Some people keep journals. Some collect photographs. There are many ways to chronicle your life. I keep old T-shirts.

I recently went to the bottom of one of the piles and found my oldest. It is a simple white undershirt emblazoned with a red fist on the front. It was a symbol of rebellion several hundred of us wore back in the late ‘60s when we took over the Virginia Tech Administration Building in protest of the Vietnam War. It was one of the first times I’d worn any sort of a uniform or belonged to anything other than an athletic team. It felt pretty good, even though I’d had to drag the shirt out of my dirty clothes hamper an hour before the protest began to stencil it. If I ever join another protest I will certainly be able to find a clean T-shirt. My wife will see to that.

I have another shirt almost as old. It has the Greek letters Sigma Lambda on the front. It was the name of my college fraternity. Sigma Lambda was a very active local fraternity, but shortly after I graduated, the university decided to allow national fraternities on campus and the days of the locals came to an end. That was too bad. Had we hung on a few years longer we could have shown Hollywood how fraternity life really was and the 1978 movie “Animal House” would not have been so humdrum.

Most of my T-shirts are considerably younger than those two. Some are cause-related. One of my favorites is from the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, a group dedicated to protecting wild lands. I’m not much of a joiner, but this is an organization well worth joining. One of their sayings, “Use the quads God gave you,” speaks to the heart of the matter.

Some signify events. The Wray Family Reunion in the Cook Islands in 2000 was a favorite. My parents took the entire clan. It was my mother’s last big trip and the kind of memory that gives you pleasant feelings every time you revisit it.

I have an Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife T-shirt commemorating the time agency employees spent in Coos Bay and Waldport in 1994 participating in the cleanup of the massive oil spill caused by the freighter New Carissa. Now there was some industrial-strength fun.

I have several T-shirts created after military operations, none very important. But I saw a man wearing one a few years back celebrating “Frequent Wind, 1975, the Evacuation of Saigon.” The celebration of failure seems a little strange to me. I wonder, had T-shirts been available in earlier times, would we have seen, “Wellington cheated! Waterloo, 1815” or “I treaded water with the Spanish Armada, 1588?”

Some of my T-shirts attempt humor. My daughter gave me one that asks, “If a man says something in the woods where no one is around to hear it, is he still wrong?” I’d feel better about that shirt if I didn’t know my daughter considers it a serious question.

But my favorite T-shirt shows three beautiful children smiling out from the front. Beneath them is the saying “We love Grandpa.” That would be me.

I can’t help thinking about what a long, strange journey it’s been from the days of protests and red fists to a T-shirt with three smiling grandchildren. In a way, there is a certain sense of deja vu … I should probably give my oldest grandchild, Madison, the protest shirt. The way things are going in this country, she’s going to need it.

Pat Wray is a free-lance writer and longtime local resident. His general-interest columns can be found in this section on alternating Fridays. He can be reached at patwray@comcast.net.