“Serving overseas as a small-town boy from America is intense, stressful and humorous! Enjoy a light-hearted story with me from our last 20 years overseas!”
—Matt
Moth Ball Cologne
Do you try to make a statement by your clothes? As we live and travel overseas, one of the easiest ways to guess where a person lives on the planet is by the clothes they wear and how they wear them. Colors of choice, worn form fitting or floppy, or even the types of fabric help me to play Sherlock Holmes and guess where people are coming from. I am in Texas as I write and the cowboy hats confirm my geography. However, with this said, my main factor in picking what I wear is whether it is clean or not.
I once traveled back to the States for meetings on the East Coast. My suitcase was lost in route along with all my clothes, except what I was wearing. I arrived to my lodging house late at night and wearing the wrinkled and smelly clothes of two days travel. The meetings started first thing the next morning and there was no time to go shopping, nor was there a store nearby.
The organization I work for received donation clothes over the course of several decades that often had seen better days (threadbare, faded, and of a different style than I was used to). I made the journey up the windy creaky stairs to the lodging house’s attic above the third floor, where the clothes were stored. In the dim light of the narrow attic, I began to find clothes I could wear the next day. Despite the clothes being from a different era and ill fitting, I had clothes to wear. I returned back down to my bedroom and was quickly asleep.
I was up early the next morning, now showered and began to put on the clothes. What I didn’t notice in my fatigued state the night before was that the clothes smelled very strongly of moth balls. I had no options and put on my clothes and off to meetings I went. My luggage did not arrive as the airline promised the next day, nor the next day, and on-and-on. Each evening I would make the journey up to the attic for more clothes for the next day. I felt like explaining to people that I met each day, “I don’t normally dress this way, nor smell this way”, but that seemed an even more awkward way to introduce myself to people. When the week of meetings were completed, my luggage had still not arrived. I hand washed my original clothes and wore them back overseas, and my luggage arrived back to me some time later.
To this day, I still prefer having moths to the smell of moth balls.
Something similar ever happen to you. Contact me and let me hear your story!
mattsmishaps@gmail.com Matt’s Mishaps, PO BOX 114, Grabill, IN 46741
