Beech Tree News Network

I ordered a Caribbean Joe shirt for Garey, in green—there were six colors to choose from.  Garey loves green, but the shirt is a bit brighter than it appeared on the website.  Actually, it’s a lot brighter than it appeared on the website.  I’m keeping it, on the outside chance that we might be invited to a luau, plus I don’t want to go to the trouble of sending it back.

                When I was hanging the shirt in his closet, I remembered how my stepmom used to order clothes for herself from catalogues.  She always took us to the store to buy our clothes, but all of hers came from inexpensive mail-order catalogues, like Montgomery Ward.

 All of us kids would get excited when the mail carrier delivered a package for Mom.  We always told her how pretty the new dress was, even if it was a substitute for what she had actually ordered.  That was the odd thing about ordering back then. If the catalogue people were out of your size or preferred color, they had the prerogative to substitute one item for another.  Mom didn’t have the money to send anything back, so she just made do and wore whatever they sent her.

I was thirteen when Mom became pregnant with her last child, my younger half-brother, Mark.  At the time, she was pushing forty, and the pregnancy came as a surprise.  I remember her ordering two tent dresses—dresses without a waistline, popular in the late sixties—from the catalogue.  She rotated them, washing one, while wearing the other.  I felt so sorry for her.  When I think back on that time and those conditions, I have no idea how she made it through any of that with even an ounce of sanity to spare.  When I think of all she endured, I am reminded of an Eleanor Roosevelt quote, “A woman is like a tea bag…you never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water.”

Although I mostly order stuff online, I still order from catalogues.  Recently, I ordered one of those wide-brimmed Scala sun hats from a catalogue.  They’re made from canvas, and you’re supposed to be able to pack them any-which-way in your suitcase, and when you take them out, they’re supposed to spring right back to life.  I couldn’t get mine to spring back to life straight out of the box.  I put it back onto the cardboard shaper it was shipped on, set it on the dining room table, and rolled and tried to reshape the brim till I was worn out.

About the time I was getting ready to put it back into the box with a return shipping label, Garey walked into the kitchen, grabbed a green plastic bowl—almost identical to the green color of the hat—plopped the bowl over the hat, and it instantly sprang to life.

“If it loses its shape when you take the bowl off,” he said, “Just wear the hat with the bowl on top of it.  They’re the same color, so nobody will notice.”

You know what?  That hat is about the same shade of green as the Caribbean Joe shirt.  If Garey wears the hat with the bowl on top, the shirt won’t attract any unwanted attention, and he won’t have to wait for an invitation to a luau before he gets to wear it.

I am pretty disgruntled with the last items I ordered from a catalogue.  Garey and I decided we want to grow almond trees.  It took the catalogue company six weeks to get them to us, and by the time they arrived, it was too hot and dry to set them out.  We put them in large pots near the house, so we can keep them watered until fall, when we will be able to set them out. 

When the trees arrived, they looked like two dead sticks.  I put them in the big pots, and after about a week, one of the trees started to sprout.  The other tree still looked like a dead stick.  I called the dead-stick people, and they told me the tree was probably still in shock from the shipping ordeal.  They told me to perform the scratch test to see if it was still alive.  The scratch test goes as so: If you scratch a place on the bark, and the wood underneath is white, yellow, green or light brown, the tree is alive; black or dark brown wood signifies the tree is dead.  They told me if the tree is dead, I have to return the original shipping label with a description of the tree in order to get a replacement.  This was a week ago.  The test revealed the tree is alive, but it doesn’t look that way to me, and I have no idea what I did with the original shipping label.  Maybe, the catalogue people won’t mind if I substitute a shipping label of a different size and color.