“You look like you’re ready for the cold!” the Starbucks cashier said, cheerily.
“Uh-huh,” I grunted with a forced smile, doing my best to squelch her energy without being overtly rude. It’s a delicate balance, but I’m a master, if I say so myself.
Yes, I was ready for the cold. I was wearing a down coat over a fleece jacket, a wool hat, thick gloves, and insulated boots. There was a reason for this: the wind chill factor was 20 below, and there was half a foot of snow on the ground. Nevertheless, the way she said it clearly implied that she found something quaintly odd about wearing warm clothes in cold weather. If I’m not mistaken, in her mind she was humoring an eccentric old man.
After I received my “tall” coffee (I know you’re wondering—or at least I hope you’re wondering—what I was doing in Starbucks in the first place; more on that in a later issue), I glanced around the restaurant and concluded that her view seemed to enjoy majority status. There were six other customers in the place, of whom only three had any sort of outer garment with them. Of those, one was an unlined denim jacket, one was a hooded sweatshirt, and one was a legitimate winter coat.
It’s an oddity that I have noticed with increasing regularity in recent years: the same people who prepare for a half-inch of snow by holing up in their bomb shelters with their flashlights and bottled water will walk around in a true deep freeze as if they’re at a Labor Day picnic. Standard New Hampshire attire for a bone-chilling February day includes a t-shirt (possibly with a sweatshirt over it, but that seems to be more for fashion than for warmth), light-weight pants or shorts (or pajamas), and sneakers or smooth-soled shoes that allow for maximum sliding. Socks are optional, and hats and gloves are unheard of.
I know these people are cold. I see them shivering, dashing across the parking lot as fast as they can, trying to navigate the snow banks in their clogs and boat shoes, acting as if they were caught in a freak, sudden Arctic blast, even though the temperature hasn’t been above 15 in two weeks.
And yet, I strongly suspect that every one of them does, in fact, own a winter coat, gloves, and a hat. This leads me to ask a question: Why? If a wind chill of minus 20 isn’t the appropriate occasion for wearing your coat, what exactly are you saving it for?
I’ll also bet that these are the same people who start whining, sometime in early December, that they’ve had enough of winter. Hey, here’s a tip to get you through the winter: wear some clothes!
I think I understand what’s going on. Given the choice between physical suffering and actually doing a little work, most people will choose suffering every time. People would like to be comfortable, but not if it means having to put both arms into a coat. And reaching up to put a hat on one’s head comes dangerously close to exercise. Besides, hats can mess up the hairstyles that have so many New Hampshirites contending for spots on People’s list of the world’s 100 most beautiful people.
So, if you’re just walking from the house to the car and from the car to the store, why bother with another layer? It’s just too complicated.
Unfortunately, people, that’s not how life works. Here’s how it works: It’s cold, you wear a coat. It snows, you wear boots. There’s really not much to debate here, so stop clowning around.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not worried about anyone’s comfort. For the most part, I enjoy seeing people suffer from their own stupidity. It’s how I know God’s doing His job. What I don’t like is the embarrassment of having to acknowledge that I am, technically, a member of the same species.
So I’m proposing that willful coatlessness be classified as a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in prison. It’s not that going wrapless is, by itself, such a grand societal harm. Like most Americans, I believe people have a right to do whatever they want with their bodies, as long as they don’t do anything I personally find offensive (just as I share the majority interpretation of the First Amendment—people have a right to say whatever they want, as long as they don’t disagree with me).
The coat-free lifestyle is, rather, an indicator of a general cluelessness that inevitably leads to more dangerously pathological conduct, such as using “disconnect” as a noun or baking brownies with nuts in them. Round up the unbundled masses, and other plagues on our nation—car alarms, corn chowder, and (dare we hope?) pumpkin spice coffee—will quickly disappear.
And there is one more benefit: a dragnet for coatless people on a blustery February day in New Hampshire is certain to remove a few presidential candidates from the streets. That alone would justify the effort.
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Stop clowning around. Forward The Johnston Papers to a friend.
