The Magic of Monday Pants

In the last year that I went to work, on almost every Monday, I wore the same item of clothing — a pair of red, Royal Stewart tartan trousers that I bought in London. I was not there for vacation, but to attend a memorial service for my husband. 

In the months since he had died, there had been four memorial gatherings, one in each of the cities where he had lived. The first was in Huntsville, Alabama, which had been our home for the last ten years. The next was a holiday get-together in Chicago, organized by his childhood friends. In February, family and friends gathered in New York. Then finally, in March, my two daughters and I went to London, where they were born, for a final farewell to that city and to the family the four of us had been. 

By the time I reached London I had spent the past five months thinking about music and readings and programs. I had a ton of help, but the weight of the questions — what would he want, what do you need, what feels right, who should read what — staggered me.

Going to Chicago in December, my older daughter, who has autism and loves airplanes, lay down on the floor and screamed that she did not want to go to the airport. On the way to New York, two months later, she was cheerful and compliant, but had a grand mal seizure as she walked through the X-ray machine. 

In addition to the challenges of traveling with her, I was carrying some of my husband’s ashes. Part of my grieving process was to scatter them in significant places and write about it on his Instagram account. Packing these small ziplock bags of white powder added an element of suspense to TSA screenings. 

Over that time, the ashes only triggered one bag search. They made it daringly onto Wrigley Field (thank you, Dan!), to the location in Lower Manhattan where he had proposed, into the River Thames, and by air mail from London to a garden in the South of France.

Our week in London was a long goodbye. The service was held at St. Bride’s in Fleet Street, in a church known as the spiritual home of the media and the Journalists’ Church. He would have loved it.

These memorial gatherings reunited family, his college poker game, friends from the news desk. Ten members of our wedding party of twelve were present at one or more of the events. Our shared life flashed before my eyes. And then it was over. It was just my life now.

On my way to dinner at our friend’s club in Mayfair, the kind of place with a dress code that forbade collarless shirts, I wondered if my black stretchy trousers would look too much like sportswear, so I stopped for old time’s sake in a cheap trendy store to see if I could find anything more suitable. And that was where I found the red plaid trousers, almost a parody of club wear, something Princess Diana would have worn in the ’80s. I changed into them in the store. The material was weird, the fit was a little odd, and they were so inexpensive as to be almost disposable, but I brought them home and on my first day back at work I decided to wear them, my stupid souvenir from a trip I never wanted to take. 

Red pants, blue sweater, black loafers, a no brainer outfit. Mondays can be hard. The last thing you need to be worrying about is what to wear. I wore them again the next week. 

“Cool pants,” people said. 

I started to say, “They’re my Monday pants.”

I looked forward to wearing them. Because they were bright and fun, they seemed intentional, as if I had taken the time to plan what I was wearing. They were the ridiculous happy to my sad.

After a while, people just said, “Monday pants!” Like it was our inside joke.

I had no idea that I would stop working exactly one year later. Or that by then I would be remarried, that this simple trick I had played on myself to start another week, and then another, would have been so effective. 

When my stepdaughter left for college she asked if I would water her plants. We were both afraid I would forget. “Aha!” She said. “Monday pants … Monday plants!”

I haven’t worn the pants much since I retired, but I put them on last Monday, when I met with high school seniors to help them write personal statements for college applications. I wore them to remind myself that you can show growth or meaning through anything, you just have to pick something and stick with it.

Monday pants can mean whatever you want them to. As I worked with the students on their own writing, I could see more clearly what I needed to do in my own. In teaching them, I was instructing myself. My younger daughter will point out that this is a great cliche of personal statements, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. 

And sometimes, with writing as in life, we have to trick ourselves into doing what we think can’t be done.

This piece aired on the Sundial Writers Corner on WLRH on August 15, 2022. To listen to it, click here.