Forever in Blue Jeans

        I am in my seventies, the age where you pause and think about death. “Death,” more in terms of preparedness versus morbidity.
        My spouse and I had everything laid out. Our wills, power of attorney, trusts and personal wishes. It was also time to go through the many boxes that held years of hoarded memorabilia. While going through our personal stuff, I came across a pair of Levi jeans that were in a box with other clothing. I called my wife to come and see this relic. 
        “These must have been from my college years. Look at the holes. Look at the pictures of flowers someone drew on them with a highlighter.”
        “Yeah. I wonder who the artist was,” she said with a wry smile.
        “I can’t get rid of these. I want to be buried in these. These were the beginning of my formative years.”
        I remember the Christmas back in the sixties when my hippie cousin gave them to me. It was Boyd who played a part in my formative years.
        “Your cousin, Boyd?”
        “Yes. That Boyd. The one who grew up with Michael Keaton here in Moon.”
        The acid dropping counter revolutionary who took twenty some people to Woodstock in a U-Haul truck. I always looked up to him. He was a good guy – and still is.
        It was he who gifted me my first pair of Levis back then. I was nerdy and Boyd felt he was helping with my self-actualization.
        Back then, my mother, who worked in Pittsburgh, would go to Gimbels basement to buy my clothes: Chinos and button-down shirts. We were not allowed to wear Levis or any type of jeans back then. When Christmas break ended, I tested the waters by wearing those jeans to school. I was promptly sent home. I thought there and then that Levis fit with my attitude of being a contrarian. Not to mention the comfortable fit they provided. Nothing like getting into a broken-in pair of Levis.
        The moniker “contrarian” suited me fine. As the years passed, I found myself wearing jeans whenever I could get away with it. Looking back on my career in corporate America as a pharmaceutical rep, I recall wearing them on a sales call to a doctor’s office and heard one doc exclaim, “I never saw that before!”
        Not long after that, I was fired.
        After many attempts at many different jobs and many terminations, I decided I would get my MBA and at the same time, manage a retail store to pay the bills. No problem here. I could wear my faithful Levis. But I had a notion that I could do a better job than the owners at running their business. I was fired when I suggested that in a college town, they needed to carry Levis, Guess jeans and Birkenstock sandals. I decided to become an entrepreneur and made an offer to buy the business. My store was around the corner from the college campus. My instincts proved to be right. The store became a hit with the college scene. 
        But along came a mall and, there went the business. Fate dealt a hand, and I was at the right place at the right time. One of my clothing customers offered to buy me into a startup company, and I jumped in with both feet. The bonus was that as a partner, I got to wear my Levis for the next twenty-five years. I was pleased as punch. Here I was, living a life on my terms, thumbing my nose at the establishment naysayers. I was one lucky bastard, not necessarily because of the money, sweet as it was, but as the Neil Diamond song goes, “Forever in Blue Jeans.” Where would I be if I had not gotten those jeans?