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Photo:
Mike Kerrigan
Sometimes inspiration strikes in unlikely places. Filling the tank of a rental car near the airport in Green Bay, Wis., I paid at the pump and went inside to buy some bottled water and aspirin. On the way to the cash register, I felt strangely compelled to flip through the T-shirt rack, not something I usually do at gasoline stations. In fact, I can’t recall ever doing so before. One shirt, buried in the middle of the rack, had what I can only describe as an inner radiance to it, so I bought it.
The colors—orange and green, two-thirds of the Irish tricolor—were perfect, as was the fit. Best of all, it bore the charmingly old-school dinosaur logo of Dino Stop, the family-owned gas station where I’d pulled over. Nothing about the stop warranted such a commemorative purchase, but at this point the shirt had an almost mystical hold on me.
“What an awesome T-shirt,” I observed to the clerk at the register. A steal at $15, it was exactly what it was supposed to be, no more and no less.
The clerk, at once confirming my aesthetic sense and displaying the warmth characteristic of Midwesterners, replied without a hint of sarcasm: “I get to wear it to work.” He, too, radiated an unmistakable goodness.
I don’t know what made me so profoundly appreciate the perfection of purpose in a scrap of colored fabric. It just felt good to look at the created universe with a sense of wonder.
It was joyful to see a shirt and then a person in terms not of cost but value; not in isolation but as part of a greater whole that’s always there, even if I cannot always see it. The moment was more than joyful; it was self-forgetful. It was heavenly.
Mr. Kerrigan is an attorney in Charlotte, N.C.
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Appeared in the October 22, 2022, print edition.
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