My father, bless his heart, had caviar tastes on a bologna budget. Nowhere was this more evident than his closet, which was full of name-brand, but sometimes garish, clothes.
When I was a kid back in the 1970s, he would visit the top menswear stores in Nashville, Levy's, and shop the closeout rack, which meant buying items that more well-heeled customers had already rejected through several rounds of markdowns. This included garments in shocking primary colors when earth tones were the rule. As a result, my dad and I often showed up at church services dressed in greens, reds and yellows, looking as if we'd just come from cocktails at the country club.
Once when I was in high school, Dad bought me a wool sports coat with red geometric patterns. It looked like it had been designed on a Spirograph. Still, I wore that coat for 10 years until it finally got too small. The only compliment I ever got on it was from a college professor in his 70s who drove a Jaguar.
Now, as middle-age baby boomer, I find myself slipping into some of Dad's old habits -- some might say eccentricities.
I've noticed that two items in my wardrobe seem to take people aback: a pair of bright-red casual pants and my wide-brimmed hiking hat. Worn together, the make me look like a cross between golfer Greg Norman and that old coot on the State Farm television commercials who dangles a dollar bill on the end of a fishing pole.
I bought the pants off the closeout rack at Dillards department store. My 7-year-old son was quick to raise a red flag.
"So," I said looking at myself in a full-length mirror, "how do these look?"
"Um, too reddish?" he offered.
"Maybe, but I'm getting them anyway," I said. "I like them and they're cheap."
"OK," he said, "but I wouldn't wear them every day."
Being defiant in the face of common sense is one of the early warning signs of eccentricity.
Imagine my excitement last weekend when I spotted an article in the New York Times on the ascendancy of red pants. OK, it was more about how top fashion designers had tried and failed many times to start a red-pants trend, like sports fans determined to start "the wave" in a one-sided stadium. But at least it was an acknowledgement that there are red-pants advocates in the world.
"Every summer," wrote a Times fashion reporter, "it seems red pants threaten to become a thing. Every summer, they seem trapped by the old cultural baggage."
The headline on the story was "Invasion of the Lobster Legs." The report traced these fits and starts to a stigma attached to red pants in England, where they are associated -- not affectionately -- with the idle rich. As one who aspires to be both idle and rich, this did not bother me one bit.
My hiking hat, an object of some bemusement among friends and family, is my pride and joy. I once sprinted back to the Jimmy John's sandwich shop when I left it in a booth.
It's called a Tilley hat and, although it looks like a $20 Walmart special, it cost four times that much at a swanky outdoors store. Made in Canada, it has care instructions written in both English and French.
I wear the hat on my afternoon power walks and when sitting on the sidelines at my kids' sporting events. It has vents along the top that keep my head cool, and the brim wards off sunburn. It also comes with little cards that slide into a hidden pocket in the crown that you can hand out to strangers who inquire about the hat. Oddly, I still have all the cards.
It has recently been brought to my attention that my older son, age 12, no longer requires my attendance at his cross-country meets. The hat?
The glory of getting older is that you no longer care what other people think about you -- or your sun hat, or your trousers. Heck, I might even stipulate in my will that I want to be buried in my handsome Tilley hat and my fine red pants.
Wouldn't that be fancy?
My hope is that someone would then utter the magic words: "Doesn't he look natural?"
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.