Work Coat

 I'm not exactly sure what this post will be about. There is this phrase that comes back to me periodically, "work coat".

When we departed Virginia for my first assignment as a consular officer in Shanghai, China, the State Department still had a program of arranging observations with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). We flew from Dulles to San Francisco where I did my observations before boarding the big flight to Shanghai. One consultation was with a USCIS office that investigated suspicious immediate relative relationship immigrants, the IR category. The officer I visited was charged with ensuring marriages were real, as in Peter Weir's 1990 movie Green Card staring Gerard Depardieu and Andie MacDowell. This was my very first time wearing a suit and tie for actual work. I took a lunch break on my own. My older brother, Tor, flew to San Francisco to visit a former college professor and see me off to China. (I don't think he would have made the effort if it was just me. It's not that we aren't close. It's more that I get in the way or can't keep up.) We met on the sidewalk outside the USCIS office. I saw him walking towards me wearing his usual outdoorsy casual clothes. He looked right through me, didn't recognize me in the suit and tie. I had to shout "Tor!" as he was walking right past me. It was the first time he'd seen me in a suit and tie, the first time I wore a suit and tie for work.

The suit pants and jacket, beige color, were tailor made in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, by an older Chinese Malaysian gentleman. His shop was called The Mandarin Tailor. The suit is hanging up in my closet at the office waiting to be donated to a Mozambican preparing for his first professional job interview. The fabric is a cheap polyester blend. It doesn't fit in the waist any more but is otherwise a nice looking suit. I'd wear it if it still fit. Oddly, I have a second suit made at the same time by the same tailor, blue, also polyester blend, and it still fits. They were both tailored in two fittings, but the measurements must be a little different, or the fabric more forgiving. I had two more suits tailor made in Shanghai, another tailor made in Hanoi, my Dad gave me one, and I bought a suit off the rack recently from a U.S. Department store before moving to my post in Mozambique. The Chinese suits were crap. The Vietnamese suit better but still fit wrong after three fittings. I like my Dad's suit, but I ripped the upper pant's thigh on a door frame the first time I wore it to work. The department store suit is okay. Those first two suits from Malaysia always fit me the best. Tailor made clothes should be made to fit. I don't know what the fuck I am doing with  tailor made anything, so I guess I just got lucky with those first two suits from Johor Bahru. 

I don't like suits. Two daily things I don't enjoy about my job. 1) Having to carry a cell phone constantly. 2) Supposedly having to wear suits. I mostly don't wear suits in Mozambique where I run my own small consular section.  

But this is not where the phrase "work coat" came into my life. That was much earlier, on my second or third fall/winter working at the YMCA of the Rockies just outside of Estes Park, Colorado, as a seasonal maintenance worker. My seasonal colleague, Michael Connelly, or "Irish Mike" as I thought of him, pushed it on me. "Work coat." He said it in his matter of fact manner, with a wry smile that implied I would be dumb or incompetent to refuse it. It was a demin jean jacket with fake wool fleece inner liner. It was a proper work coat for construction workers to replace the outdoor fleece zip up I wore. Mike had found it in one of the approximately one hundred cabins at the YMCA where we did maintenance work. 

I'll never forget Irish Mike's smile and gravely voice. Cigarettes can do that to a voice. I'll never forget him as a person, or our old colleague, Oscar. They both had mustaches. They both were good with tools and had clever minds for fixing things. 

I was a college student who worked autumns at the YMCA to help pay my very limited school costs. Governor Zell Miller's Hope Grant ensured 100% of tuition, fees, and books were covered at the University of Georgia. Mike and Oscar were construction workers, had high school diplomas, helped mold my perspective of America, Americans, work, politics. 

I contrast that work coat Mike gave me with my foreign service officer suits. I don't fit in either world. I loved that work coat.