My Dad was famous in the family for his frugality. He was, after all, a WW2 veteran who came home in 1946 with a suitcase full of uniforms, a footlocker full of 12-gauge shotgun shells, and the khaki shirt and "pink" trousers he stood in. He took up a small farm near Independence, Iowa, got married the next year to the girl who became my Mom, and started what would end up being a family of five kids--my three sisters, my brother, and me. 

While Dad could be generous - nothing was too good for my Mom, for instance - for himself, he took frugality to an extreme degree. Granted, he grew up in the Great Depression, as did Mom, and that economic crisis indelibly marked everyone who lived through it, even people on small farms in Iowa who were already pretty parsimonious.

But boy, that vest. That was the ultimate expression of Dad's frugality.

I don't know when or where Dad bought that vest. I hadn't been born yet, after all. The best Dad could estimate, later in life, was that he had bought it in Waterloo around 1955 or so. He bought it for choring on the farm on cool spring and fall days, and it was his favorite. At one point in the late '70s, the collar was somehow torn off. I remember Dad taking the vest into his workshop, sewing the collar back on with a length of 4-pound monofilament fishing line, and sealing the seam with epoxy cement.

At one point or another, all of us siblings tried buying Dad newer, more reputable vests. That in itself was a challenge. Dad was a stubborn old man, and utterly refused to wear anything with bright colors - especially not with a corporate logo. "I'm not giving some big company free advertising," he would assert. "I am not a walking billboard." But we gifted him, over Father's Day, his birthday, and Christmas, with a series of new black, gray, and navy blue vests. He would wear them for a week or so. Then we would find him once more in his old favorite, and when asked about one of the new vests, he would mutter that it itched, or he didn't like the way it fit, and he had already given it away.

See Related: Photographs and Memories: Parsimony

Sunday Gun Day Vol. II Ep. XII - John Browning's 'Other' Shotgun

I remember Dad wearing that old vest in some of my earliest memories when the folks were still farming near Fairbanks, Iowa. I remember him wearing it outdoors on cool days through the '60s, '70s, and '80s, right up until his final illness in 2018, when he was 94 years old.

When Dad died, my sisters, my brother, and I went through the house, deciding what to do with what stuff. Mom was 89 then, and with her health deteriorating, she couldn't live alone; so she was moving into an assisted-living center, and we had 71 years' worth of the artifacts of their marriage to go through. Dad's (and Mom's) wishes were to be cremated, and when he died, my sisters decided that the appropriate thing to do was to put that old vest in the cremation container with Dad's remains; we all thought it was oddly poetic. Dad wouldn't have cared - as he generally pointed out about such things, "Why would I care? I'll be dead." But it made us feel better.

But then, we were unable to find the vest. 

Dad hadn't taken it to the hospital when he fell ill that last time. He had gone by ambulance, and his vest was still in its usual place in the coat closet. He didn't have it in the nursing home where he spent his last few days in hospice care. But we couldn't find it. It wasn't in the coat closet. It wasn't anywhere in the house. Nobody, not any of us five kids, none of the adult grandchildren, had seen it - not since Dad died.

We're all wondering, to this day, if somehow, Dad found a way to take it with him. He was a man of great determination and iron will - if anyone could find a way to do so, it would have been my Dad. He did, after all, make a cheap nylon vest last over 60 years.

I owe everything I am as a man, as a husband, father, and grandfather, to my Dad. He was the finest man I've ever known, but boy, did he ever have a stubborn streak. And when I laugh about his old vest, my wife will occasionally point sardonically at the battered old pair of roper boots I've been wearing for over 20 years, which are still my favorites, despite my having newer, fancier boots. I guess some things do run in families, after all, and if Dad was a stubborn, willful old coot in his later years, that may well be why I look in the mirror nowadays, when I'm in my mid-60s, and see just such a stubborn, willful old coot. 

There are worse things an aging fellow could be, I guess, and for that, I can only say, "Thanks, Dad."

But I'm still wondering just where the heck that vest went.