We were once out to dinner one night with friends when we lived in North Carolina, dining at the clubhouse, and when the evening came to a close, everyone was making sure they were retrieving the correct coat from the coat closet. I guess many people have gone home with a beige raincoat or black leather jacket that looked familiar, only to reach into a pocket the next day and pull out something that didn’t look familiar. Hopefully, people would return the luxury coat they took by mistake, confident that their not so luxurious one will be returned as well. (And if you are on the other side of the dilemma and found yourself in possession of a faux leather jacket with moth holes taking the place of your Neiman Marcus original, you are putting frantic ads in all the local papers to get the original back.) We actually had a strange beige raincoat residing in our coat closet in New York for about seven years. No one ever claimed it. Note: For my New Yorker blog readers, we gave the coat to charity so if it was yours, you’re out of luck.
Most moms have solved the problem of mistaken clothing identity by sewing name labels into every article of clothing that graces their child’s body. It starts with mittens and galoshes in preschool and goes all the way through the sweat shirt that proclaims the name of the college the kid is attending. I was not one of those moms. I hated sewing – as my seventh grade home economics teacher would attest to. Rumor has it she committed herself voluntarily to an asylum after a particularly harrowing lesson involving me, a sewing machine and a recalcitrant buttonhole attachment. So it was no surprise that when my kids sometimes got lost and found themselves roaming the neighborhood, well meaning folks would peer into their undershirts for a name label and start looking up all the “Hanes” in the local phone book to find me.
But then a friend of mine whose son was always attending private schools and overnight tennis camps started passing along her son’s clothes to my boys. “Todd Devenish” the labels in this wonderful second hand clothing pronounced, and since the label was already in the clothes, and I hated sewing, the moniker remained. It wasn’t until years later, one of my sons confessed that when he was in junior high he proudly wore those Todd Devenish polo shirts and sweaters thinking it was a designer label on par with Tommy Hilfiger.
My label sewing prowess never improved over the years. Allan was an Assistant Scoutmaster in the boys’ local Boy Scout troop and everyone was required to have their name clearly displayed in their possessions, particularly when participating in scout outings. Someone found an undershirt and didn’t realize it was Allan’s. They were looking for someone with the initials “BVD”.
