Formal Wear

There are very few occasions that require me to dress up, but when I do it is invariably for the same occasion with invariably the same clothes. A white collared shirt and black pants make up the entirety of my formal wear, and the only occasions where I am forced to wear them is for my concerts. I've played violin for seven, eight, hinging on nine years now. For every single one of those years I remember fumbling with the top button of my white shirt or struggling to cinch the belt to my waist. Was my tie crooked? Was there bow rosin on my clothes? Did my pants get muddy on the walk to the driveway? That white shirt and black pants accompanied me on some of the most anxious nights of my life, were my sole companions in those long, solo recitals before scores of people, gave me courage during auditions where a single slip-up meant months of work down the drain. They are as much a part of my violin as my bow.

It is unfair of me to speak like I've owned the same pair of dress clothes for all nineteen years of my life. I eat, I sleep, I grow. What fit me in elementary school will not fit me in middle school, and what fit me in middle school will not fit me in high school. But the white dress shirt and black pants are so uniform, so constant, that I feel like they have been growing along with me, matching my every new inch with their own. Each white shirt I've owned always had eight buttons. Each pair of black pants I've owned always had a small golden clip hanging off a belt loop. I do not remember ever shopping for new dress clothes; they have always been sitting in my closet, pristine, waiting. It is only when, on my occasional sifts through the old clothes box in the basement, I happen upon an older set of dress clothes, slightly smaller but almost identical to my current set, that I realize how far I've come from the nine-year old who first laid his chin upon a violin and slashed the first notes to "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."