Remember when you were young and you enjoyed the thrill of trying on new stuff in the dressing rooms of department stores? You didn’t always think so, but probably everything looked good on you.

Fast forward (and I do mean fast) about fifty years and you have an event you need to dress up for and you’ve donated all your work clothes because you’ve been retired almost ten years. Not that any of your work clothes would be right for a dressed up event anyway, but they’d have been better than the uniform you wear these days.

Shorts, T-shirts, crocs, ratty jeans.

No, the stuff you wear now isn’t the sort of outfits you can dress up. Or even down for that matter, they’re already about as down as you can get.

So you reluctantly go to the mall, because buying clothes online just isn’t working, and the mall was where you used to go when you needed something fancy. But the mall is different now, with most of the stores you know gone, some actually standing empty.

You decide to stick with Macy’s, where you rarely shopped as a kid because they were too expensive, and even there you find racks filled to overflowing with stretchy weird clothes, not neatly organized, not much in your size.

And your experience in the fitting room is even worse. Nothing fits. You don’t know what size you are anymore. You’re not sure if you gained this much weight or they are making the sizes smaller. The prices aren’t smaller, that’s for sure.

You settle on a pair of black pants that look sort of OK.

The young clerk ringing you up asks if you’ve found everything. You laugh and say you drove an hour to buy a pair of black pants. She nods as if she knows what you’re talking about. She doesn’t.

And you head back home and vow to go through your own closet because surely there’s something there that will be dressy enough to get by.

Cause everything goes with black pants.