The other day I went into Belk’s Department Store in Canton, and while I was standing at the cash register making a payment on my account, I saw in the middle distance a rack of what looked like seersucker suits in the men’s department.
I asked the sales clerk, who was not a child by any means but a woman of perhaps 45 years, “Are those seersucker suits over there?”
“What?” she said.
“Are those seersucker suits over there?” I repeated.
“What?” she said again, with the same blank look on her face as before.
A light bulb went on in my head. She had no idea what I was talking about. “Do you not understand the word ‘seersucker’?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“You’ve never heard of seersucker?” I asked, not believing my ears.
“Never,” said the sales clerk.
“It’s a type of lightweight, puckered cloth used to make clothing that people wear in warm weather,” I said. “I must be really old. I didn’t realize the word had passed out of use.”
So it is with great joy that I can now announce that the word ‘seersucker’ has not passed out of use. I present with pleasure an article I found online today, “National Seersucker Day Comes Back to Congress, Thank God”.
If you don’t want to do the due diligence, I will summarize. Our illustrious U.S. Congress stopped bickering over their usual differences long enough to agree on something truly important. They formally re-instated National Seersucker Day, which had been a bipartisan Capitol Hill tradition between 1996 and 2012 that somehow was abandoned in 2013. This summer, therefore, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, members of the U.S. House of Representatives will wear seersucker on Wednesdays, and members of the U.S. Senate will wear seersucker on Thursdays.
God’s in His heaven; all’s right with the world.
Or not.
That has yet to be determined. I think the bill is still in committee.
But at least I am not an old codger whose vocabulary, not to mention style, is passé.
I am as au courant as the headlines in your daily newspaper.
It is that lady sales clerk who needs to get a grip. I don’t know how she ever got a job in the clothing department.
Maybe she should raise an Ebenezer.
