A good coat can take you places you’ll never go

In Ann Brashares’ “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” Carmen buys a pair of jeans in a thrift store. Just an ordinary pair of jeans.

Yet they fit her and her three friends, despite their different sizes. They took turns wearing them, buoyed by their friendship.

“Wear them,” one girl told another. “They will make you brave.”

I have a coat like that.

I bought it 30 years ago. It’s red, an outer shell over a black down jacket inside that zips out. The price tag made me gulp.

“Invest in a good coat," my roommate Susan said coming up behind me in the store. "You’ll never regret it.”

I wore the coat cross-country skiing in Flagstaff, the cold never seeping through.

In Pennsylvania in the dead of winter, it flapped behind me as I ran up the 72 stone steps to the entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art like I was Rocky.

It withstood frigid winds coming off the Chicago River. Not a drop of Seattle rain soaked through it. The outer shell buffeted me on a rough sailing trip off the California coast.

The first time my toddler son played in snow, when the tip of his nose turned red and his wet, mittened hands cold, I zipped him into the coat with me for the walk back to the cabin.

There aren’t many opportunities to wear the coat here, so I loan it out.

Mary Jo wore it in France in 2003. My mom took it to London a few years after that.

It sailed with Jen on an Alaskan cruise.

Virginia wore the coat in New York in 2014. It went to New York again in December with Taylor, who wore the black down liner to the stage door of the Lyric Theatre.

I can’t remember now exactly what I paid for it.

Whatever it was, I don’t regret it.