Memorial Service For My Beloved Dead Sweater

Don't tell me they'll (sob) reissue. They never reissue.

This isn’t the exact pattern, but you get the drift. See you on the other side of the rainbow bridge, my beloved sweater!

Did you get my note about the memorial service for my dead sweater? No problem if you didn’t because I’m streaming it and it’s starting now. The first speaker is me:

Beloved Eileen Fisher sweater. How many carefree years did we have together? As few as ten, as many as fourteen? How many road trips, in which I did not worry if I would miss my exit or if anyone would like me,  because with you, I was ready for anything. Your jaunty orange, grey and beige design signaled me as playful, sporty, and able to drive stick. Your generous but not excessively boxy cut indulged and celebrated my older babe bod.  

None of this trendy crop top nonsense for you, my understanding sweater. Whether you embraced me Tencel/Merino Wool to skin or clasped me around the shoulders like an old pal, you were a joy and a comfort. You were tri-seasonal. You folded into nothing. You went with everything. And then came those dark days when, despite the tenderest hand washing and blocking, you shrunk and became misshapen. Sure, for a while, I tried to tell myself I was imagining it, but too soon, I, I — sorry, I can’t go on.

 A saleslady from the Eileen Fisher outlet in Central Valley, New York, who I have become close to over the years, takes over.

Retail is cruel. We go into a store, we try something on, we know in an instant: This is me – this is the one. But we also know nothing lasts forever, especially knitwear. The most expensive weaver on the Upper West Side cannot save an old sweater. Painful as it, you must --

CRASH! SPUTTER! SCPLOTT! (The screen goes dark.) I had a feeling this would happen when I held a celebration of life for a beloved piece of clothing — I broke the internet.

I admire Eileen Fisher, by the way, not just as a designer — her stuff makes up about eighty percent of my wardrobe — but as a business woman.

Eileen Fisher has nerve.

Her sweaters start at an average of $198 and, if you are thinking cashmere, glissando on up to the jolly $400s. (I do not pay this, of course, I make my Eileen Fisher purchases at that outlet in Central Valley, New York, where I am so well known to the staff that I have my own parking space and they greet me with a cheese plate.)

Although the Eileen Fisher demographic is older babe, a lot of her stuff is sleeveless — although she knows perfectly well older babes will not go sleeveless.

That means if you fall in love with a $180 sleeveless Eileen Fisher dress, you have to get another piece, for maybe $80 to $120, to cover up your arms. This may be a long cardigan, so you can hide your body after not eating donuts since the ‘90s, or a bolero, which even matadors hate because the bulls laugh at them.

Eileen Fisher’s greatest example of retail chutzpah: A recycling program, called Renew, in which you get $5 for every item of clothing you return. And when the items are resold, the prices range between $35 to $175.00. It’s staggering. Eileen Fisher should be going to parties apologizing.

“Sorry. I can’t imagine what I was thinking. You did that? Give me your address and let me send you a $460 cashmere sweater.”

A recycling program does, however, offer the possibility of finding a worn out item of clothing, like my beloved dead sweater. I search for months, but that doesn’t happen.

Then I get an idea for which I believe I should be honored in Sweden:I photograph the beloved dead sweater, with its sleeves folded peacefully across its chest, and put it up on Google Lens.

Then I hit search.

And there it is on E-Bay! The big sister ( a Medium) to my beloved deceased sweater (a Small.) Cost: a mere $19.99. Sure, it’s used. It also looks a bit misshapen and possibly shrunken but a shrunken Medium, by my calculations, will fit me perfectly.

I want that sweater so much I don’t even bother to make a low-bid offer. I just hit the “Gimme that!” button and camp out at the mailbox.

At last the sweater — Clone Sweater? Separated at Birth Sweater? Ancestry.Com Sweater? — arrives. Despite being a Medium, Clone Sweater looks very close in size to my Beloved Deceased sweater. I have the sinking feeling that the previous owner, when it came to the precarious realm of hand washing, was more aggressive with hot water.

Worse, when I try on Clone Sweater I find that though it gives me an inch or two more width than the Beloved Deceased Sweater, it is two to three inches shorter than the Deceased. It’s kind of better, but, looking at this purchase with brutal retail honestly, I have to admit it’s also worse.

Or is it? I could spend hours going between the two sweaters, trying to decide. I can’t see myself throwing out either.

I find myself thinking of Stalin’s embalmed body. Stalin was displayed for years in Red Square, next to Lenin. He looked good, though he couldn’t order people murdered. Then one day, at a Party Congress, an old Bolshevik woman gets up and says Lenin had come to her in a dream and said he could not stand being next to that creep Stalin one more minute and a few days later, the Russian toss out Stalin.

There are times I could use a no-nonsense Bolshevik in my life.

Meanwhile, the sweaters fold up very nicely.