Here is Mei-O with her 81-year old father in Taiwan in April, 2004. The gold sweater he's wearing has an interesting, almost unbelievable history.
When I was in high school, I bought a gold sweater that looked something like this one, only it had long sleeves and the V-neck was much, much higher. I remember it was pretty expensive. I didn't normally buy such fancy stuff, but I really loved the sweater and somehow managed to talk my parents into buying it for me. It was my favorite sweater, and I wore it often.
After finishing high school and attending three miserable semesters at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, I decided college wasn't for me, so I joined the Air Force. I got stationed in Taiwan where I eventually met and married Mei-O. When my military service was over, we returned to the States. We initially lived with my parents in Chicago, where I discovered my old gold high school sweater in the bottom of a drawer of some of my old clothes my mom had saved for me. When we eventually moved out on our own, I took it with.
Over the years, the sweater got smaller and smaller (well, actually, I got bigger and bigger!), and it spent most of its time in a bottom dresser drawer.
When Mei-O's mother and father came to live with us for a year or so when we lived in Ohio in the late 1970s, I passed the sweater down to my father-in-law. It was, of course, too big for him, but my mother-in-law told us not to worry, that she could have it fixed when she got it back to Taiwan.The next time we returned to Taiwan a few years later, I noticed my father-in-law wearing the sweater in this picture. I didn't think much about it - as I said, my old high school sweater had long sleeves and a much higher V-neck. But something did look rather familiar about it. When I mentioned that to Mei-O, she informed me that her mom told her that she took my old sweater to a 'sweater-maker' who unravelled it into a big ball of yarn, and tried to re-knit it into a new sweater. The new sweater didn't turn out very well, so my mother-in-law retrieved it and the leftover loose yarn, and knitted the sweater in the picture herself. That was over 25 years ago. To this day, my father-in-law wears it quite often.
It's hard to believe that this sweater is made from the same yarn that I often wore to high school in the sixties. It is starting to look only the slightest bit worn, but my father-in-law doesn't seem to mind. It was good quality material from the beginning, and has proven its worth well beyond what I ever would have expected.
A Post Script
Mei-O's father passed away on July 7, 2008. When we returned to Taiwan for his funeral, Mei-O's mom gave us the gold sweater which my father-in-law had worn for so many years. I now have my old high school sweater back and treasure it as a fond reminder of this wonderful man who gave me his daughter to share my life with and accepted me into his family as one of their own. Thanks, Pa.