I am delighted and honored by the number of responses to my Dry T-shirt contest. You guys are great. I love this. OK, so I’m a cheap date — like Patty from The Patty Duke Show, a hot dog makes me lose control — but you knew that already, right?

It’s fabulous to know that while enormous matters of state and huge changes in the socioeconomic, educational, and cultural structures are taking place around us, shifting the infrastructure of our daily lives on an hourly basis, what we really love is finding a great line printed on cheesy fabric.

It reassures me to learn that I am not entirely alone in my firm belief that any day can be justified, redeemed, or made nearly perfect if I read something great on a stranger’s chest.

It also reassures me that I am not nuts.

Because I honestly believe that the incidental unspoken conversations we have with strangers when we read their bumper stickers, t-shirts, banners, and tattoos are significant. It’s not only those long, drawn out, pedantic, boring, miserable, tedious, unprofitable, futile, earnest, humorless, repetitive exchanges — for example, at a department or editorial meeting (not that I’m bitter) — that shape our vision of reality, but the the the casual linguistic hookups in life that make it worthwhile to have learned phonics.

Context for the T-shirt meditation? I was inspired to write the post because I was (yeah, again) reading an old journal. I came across an entry made during my time as a graduate student participant at the Dickens Universe at U.C. Santa Cruz, “a week of study and Dickensian conviviality.” It was 1986. John Glavin from Georgetown had been charged with putting on a play based on the weighty novel, Our Mutual Friend. I was cast as Lizzie Hexam and had exactly one line: “I am scholar enough.”

I always wanted a T-shirt with that line even though, as I remember, Lizzie doesn’t actually say it in the novel. (Her character more or less lives out that line, of course, embodies it and manifests it — John Glavin is good at what he does.) Now it’s too late; I suspect I’m past the T-shirt stage in life. I must file the longing for that never-fashioned garment into the longing for boys I never kissed and hands I never held, as well as bathing suits I never fit into and high-heels I never wore even after purchasing them at a non-discount retail establishment.

Plus I am no longer as confident as I was 22 years ago that I am indeed scholar enough. What’s enough? Lizzie knew, but I don’t.

But I do love the “I’m so educated …” shirt mentioned by Kiki (and seconded by Toni) and the line from Emile about lies, which makes me seriously consider the nature of publishing: Can we make T-shirts count?

Thanks, dear readers. You are, without questions, scholars and writers and fashionistas enough.