My Florida.

Sartorially speaking, my father was a man of almost spectacular dullness. During the later decades of his working life in New York, he bought two suits a year, one navy and one brown. He never went to work in anything but a white shirt so starched it almost cut his throat. His ties were all dark, and so timid in pattern that you pictured them cowering in the closet, each praying it would not have to hang around his neck that day and suffer the agony of public exposure.

If Monday through Friday he looked like a businessman, on Saturday and Sunday he looked like a businessman who had been fired months before and had gone to seed. In spring and fall his uniform for working in the garden never varied: a fedora, retired from business service, that appeared to have been trampled by a herd of buffalo; dress pants, also retired, shiny in the seat; collared shirt; brown zip-up gabardine jacket that I believe was manufactured during the Coolidge administration. Blue denim never touched my father's body. Canvas never touched his feet. He wore shoes with laces.

With a couple of dreary sports jackets standing in for the suits, he maintained this style even after he retired, my mother died, and--desperately lonely, for he had loved my mother more than he knew--he married a widow they had known throug...

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