When my elder daughter got married thirteen years ago, I bought a light brown, three piece suit in honor of the wedding - and I wore it. The wedding was in August, but it was outdoors, and the suit wasn't too heavy.
Since then I don't think I've worn the suit twice. The men in Israel who regularly wear suits are the ultra-orthodox, and the rest of us mainly dress casually. A shirt with buttons is pretty formal by Israeli standards.
When my younger daughter decided to get married, I planned to wear the same suit. I checked, and sure enough, I could still get into it. It needed pressing, but it still looked fine. So on my list of things to do before the wedding was to purchase a new dress shirt that would go well with the suit. I ended up buying one for 219 shekels, which is about $57, and I NEVER have paid that much for a shirt before. My idea of an expensive shirt is one that costs about half that amount. (You can guess where I buy my clothes!) But I figured that for my daughter's wedding, I could splurge for once in my life. Anyway, we were spending so much money, that $57 for a shirt was negligible.
In the end, I didn't wear the suit, but I did wear the shirt. Israel was plagued with an extreme heatwave this month, and if I'd worn a three piece wool suit, I would have been carried away from the wedding on a stretcher with an infusion sticking in my arm.
This morning I ironed the shirt, trying to persuade myself that the quality of the cloth and the tailoring justified its high price, which led me to think about why I hate to pay a lot of money for clothes. Is it just because I'm cheap? I don't think so. I'm not cheap about everything.
As for ironing my own shirts, I don't mind it. Every few weeks I have an ironing marathon and take care of a pile of my shirts, and while I'm doing it, my mind wanders all over the place - some pleasant thoughts and some less pleasant.
Among the unpleasant thoughts arose the memory of a British acquaintance of ours named Robert, a large, rich, extravagantly homosexual writer of sorts, who committed suicide by jumping out of his window a few years ago. Robert discovered a Christian Arab chef named Bassam who needed extra money and was willing to clean houses, and he recommended him to us. Bassam worked in our house a couple of times. He was a diligent, polite man, clearly much too intelligent and refined to be cleaning houses, and after a week or two he stopped doing it.
Robert, in recommending Bassam, also praised his skill in ironing shirts, and he immediately realized that he'd said the wrong thing to me. Just as I don't wear expensive clothes, I would never pay someone to come to my house and iron my shirts. But Robert was a wealthy man. I don't imagine that he had a single shirt that cost less than $57. But his life wasn't worth anything to him.
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