When is the last time you thought about dickies?

There are some unexpected advantages to hanging around outside the synagogue on a sunny Saturday morning. One of them is the idle social chit chat with people who you like but never get the change to talk to. Another is the strange directions that conversations with those people can take that gets you thinking about things that haven't crossed your mind in years -- maybe even decades.

Last Saturday morning that happened to me. There was no need to hurry home for lunch at 10:30 in the morning and it was just the kind of day that begged for mingling. I was chatting with two friends after the services and somehow we got on to the subject of buying suitably modest clothes for our daughters. I could retell the entire conversation from the beginning but it probably wouldn't make any sense after the fact. Suffice it to say that we ended up talking about how religious teenage girls in Ra'anana who prefer to cover their arms past their elbows all year round had stumbled upon an interesting technique. They take very colourful knee-socks and they cut off the feet. Then, they wear regular t-shirts and cover their arms with these knitted tubes. It's very cute in a teenage-funky way.

We all agreed that that was both funny and clever.

Now you would think that after that non-specific vote on humour and brilliance that that topic would have run its course ... but it didn't. Because at that very moment, my friend Miriam brought up a product that I hadn't thought about in years. She said: "It's kind of like dickies."

When she said the word "dickies" it took me about 20 seconds to go back through my mental rolodex and recapture that long lost memory. Then, all of a sudden, I just cracked up. Dickies. Haven't thought about them in a million years? Have you? Or more important ... do you even know what dickies are?

In case you have no idea what I am talking about (maybe it was a Canadian thing, who knows), dickies were those fake turtlenecks that you wore under a collared shirt so that it would look like you were wearing a whole turtleneck when in fact you were just wearing the neck part and a little piece of the front and back of the shirt.

I had a few dickies and knowing me at the time I probably thought I was the coolest kid on two legs. (I just did a quick google search and dickies are so un-cool now that they are not listed until the final item on page one of my search.)

On one hand I know that dickies are an inconsequential wardrobe item at this stage of my life. I rarely need a sweater, let alone a fake turtleneck. But I have to tell you, I just can't get this dickie thing out of my head. Every time I think about it, I just crack up all over again.

However, now that I have put it on electronic paper I am hoping to just let go of it and move on. I am thinking about thinking about saddle shoes instead!!!

(Note to any fashion historians out there: the whole dickey story can be found in wikipedia.)