Pins

I'm wearing a new shirt for Thanksgiving. It has a checked pattern, button down collar, and, for a storebought shirt, it fits quite well. The label at the back of the neck has a well-known brand on it. But, as with most apparel these days (at least the kind that I'm likely to buy off the rack), it was made overseas. In this case, Cambodia. The label tells me this in English, and also in Spanish ("hecho en Camboya"), the latter, we may suppose, for the benefit of the many people in this country for whom the Spanish language is the preferred medium of communication.

One could go on at length about the marketing of apparel with well-known American brand names, about the transfer of manufacturing to countries with cheaper labor costs, about perceived corporate greed for higher profits and an improved bottom line. But one chooses not to enter that arena.

Let us instead examine the shirt itself. Quality of the material is very good. The sewing of the pockets and the collar and the buttonholes and the sleeves happens to be fair. There are some hanging threads here and there, which must be carefully trimmed away with my wife's nail scissors. Sometimes the buttons are not sewn as securely as one might have expected, but that failing is easily remedied with thread and needle.

The shirt as it comes is neatly folded. A cardboard insert keeps the whole thing stiff and easy to handle. The problem though is that there are a number of pins that hold the fabric so that it retains its tidy rectangular shape against the cardboard. Some pins pierce the fabric as well as the cardboard, others may pin a sleeve to a breast pocket, and still others are hidden in such a way that an unsuspecting person could easily prick a finger in trying to find out how they are attached. Care has to be exercised to avoid such occurrences.

Now, something about those pins. In a quality shirt, the pins are likely to have large round heads, so that they can easily be distinguished by clumsy male fingers from the sharp, pointed end. Cheaper shirts may have pins with old-style tiny heads. These are more dangerous.

On an average man's shirt, there may be as many as ten pins. In the past I have simply discarded the pins, including the large roundheaded ones, by dropping them in the wastebasket. Then one day my wife told me that she could use those pins, so now I collect them every time I open up a new shirt. I place them in an empty film canister (speaking of which, these are fast becoming a rarity with the demise of film as a photographic medium), and when enough of them are collected, the pins end up in the embroidered pin cushion (made in the shape of a colorful turtle) in her sewing box.

Here I will stop and wish everyone a very happy Thanksgiving, as I put on my new shirt.