In the South that shirt would have caused a church meeting

I have been in Maryland for about a month now, and I have made a discovery that would have caused a minor scandal back in Georgia.

People up here wear tie-dye. Casually. In public. On purpose.

Not just at festivals. Not just the one guy at the farmer’s market who also sells crystals and has opinions about the moon. Everywhere. Regular people. Nice people. People who appear to hold steady employment and own functioning vehicles. Just walking around in swirling, rainbow-splattered shirts like it is the most natural thing in the world.

Because up here, apparently, it is.

In Georgia, tie-dye was not a fashion choice. It was a declaration. It was a bumper sticker you wore on your body. If you showed up to a cookout in a tie-dye shirt in the part of Georgia where I grew up, people did not think “fun summer look.” They thought “well, there goes Dale, gone off the deep end.” Tie-dye in Georgia was shorthand. It meant hippie. It meant liberal. It meant you had, at some point, made choices that the congregation was going to have to discuss.

In my entire life in Georgia, I think I saw tie-dye four times. Maybe five if you count the time I saw Superstar Billy Graham wrestling at the Omni, which I absolutely do count, because that man wore more tie-dye than a Grateful Dead parking lot and he was also enormous and terrifying, so nobody was going to say a word about it.

Outside of professional wrestling, though? Tie-dye was rare. Tie-dye was a statement. Tie-dye had consequences.

Got a minute? Got a story.

I had a friend growing up whose mother was what you might charitably describe as a free spirit. She burned incense. She had opinions about things my parents had never heard of. She was, by the standards of our particular zip code, a hippie.

I was spending the day at their house one afternoon, and she announced that she had come up with a wonderful activity for us. We were going to make tie-dye shirts.

Now, I was a kid. I did not understand the geopolitical implications of this craft project. I just knew it involved rubber bands and dye and that the end result was going to be colorful, and that sounded like a fine way to spend a Tuesday. So we did it. We twisted and tied and dunked and rinsed, and when it was all over, I had a shirt that looked like a sunset had a disagreement with a lava lamp, and I was enormously proud of it.

I wore it home.

My father, who’s political views can best be described as somewhere to the right of Ghengis Khan, looked at that shirt for a long moment. He did not say anything right away. He just got this slow, knowing smirk — the kind that meant he had already figured out exactly what had happened and found it genuinely funny. Then he explained to me, gently and with great patience, that my friend’s mother had used me as a very well-executed political instrument. That she had, with rubber bands and a bucket of dye, sent his son home wearing the unofficial uniform of everything he disagreed with.

It was, I have to admit in retrospect, a masterpiece of low-stakes political theater. She never said a word. She just handed me a shirt and sent me home.

In Georgia, tie-dye was a weapon. A soft one, deployed with a smile, but a weapon nonetheless.

Up here, it is just a shirt.

I have seen more tie-dye in my first month in Maryland than I saw in four decades in The Peach State. And nobody up here is making a statement with it. Nobody is trying to start anything. They are just comfortable and colorful and apparently unbothered by the concept of wearing multiple colors simultaneously, which, honestly, sounds like a peaceful way to live.

I am starting to think that might be the healthier approach.

I will not make any promises. I am still a Georgia boy at my core, and there are limits to how far the transformation goes. But I will say this: if you see me around Havre de Grace sometime soon, swirling around in something that looks like a sunset had a disagreement with a lava lamp — just know that I have made my peace with it.