Just in case you were wondering, Anne and her folks got back from their big Church history tour last night. I was waiting at the airport to collect them, marvelling at the colossal lack of style shown by most of the people around me. I’m not exactly George Clooney in the sartorial department, but most people these days seem to travel in their gym clothes — sweatpants, sweatshirts, hoodies, t-shirts, wifebeaters, and ball caps. Everything loose-fitting, untucked, often several sizes too big. The look was so common last night that the occasional pair of jeans was remarkable, and the lone gentlemen in a sport coat and tie was downright startling. (He was an older man, of course, old enough to remember when t-shirts were considered to be undergarments only.) Most of the athletic outfits were nondescript and without obvious logos, but then there was the family of gang-banger wannabes that was dressed head-to-toe in Oakland Raiders-wear. An entire family — late-twentysomething mom and dad, a tall boy about ten or twelve and a younger boy, maybe seven or eight years old — garbed in officially-licensed, Raider-branded black-and-gray. Dad wore an expensive-looking leather team jacket; mom had a slightly-less pricey fleece version. And all of them wore those ubiquitous nylon workout pants with the snaps down the sides of the legs. They must’ve spent a small fortune at Fanzz to acquire all that stuff.

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