit odd that many of the people I saw wearing coats, left them on even after the day became warm beyond the need for a coat. Maybe if you only have one coat, you might not be inclined to be quick to take it off just because it warmed up a bit.

Before I started to write this post, I tried a one-shot query of the internet and stumbled on a question posed from a different angle. This was posted 3 weeks ago: “How many jackets do I have to bring in America?” On the surface, my reaction was one of alarm that others would think living here requires multiple jackets, but further reading revealed the query was a genuine concern about how cold it would be. I can see the logic. The colder it gets, the more jackets you wear.

Like many items in an affluent society, it is possible for jacket fashion to exceed jacket function when it comes to importance. But hardly any of the jackets I have would qualify as having any importance with respect to fashion. I am inclined to select them by function. So the task I have before me is one of sorting my jackets by function and seeing if I can’t pare the number down to one I feel is more reasonable. What is a reasonable number of jackets?

More importantly, which is the one that functions as the first jacket of fall when it is just a bit too chilly in the morning but warm enough during the day that you forget you brought a jacket and leave it behind if you even remembered to grab it when you left the house in the first place?