My brush with fame was 20 years ago

I have 20 or 30 different t-shirts that I regularly wear for jogging or lounging around in. Normally, I hardly notice what is printed on them--they range from ones that you get in a 10K run to such minor events as company picnics & etc. The other day I noticed this shirt because it had a date on it and it was 20 years old. I had not realized that clothes could last that long.

The funny thing is that it very nearly only lasted for one day. You see, this t-shirt was worn in a kind of 10K mud run from back when I was in the Marine Corps. The race involved wading through waist-deep mud, crawling under barbed wire and so forth. Had I torn it on the barbed wire, as I did my Cami trousers, I would have thrown it away. As well, when I finished the race I was more than half tempted to just toss the shirt since it had about a pound of mud caked into it. It may have taken a couple of washes to come clean, but it has served me well for two decades and counting.

Oh yes, the fame: The next month on my drill weekend some fellow Marines showed me the latest issue of Leatherneck and there I am. Of course my name isn't with the picture and I didn't even recognize myself at first, so a pretty tenuous claim to fame--but I will take it!