It’s just too cold to act cool

Lows in the 40s. Time to write about coats.

Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Get serious. There’s anthrax, there’s airport security, why bother us with a silly thing about — what was it again?

Coats. It was coats.

I love ‘em, don’t you? Your answer will tell me more than you intend. It will tell your age.

If you grab a coat when the thermometer says 40 degrees (or 30 or 20), that means you are either (a) a grown-up or (b) a little kid. You are not (c) a teen-ager.

I don’t need any research on this. I live it, every morning.

Take Monday. My high school-bound trio of carpool passengers piled into the van loaded with backpacks and lunches. It was 6 a.m., foggy and freezing.

We’re as close now to November as September. By my calendar, that means wear a coat. My riders all wore hooded sweatshirts, which is how they win the argument, how they get out of the house.

Only one kid was zipped into a fleecy coat, the one strapped into his car seat. I can muscle that guy, but I don’t need physical force to put a coat on him. About to turn 3, he remains of the opinion that coats are cool. He has a thick new red one he begs to wear.

His brother, almost 15, has a new red coat, too. He thought the snowboard-style jacket was cool enough to buy; it’s just not cool enough to wear.

Now, it’s hanging (or stuffed) in his school locker. He wore it that pouring-rain day last week. I made him wear it. And I haven’t seen it since, most likely because the rest of the known teen-age world shuns all coats, no matter the weather.

Don’t believe it? Check out a high school football game. Forget coats, I saw tank-top girls one recent night.

I pumped a piece of my tax relief check into the economy by buying coats for my boys. I’ve done my duty. If you see that too-cool son of mine at a bus stop in a short-sleeved shirt, if he’s shivering and soaked, don’t point fingers at me.

The kid has a coat, several coats. Gloves, too, and a hat, not that he’d be caught dead or alive in those. I’ve done my best. He claims he isn’t cold.

My attachment to outerwear is an accident of geography. In my native Spokane, skip a coat and you’re a human Popsicle.

So I have a ton of coats. I collect them the way other folks stockpile souvenir T-shirts. You didn’t think I was noble enough to spend my entire tax rebate on boys, did you?

I have a new pea coat, black. My old blue pea coat has been downgraded to dog-walking. I’ve waited impatiently for a chill serious enough to warrant wool. It’s here, I think.

If it’s wet, I’ll go with my black raincoat. If it’s just misty, I’ll toss on my battered suede jacket. If it’s not too cold, there’s the canvas barn jacket my husband gave me for my 40th birthday. He knew a good gift — another coat.

Alas, I am missing my single favorite item of clothing (yup, a coat). When I dropped my daughter at college, I left my jean jacket draped over a chair in her dorm. She’s in California. She’s busy. I doubt I’ll see it before Thanksgiving.

This isn’t just any jacket. It’s a dark indigo, perfect-fitting, Calvin Klein but they don’t make it anymore, can’t-live-without-it version of the American classic. It went with skirts, khakis, everything, my daughter warned, except jeans — "too ’80s, Mom."

Now it’s in her possession. When last we talked, my daughter was enjoying an 86-degree day.

So send back the coat, baby.

I suppose I could lie, tell her I need that jean jacket pronto. I could say her brother wants to borrow it, that he finally got cold enough to throw on a coat.

Nah, she would never buy that one.

Contact Julie Muhlstein via e-mail at muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com, write to her at The Herald, P.O. Box 930, Everett, WA 98206, or call 425-339-3460.