“He had always told me that a man is at the peak of his powers from his late thirties to his early fifties, when he has forced the world to hear his footsteps—that a man comes into the peak of his powers when he has power and the world at last bends to him. He never told me, however, that that power can be measured by the number of secrets a man knows and keeps, and that when it became my time to make the world heed my step, I would want to know his secrets, for the paradoxical purpose of safekeeping and promulgation. My father’s fashion tips: I’d listened to them all my life, and now that I was finding myself living by them, I wanted to tell them to the world, if only to understand where in the hell he got them; if only to understand how someone like my father can come to know, without a moment of hesitation or a speck of doubt, that the turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear.”
Tom Junod, My Father’s Fashion Tips - GQ
Junod won a 1996 National Magazine award for this story; it reminded me of my grandfather.
