My Ted Sox t-shirt is in the wash. I wore it on my run today, a route that takes me by Senator Kennedy’s house in Washington, DC. It was the first time in years I’d put it on. I got the shirt in 1995 when I played on the Kennedy staff softball team; it has a silhouette of a baseball player on the front with the word Kennedy across the chest in blue, and Ted Sox on a diagonal in red. On the back is one of the great closing lines in American political rhetoric, “And the dream shall never die” – the last words of his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1980.
As the result of a stroke of dumb luck in 1995 I was asked to move from Phoenix to Washington to work for the Senator. I stayed on staff for about a year. My work there means a lot to me, but I’m not in any books about the family or the Senator’s many accomplishments.
Like most folks in politics I have accumulated and given away countless t-shirts over the years. Most have been put in clothing boxes on corners and as a result somewhere in some developing country there’s a guy in a Jerry Brown for President 1992 shirt. I’ve hung on to a couple, mostly for sentimental reasons. That’s the category the Ted Sox t-shirt falls into. By now the shirt is a bit faded and worn, as shirts get. I wore it a fair amount in 1995, but not a lot since.
I now find myself torn. Once clean, what do I do with it? Hang it in my office next to my “Property of Watergate Bugging Team” t-shirt I had as a kid, casual evidence of presence at a moment in time? Do I put it back in my box of political stuff, next to the “grip and grin” pictures and old convention credentials, saved for some notion of posterity or tools to help the nurses when dementia finally sets in? Or do I put it back into the working t-shirt rotation, knowing that this will only make it wear and fade?
Working for Senator Kennedy was one of the proudest moments of my career. I learned, and continue to learn, from the Senator and those with whom I served more than a decade ago. I suspect that I’ll wear the shirt again tomorrow.
