Notes from my Knapsack 1-2-20

Notes from my Knapsack 1-2-20

Jeff Gill

 

Tied up in knots

___

 

One challenge in growing up today is knowing when you have.

 

As the oldest in my family, I think back to the important step it meant when Mom let me put down a regular fork for one of my younger siblings instead of the salad fork that "little kids" used.

 

Older folk than I talk about getting long pants or other now past rituals of maturity. One that I share with earlier generations, which now is starting to make a divide between me and my younger cohorts, is the masculine act of tying a tie.

 

In younger days, I had the classic clip-on tie, bow or straight down type. But you knew you were on the direct route to manhood when you learned how to tie a tie, and it was your road to walk on your own when you tied it yourself.

 

Now I have about thirty ties in my closet, and rarely wear them. The holiday season gets out the six or seven I have that are Christmas themed, and there's a couple of Halloween and patriotic and religious ones each, plus a Chicago Cubs tie I had to get in the year of their World series victory. But more and more, ties are an anomaly, an aberration where they were once an expectation.

 

I'm a Christian preacher, yet even in church I'm often the only one in worship with a tie on, and truth be told I have a fair number of Sundays when I don't even wear one to preach – something I could not have imagined 30 years ago. I still feel a bit obligated to put one on for funerals and weddings, even when I'm not the officiant, but it's not unusual for even the groom to be open collar.

 

College presidents and captains of industry are eschewing neckwear; putting on a tie is a statement of sorts, but darned if I know what it is. I know bow ties are a Gordon Gee thing, and wearing one seems to suggest a certain sort of intellectualism, or at least idiosyncrasy. But I have to say on those occasions when I put on a hand-tied (not clip-on) bow tie, there's a certain awe, or perhaps just bewilderment, as other men ask "did you tie that yourself?" Knowing how to tie a necktie knot is an esoteric skill up there with rebuilding carburetors or sharpening an axe.

 

And I've found myself tying a great many ties at weddings for the groomsmen in the last decade. It's no longer a rite of passage for young men, and even fathers often aren't themselves up to speed with the whole Windsor, Four-in-hand, adjustable knot concept, so they can't teach it to sons.

Somewhere I heard that the necktie craze began with Croatian mercenaries having a certain flair for how they tied their scarves, marching into Paris, and these Croatians from Croatia by some linguistic devolution became "cravats." Could be, and I'd hate to look it up to disprove it. A fascinating book my fashion design professor sister told me about, "Sex and Suits," explained how the modern dress suit got its medieval start as foundational garb underneath a suit of armor. So why not a Croatian scarf giving birth to my Italian silk tie?

 

As you prepare for work, or play, or going to church, or costuming for an occasion, men just need to remember one thing: don't complain to women about having to tie a tie. Seriously, just don't.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he still wears ties, but not as often as he used to. Tell him about fashions you're glad or sad to see go out of style at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.