On guys who wear shorts

My eldest daughter is trying out being a teenager. She is twelve, going on thirteen, but is aware of the tropes of teenagerdom. She has always been a “company man,” as my wife and I like to say. She takes her parents’ side in squabbles with “the children” (her three sisters, her locution), and truly she’s been with us for most of our marriage, a child who had young parents, not so unlike, as she likes to point out, Rory Gilmore.

So she’s always been mature to the point of being a bit uptight. She’s a classic first child, loving rules and structure. Two years or so ago, she came in to my office in tears, realizing, she said, that she may well have been an enthusiastic Nazi, since she loves to join things and always wants to please. I told her her very tears were evidence she was no incipient Nazi, and that there was considerable freedom in knowing one’s own tendencies. Nevertheless, I had to admit, she had a point.

Anyway, teenaged rebellion does not come naturally. She is, as my friend Mary Townsend observed of her own eldest child (who is the same age as mine, and who I hope will someday meet her) “putting in the work.” She’s aware that being rude to your parents, being moody and difficult, is a script she’s supposed to be reading from, but can’t get over the sense she’s been miscast. And so she doesn’t really mean it when she sasses us. Sometimes I’ll tell her she can’t have or do something, and indeed her once-chipper “ok” comes through slightly clenched teeth. So she’s tempted, but is too much herself to throw it all away for what she understands is just one more phase of life. Irony, Jonathan Lear observes, is the gap between who one is and who one aspires to be. If this is the case, then my twelve-year-old is currently putting on an irony masterclass, since she does not and perhaps cannot be what she half-aspires to.

She slips in and out of being a teenager the way one tries on shirts in the morning. Is this the right look today? My colleague Philip Lee once told me that eleven year old girls are the best humanity has to offer—diligent, virtuous, conscientious, intelligent, sweet, righteous. They’re in the place between childhood and teenagerdom that Rousseau tries to extend as far as possible in Emile. Apparently this is well-known among educators, and, in middle schools, sixth grade is coveted by experienced teachers, because the students have the abilities of older students, but generate only a fraction of the drama of grades seven and up. Rousseau describes happiness as a sort of completely-overlapping Venn diagram, where the two circles are “capacities” and “desires.” You’re able to get what you want, and want what you get. Sounds good to me.

Nevertheless, time marches on, and we’re all getting older. I recently put on a pair of corduroys with an Oxford and a tie, topping it all off with my beloved J. Crew “shacket.” I asked my twelve-year-old what she thought of the outfit and after very little consideration, she said, witheringly: “dad, why do you dress so preppy? what are you prepping for at your age—death?” I told her it’s just the type of guy I have more or less always been, and if she thinks it’s embarrassing to be preppy at almost-forty, how much worse would it be if I suddenly started dressing differently? Her response: “maybe you don’t have a great idea of what ‘embarrassing’ is.” Touché. (She would later apologize, even though I told her it was hilarious, and I was proud she was developing a bit of an edge. She’s also a type of guy.)

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But I started writing this because I had another type of guy in mind. Throughout the pandemic there was a young fellow who walked up my street each day, who, in the very depths of the Canadian winter, wore shorts. I would see him every morning after I dropped my younger kids off at school. He wore shorts in September, and kept wearing them, incredibly, through February, March, until everyone caught up with him again in June. Evidently, some people have more “brown fat” than others, and young guys, especially, don’t stop moving and have high metabolisms, so they simply don’t get that cold. Whatever the reason, I’m sure his parents told him that shorts should not be an option in New Brunswick in February, but he persisted.

I was running late today, and so I took a different route on my walk to work, when, to my delight, I saw shorts kid for the first time in about six months. His backpack stuck out about four feet behind him, and he was reading as he walked. He is a type of guy, a shorts guy. My wife’s uncle Adrian, a resident of Northern Maine, is also a shorts guy. Every day of the year, he wears shorts, and it is a symbol of many things I like about him. When formulating what makes a specific type of guy, we need paradigms.

I don’t think the why of the shorts guy is as important as the what. It’s fairly common for people to complain about too much air-conditioning—when I lived in Texas, I’d wear shorts to the library in the summer, sweat on my walk, only to don a sweater thirty seconds after I went inside. But the shorts guy accommodates himself to the climate instead of the climate to himself. With more shorts guys, we’d have fewer cardigan gals. Unburdened by redundant shin fabric, the shorts guy is also free from convention. Would a shorts guy ever become a Nazi? Well, the mysteries, the darknesses, of the human heart are too deep to be penetrated by a Wednesday morning stack, but if you’re willing to buck the expectations of others, of “common sense,” to quietly protest accepted wisdom, you’re free in a way we pants-wearers simply aren’t.¹ The gap between being and aspiration, one suspects, is smaller for shorts guys than for the rest of us. The seasons change, but shorts guys don’t, a northern star for those of us whose desires outstrip our capacities.

1. Could one be a shorts guy in pants? I don’t see why not.