A casual chat about Rett syndrome, then a surprise in the mail

I confess that I am a T-shirt hoarder. I have dozens, many of them embarrassingly old. How bad is my habit? I am in my Social Security years, and I still have a T-shirt from my high school fraternity. And yes, it still fits, kinda.

Occasionally I make an effort to throw some out, but here’s the problem: Most of them tell a story, about a half-marathon I ran, or a place I visited, or whatever. And I fear I have passed along my hoarder gene to my daughter Abby, who is 29 and has Rett syndrome. She too has drawers and boxes overflowing with T-shirts — musicals she saw, camps for kids with disabilities that she attended, gifts from her sister or an aunt. And because she essentially stopped growing after spinal fusion surgery in 2009, most of them, too, still fit, kinda.

It occurred to me that our respective T-shirt collections contain, in effect, assorted snapshots of our life with Rett syndrome, and that these snapshots could be an irregular series for this column. So, herewith the first installment of the T-Shirt Chronicles.

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The surprise package

In 2005, I was working as a writer and editor on the arts desk at The New York Times, and that November I wrote a modest article about the Country Music Association’s annual awards show, which for the first time was being held at Madison Square Garden in New York, rather than the usual Nashville.

For the piece, I did a brief telephone interview with Kix Brooks of the duo Brooks & Dunn, who were then about as popular as a country act gets and were to host the awards show. Brooks gave me a few suitable quotes for the piece, but then we somehow got talking about Abby and Rett syndrome, possibly because the country singer Kevin Black (brother of the more famous Clint) had recently lost his daughter to it.

Brooks probably did a dozen similar interviews that day promoting the awards show. Feeding the media beast is part of the job if you’re an entertainer: toss off a few quotable snippets, move on to the next phone call, repeat for an hour or three. And if you’re a journalist writing about entertainers, you know that the famous person you just talked to probably forgot your name three minutes after the phone call ended.

So it came as something of a surprise when, a few days after I interviewed Brooks, a package showed up on our doorstep in New Jersey, addressed to Abby. Inside was an assortment of Brooks & Dunn goodies. An autographed copy of the duo’s latest CD, “Hillbilly Deluxe.” An autographed photo. And, among other stuff, a couple of Brooks & Dunn T-shirts.

The thing is, I don’t remember giving Brooks my home address or even mentioning what state I lived in. I don’t naively think that Kix Brooks personally boxed up those treats and took them to the post office, but it’s remarkable to me that amid all that he must have been doing at that moment getting ready to host a nationally televised awards show in the historic venue of Madison Square Garden, he took time out to have an assistant find out where this kid with Rett syndrome lived and make sure she received a surprise in the mail.

Sometimes a T-shirt is just a T-shirt. But sometimes, when you come across it in your overstuffed T-shirt drawer, it can remind you that little gestures can resonate for decades.

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