This Old Sweater

Moi, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

My friend Greg wrote about an old shirt that he owns, and since it's my hope to write here on a daily basis (at least for a little while), the topic inspired me as I, too, have an article of clothing that I have been wearing for a long time, and which still brings a certain comfort to me.

My story probably isn't half as interesting as Greg's, but in February of 2005, I attended the International Folk Alliance conference in Montréal, Québec, Canada. I was booking a folk music concert series at the time, as well as coördinating the music for the now-defunct Great Lakes Folk Festival. It might have been my first time out of the country as an adult, now that I think about it, as the only time I recall being in Canada previous to that was on a family vacation as a kid.

Since it was February in Montréal, I naturally brought warm clothes with me because I expected to wander from the hotel while I was there. I had joined Flickr the previous September (I can't believe it's been over twenty years now!) and had become part of a thriving community of people sharing photographs and stories and their senses of humour and so many aspects of their lives. No social media site can match that today—not Facebook, not Instagram, not the hellscape once known as Twitter. Flickr was the be all, end all of social media.

But I digress...

I was staying at the Hyatt Regency, just a short walk from Old Montréal, so I planned to get to the oldest part of the then three-hundred-sixty-three-year-old city to take photographs to share on Flickr. I didn't have a really heavy coat at the time, despite that I lived in Michigan, but layers would keep me warm. One of the layers was this sweatshirt.

Trois, ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Odds are you haven't been to a Folk Alliance conference before, but during the day, there are break-out sessions about various aspects of the music business aimed at both musicians and bookers/producers, along with official showcases by musicians produced by the Folk Alliance. Musicians also hold "guerrilla" showcases, typically in their bedrooms or in suites if they happen to have garnered sponsorship. I've not been to a conference in quite some time, but the guerrilla sets were discouraged while the official showcases were going on so as not to splinter the audience during that block of time.

So, once the offical showcases had ended late in the evening, the unofficial showcases would run until almost all hours of the night. Since the hotel was pretty much nothing but conference goers, it didn't tend to create a problem. Also, there were "non-music" floors for people who had more interest in sleeping than attending these mini-concerts. Perhaps the biggest problem was—as a booker wanting to check out specific musicians—being able to get from one room to another in short periods of time, especially if it meant going from one floor to another when everyone else was trying to do the same thing at the same time.

Which is what leads me to the sweater. You know... the one in the photograph at the top of this page?

I can't recall the specific circumstances of the night in question, but it's all too likely that I had returned to the hotel either from a walk or from having dinner with several friends, and after dropping off my coat in my room, I went about my magical mystery tour wearing the XXL sweater, and somewhere along the way, I got too warm wearing it so I took it off and carried it around with me from showcase to showcase. I most certainly had a conference tote bag with me, but as it was no doubt filled with CDs and press kits, the sweatshirt was either tucked under my arm or—more likely—tied around my waist so that I wouldn't have to carry it under my arm, and somewhere along the way, either in a hotel room or hallway or elevator, I dropped it. When I noticed it, I backtracked a bit in hopes of recovering it but to no avail.

So, on my flight out, knowing that the airplane cabin would be cold (they're always cold!), I bought a new sweater at an airport gift shop, and while it no doubt was expensive to some degree, I have certainly gotten my money's worth out of it over the course of the last nearly twenty years. It has also made an appearance in many of the self-portraits I've posted at Flickr since that time, although sometimes not always an obvious component of the photographs. It has traveled to Paris, Oslo, Prince Edward Island, and the United Kingdom as well as many places throughout the United States in twenty years. In fact, one totally unexpected benefit of wearing the sweater in Paris in 2005, when Bush was President, was that people guessed that I was from Canada. That was nice.

Unlike Greg's shirt, my sweater hasn't developed any holes. The zipper is still intact, but the elastic at the ends of the sleeves has been stretched out from pulling the sleeves up to my elbows too many times. The green in the fabric has also faded a fair amount. Like Greg, I put it on during the cold months while I'm indoors to help against the chill in the air (especially since our steam heat seems to work only when it's warm outside), and lately, unike Greg, I've even been wearing it outdoors.

History. Comfort.