Last Sunday was Pentecost Sunday.
Pentecost marks the 50th day after Easter and the day when the Holy Spirit descended upon the early Apostles of Jesus. This singular event is considered by most Christians to be the birth of the Church. The liturgical color associated with Pentecost is red, and so it was suggested we congregants wear this color to celebrate and honor the day.
Red is not a color I often wear. The color palette of my wardrobe tends mostly toward blue, gray and black. I have a couple of red tech shirts, swag from running events, as well as a warm red sweater for cold weather holidays. Nope, these won’t do.
I went to that corner of my closet where I keep my old neckties. Sure enough, I had a red tie that was designed with festive squiggles and little yellow guitars. This might work, I thought. Great. The only downside is: now I have to wear a tie.
This slow resistance to neckties has been going on since I retired from teaching school. At the beginning of my education career, a tie was expected attire for male teachers. I didn’t mind a bit. I had worked many non-necktie jobs before teaching school. A tie would have been pointless or even dangerous in many of my work experiences.
To me, wearing a tie represented an intellectual life, a chance to share the love of literature. Truth is, I quickly learned teaching seventh-grade English had more than a few similarities to my former work lives. In many ways it wasn’t much different than working in a sawmill except that I wore a tie.
Slowly, over the years expectations changed when it came to dress codes for teachers. My wife Becky remembers when women teachers, finally, were allowed to wear pantsuits instead of dresses and skirts. I started teaching a few years after that, but there came a time in my career when ties were not expected and, as you might expect, men came to work without them. I, however, was not a no-tie guy.
In college, I had read an education textbook that argued student discipline improved if teachers dressed like “adults.” Thinking about it, though, that textbook was written at least 50 years ago. Honestly, I am not sure how my neckties added to my authority in those days. Considering how attitudes toward authority by both children and adults have changed since that time, I am not sure any dressing-like-an-adult theory is worth all that much.
Nevertheless, I continued to wear a tie at school even after most of the other male teachers in the corporation had shed them. I am pretty sure I wore a tie on my last in the classroom. However, when I was called to do some substitute teaching the next year, I showed up without one.
I continued to wear a tie each Sunday to church until one Sunday morning I didn’t. I’m not sure why except it was one more thing to do in that morning. No other men in our regular congregation wear ties. The modern fashion zeitgeist seems to assume a radical casualness in male attire in which neckties certainly don’t fit. Unless you are a politician running for president, I guess. Maybe the candidates feel their ties convey power and authority. I wonder if ties will someday go the way of spats and top hats.
But that leaves me with the problem of what to do with all of these ties I continue to hold onto. Many retired teachers I have talked with have a similar problem: We can’t seem to get rid of old school clothes. “I might need this someday,” and “Maybe they can be repurposed,” we argue.
All I know is, because of my necktie collection, I had something red to wear for Pentecost.
Norman Knight, a retired Clark-Pleasant Middle School teacher, writes this weekly column for the Daily Journal. Send comments to [email protected].
