I can think of all kinds of things I miss from life before the pandemic:

No masks.

Soft hands. Those 70%+ industrial strength alcohol solutions don’t help the manicure.

Going places unfettered, no concerns about dining in, or eating takeout, or about who might have breathed on your cheeseburger.

I miss less fear, less uncertainty, less anger.

But there’s one thing that covers it all, one powerful, binding ritual that so captures our current situation:

I MISS MATCHING T-SHIRTS!

Please, dear Lord, just give me a homecoming or prom or senior/faculty softball game T-shirt to buy for $15.00 that I can wear maybe twice, and then can be folded and put in the closet to get made into a T-shirt quilt twenty years down the road. But right now I want to wear it along with everyone else, all of us together and having a good time, celebrating our school and our students, unity represented by wearing “Go Tigers” on the same gray or orange or black Gildan 50/50 T-shirt.

Let me go to Spring Park in Tuscumbia and see a family celebrating MawMaw’s 80th birthday, and I know it because they are all wearing pink shirts with purple writing that declare it is so. There is a spread of barbecue with all the fixings laid out on picnic tables. There is MawMaw, wearing a sparkly birthday crown, pushing a great-grandchild in the swing, bonded in blood and in Comfort Colors.

A trip to Disney World with family? Mickey Mouse ears on a red Dri-Fit T-shirt, because the humidity is thick and that material breathes well.

The U.S. Space and Rocket Center for a class field trip? The neon orange school shirt, of course, so we can find little Johnny when he wanders off to look at the moon rock again.

Maybe that’s why presidential shirts were so popular this year. I remember presidential elections in years past when supporting a candidate was evidenced in the form of a bumper sticker. We upped the ante in 2016 with the MAGA hats. But a T-shirt? Only the most devoted disciples wore the shirt.

And then there was the pandemic.

Maybe we felt a more pressing need to belong to something greater than ourselves this year, all politics aside. And some of us will now always have the shirt.

I don’t know when life will return to the pre-pandemic glory we once enjoyed, but I believe it will happen.

We will get to a point when we can once again eat with the family under one roof and not have a care about spreading The Virus.

We will be able to come and go wherever we please and not feel an obligation to wear a mask, much less color coordinate them.

(BTW, Santa, I need leopard print. Please put one in my stocking this year.)

We will shop at Wal-Mart and visit the Lysol wipes aisle and be able to buy more than one per customer.

We will hug MawMaw and PawPaw again instead of waving at them through a glass pane.

We will have parties and reunions. We will travel to New York City and the Grand Canyon. We will have field trips and field days and ballgames and shopping, shopping, shopping without using hand sanitizer after visiting each store. We will have ladies’ luncheons and get-togethers and cookouts and dinners to celebrate the end of COVID.

And some of us will be wearing the shirt to prove it.