Fashion

I still have the pictures that we took at Piarco airport the day that my father left for the United States.  It was 1969 and we got all dressed up to go to the airport.  My grandmother, grandfather, aunts and cousins, pretty much the family village all came in a caravan to the airport; they even hired a photographer to take pictures of this momentous occasion.   In Trinidad, at that time, going on an airplane was serious business as travel was uncommon.  My father bought a new suit and a fancy Eccolac briefcase for the occasion.  He wanted to paint the picture of a businessman going off to a better life. To that end he mysteriously had my sister take a piece of white rectangular cardboard and cut it into a zigzag pattern and this he placed into the outside breast pocket of his suit jacket and headed off  into his new life.  It wasn’t until years later looking at the picture that I realized what he was trying to do.  Apparently, he was trying to imitate the pattern of a handkerchief in his breast pocket. He had seen pictures of elegant men in suits and noticed a zigzaggy pattern on their outside breast pocket, and looking at it two dimensionally, didn’t realize that it was a handkerchief.  He wanted so badly to look sophisticated that he wore a new suit, carried a briefcase, and ironically installed a piece of cardboard in his breast pocket to complete the ensemble.  Looking at the pictures today I wonder what people thought when they saw that piece of cut up cardboard sticking out of his pocket. I hope they were kind.