I work in an office where we aren’t allowed to wear jeans.

The norm is Dockers or dress pants, even though there is rarely a visitor to our engineering area, and I’ve destroyed countless pairs of pants going out onto the shop floor wearing them.

I wear jeans. I’ve worn jeans since the diapers came off. I wore them because they were tough and lasted a long time, and I outgrew them before they wore out.

Oh, sure, at school we wore uniforms, at mass we wore the best we had. It was the 60’s, and our small town culture was still stuck in the 40’s. Men wore hats, women dresses, always.

Still, I wore jeans. I wore jeans to work, i wore jeans to play, I wore jeans to school whenever we had a uniform free day (Once a year!!) All through seminary I had to wear a suit, and tie, every day, all year, for six years. I RAN home to put on jeans. Oh, it wasn’t allways that they were more comfortable- shit, Gramma made jeans for me until I was ten or twelve, and the denim she used would have been at home as the cord in radial tires. I often chafed so much that I had to grease myself.

Then, denim became the uniform of the hippie, and frankly, that sucked. The moment people started associating hippies with denim, I was pissed.
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