The old black leather aviator-style jacket is scratched and scraped by 30 years of life, each mark a memory etched in a long dead cow’s hide. I think it was given to me for Christmas, but by who escapes me. Most likely it was either my in-laws or my wife. It was so long ago I cannot remember. It was not my parents, I know. We were Naugahyde people.

In 1982, I survived a run-in with a concrete highway barrier on a frozen bridge in Texas back when my hair was brown and the black leather was new. The coat sustained no injuries. The same could not be said of my Buick Regal.

I nearly drowned in the early 1990’s, wearing it after our canoe sank in a Potomac River whirlpool above Great Falls, riding the rocks and rapids down into hypothermia. The incident required a gutting of the jacket lining. The tailor, stupidly, did not put my old familiar pocket back inside. It still bothers me.

In 1994, I wore it while jumping from a second floor window behind the Lowes Santa Monica during the big LA earthquake as the building heaved and leaned and rocked back and forth. Sliding down a palm tree – the ragged trunk scratching the front of the jacket and me – I wandered in the pre-dawn cool beside Douglas Fairbanks’s and Mary Pickford’s old beach house, waiting for a tsunami that never came.

I was wearing it on a Boeing 747 flight when the engines began to die one-by-one, requiring an emergency landing in Denver. I also wore it during a zero-gravity drop in a 757 over the Gulf of Mexico. Similar feeling, same coat.

This will be a tough reckoning, but that black leather jacket has gone through three children, nine jobs, seven moves, 58 cities, five funerals, one heart attack, three automobile accidents, an altercation with a cop, a near arrest, months of hospital visits, 60+ TV productions, more than a million miles of driving, three million miles of flying, probably 500 miles of walking, 350 hotels, at least 500 restaurants, and more meetings than I care to remember. The happiest days of my life, along with the saddest, have happened in that leather. I even played HORSE with Michael Jordan wearing it. That thing knows me better than anyone except my wife, and perhaps even better, now that I think about it.

When you start breaking your life down into things you have done while wearing a particular garment, it quickly turns pathetic. Few people own something wearable that long. Guys understand this. Women do not. But there it is, still doing its job. And I respect it for that. The weight of life riding inside that coat makes it feel heavy at times. Yet I’m wearing it right now as I type this. It’s chilly in here. If I tried to estimate how many stories I have written or told while it was on my back or hanging on a chair behind me, I could not finish the list.

Never did I think I would ever have such a relationship with a dead cow. And I imagine one day, just like that cow, I’ll die in it, as it should be.