You may be right

Unlikely as it may be, from Seize You on the Dark Side of the Moo

You may be right

I may be crazy, but humor me. Call me Ishmael. I'm engaged in an epic hunt, a seeking-of-soul's-purpose perhaps, an expedition into the sea of despond. A mission. This madness hales back to my misspent youth. Now I have decided I must pay the price. If, that is, there is someone to whom the price might be paid. Plainly put, I am in search of a great wide wale.

This obviously requires a bit of explanation. There was an incident, a denouement if you will, that left me emotionally one-legged. So to speak. Metaphorically legless. Peg-legged. At least one stilt knocked out from under. Emotionally, you see. Well, maybe you don't. There are things one can't know if one weren't present. You weren't, I'm pretty sure. Unless you are an alumnus of Rollins College, Classes of 1974-78, inclusive. Scoff if you like.

But profoundly handicapped is not an exaggeration.

My watchwords have always been “high hopes” and “low expectations.” The first to keep me going in the teeth of life's roaring gales and the latter to forestall drowning in disappointment. No one who viscerally expects the worst can long remain unhappy, since the worst so seldom occurs.

You can quote me on that.

I blame the wide wale.

In the early 70s, determined to establish my fem-cred, I used a sewing machine. (!) This isn't something guys did back then. Well, most guys. I mean there were fashionistas, those Lucy-in-the-sky guys, who draped presidential wives and super-stars, and there were tailors (always a bit suspect when measuring inseams, making clients just a little squirmy, and increasingly scarce in an off-the-rack world), but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a kind of regular guy who sewed. (For that matter you'd have found it hard to find a regular guy who pressed, at least anything other than weights or doorbells. Wash-and-wear Stay-Prest® garments had more to do with the decline in men's interest in marriage than is given due credit, and credit is due.)

Some measure of blame has to be laid on my Mom, natch. This is doubtless more than you wanted to know, and, hey, there are more stories in this book, just flip forward a few pages.

I'll wait.

(Sound of drumming fingers. This is the second story in a row where I have used this trope. Getting a little stale dude. Lighten up.)

Mom let me experiment with a Barbie.

Oh, sure, I had a cap pistol (that dates me, doesn't it, back to a bygone era when little children were permitted to casually toy with dangerously percussive substances), and a BB gun (these days youngsters seem to go straight to AR-15s), and a platoon of army men (green plastic, maybe two inches tall), did the Cowboys-and-Indians thing in the vacant lot next door, joined in kick-ball, and etc. and etc. But also I had a doll.

I have no idea whence she entered my life. Or why she arrived naked. (!) And whereas most 1950s mothers would have shielded their sons from exposure to curvaceous nudity, even plastic and lacking navel and nipples and whatnot, Mom taught me to sew instead. I dressed my Barbie in blouses and skirts, a dress and pants. Then Mom taught me to crochet and I made a tiny sweater with a matching scarf. This is one of those dark family secrets that haunt us all, in one form or another. But they're all dead now and the skeletons can come out and dance.

At twenty I wanted to be part of the feminist future and so I sewed a maxi-dress for my girlfriend as a tangible gesture. What we called a granny-dress, See! I can do a woman thing!

Which production—well let's be kind—sort of fit, mostly. Long, informal dresses are quite forgiving as was she, dear heart.

In any event, building on my success with a Simplicity pattern, I ventured forth. Set sail into the vastness of Butterick and McCall's and, yes friend, even Vogue. I shrugged off the stares of other customers, all female as I recall, and at least a little frightened of the long-haired hippy creature surfing in their sea, swimming through fashion catalogs and paddling through the ocean of drawers at my local fabric shop. What was a freak doing in their drawers?

Oh, the fabrics! What a delight! The prints, the textures, the weaves! I selected a shirt pattern and material, some sort of shiny, soft, man-made, well I mean human-made and probably woman-made-in-a-sweat-shop, cloth (back then, likely in the South, before all that was off-shored to Indonesia or Vietnam), in a bold pattern that evoked a sense of ocean swells in a bounding main. (It wouldn't be too many years before I adopted cotton, linen, rayon and then, a decade or two further on, some silk. Natural fibers are way more comfortable, though not so much for the silk worms involved. Silk is, unfortunately, not vegan.)

(The most comfy tee shirt I've ever owned was 60/40 cotton and rayon. Rayon comes from trees! Wore it and washed it and wore it until it was practically sheer. Never have found another, and I've spent dozens of hours searching the Web. If you know of a source, I'd pay real money for a tip.)

The material in this case was entirely unsuited to shirt making, the oversized collar which was supposed to stand up in the way I'd seen on very hip looking British invasion rockers simply flopped, even with pretty stiff interfacing. The seams were unintentionally puffy, gathered in a way that would make a skirt flouncy. The button holes … I don't even want to think about the button holes. Please don't bring them up again. I'm pretty certain I only wore it once. Where it ended up is anybody's guess, probably Goodwill, and if you're the person who later purchased it there, I apologize. A couple of bucks wasted—contact me and I'll give you a full rebate.

You can see here where the hopey part can buoy you up, and the assumed failure diminish the odds of drowning in the briny depths. That's how learning curves work. You build on your defeats after you morosely lick your wounds, squandering a wee bit of time feeling sorry for yourself—poor, poor, pitiful me—and sally forth again.

The trick, of course, is to keep the period of abject remorse as short as possible. The successful among us are remarkably good at jettisoning mistakes in a hot hurry. It's why life, IMHO, is a whole lot like an endless Scholastic Aptitude Test. Your classmates who got the really high scores on that dreaded rite of passage were not necessarily smarter than you, no no. But they were very good at tossing aside wrong answers. Life is a multiple guess test, right?

If you're stumbling along with, oh, say, Robert Frost, and come to a fork in the road you have a fifty percent chance of landing in a good place (making all the difference as he had it). But if you come to a five-point there's a seventy-five percent chance you'll end up in trouble. See? I took the road that appeared to be less traveled by and pretty soon I was cluelessly lost. Quick elimination of the probably wrong rapidly ratchets up the odds of your being right.

But the fly in the mental coconut butter, (a great lubricant by the way, for, you know) arrives if the error carries a particularly heavy emotional load. Like that painting by Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1949, am I right? He likely went to his grave regretting the landing of that bee, still stuck in the paint after lo these many, many years. I mean, how do you remove a bee from the middle of an eight and a half by five canvas spread out on a floor without walking in the wet paint?

You don't. That's what.

Anyway, that's when I first spotted the great wide wale. Bell bottoms no less. How cool was that? Probably on another Brit rocker. A lot of us were taking our fashion cues from that crowd. Especially those of us who had our sights aimed at pop stardom. They were all so decked out, from zippers on their Wellington boots to the apricot scarf Carly sang about, hats strategically cocked, one eye on the mirror and all.

We all had one eye on the mirror back then and anyone who claims otherwise is in serious denial.

Corduroy¹ bell bottoms and a matching vest. Whoa!

They don't call corduroy the poor man's velvet² for nothing you know. That it was already falling out of favor amongst the “smart” set after its heyday in the 60s was of no matter to me. I wanted to look great. This was going to be my first serious fashion statement. If memory serves, and that is getting less reliable with every bong of this old ship's bell, a Butterick. The guy on the package looked precisely right. That's me, I thought. Looking good.

Next, the wide wale. A rich chocolate brown, wales as wide as a young hornworm. Not the fat grown-up ones you finally discover when they're cheerfully stripping your tomato plants in mid-summer, but the ones you missed two weeks prior. If you'd spend a little less time reading and a little more time in the garden, you know? It's not my intention to be all preachy, but here you sit frittering when you could be doing something just a bit more productive.

So not as wide as a #2 pencil, but close, and by the way, did you ever stop to think “How do they put the lead in a pencil?” Not “lead” lead, of course. Graphite. Plumbago as the old folks used to call it.

But graphite is really, really soft, right? So, do they mill a columnar six-sided cedar shaft, then drill it right down the center, then slide in the oh-so-tender graphite, like a piece of dry spaghetti, only much more frangible?

That sounds like sweat shop work for certain, but, obviously, it isn't how they do/did it.

You probably don't know, or didn't before I took time out of my very busy life to tell you, that the numbering system for pencils was invented by Henry David Thoreau who also reinvented the process of mixing clay with graphite and water and baking it into pencil leads. Or maybe he cribbed it. What is it they say about most creative writing being just artfully disguised plagiarization? This story, for example, taking a page or two from old Hermy Melville.

Clever chap, Thoreau I mean, though Herm was no slouch, and thank goodness for #6 pencils. Wouldn't want to take on a crossword without.

Here's the thing about pencils. If you make a mistake, even a serious mistake, you can erase and start again. (Hence the eraser on the top always wears out before the lead at the bottom. Mistakes are made, but that's another story. Sort of Alzheimer's for the pencil set. An alternative sort of erasure entirely. Face it, there are many, many words which demand erasure.)³

That doesn't work with life. The emotionally devastating mistakes you make early on follow you like the tick-tock croc ever after Captain Hook, hungry for another tasty hand. (Don't get me started on pirates, by the way. It happened in my last book and kind of ran away with things.) As in youthful calamities engendered by entanglement with yard goods and mechanical stitchery.

So I purchased a swath of rich chocolate brown wide wale, about 72 percent cocoa if you're the snacking sort, and a light brown satin for the back of the vest, cambric for the pockets and interfacing for the waist band and fly flap and vest front. Buttons woven of leatherette, like the Turks-head knot you might have learned to tie in Boy Scouts if you'd been paying attention.

Oh and a zipper.

You've been patient, so I won't bore you further with the painstaking details: the careful measuring of body parts to the nearest eighth of an inch using a cloth tailor's tape, the transfer of body part measurements from that tape to the pattern (using a #6 pencil, natch, this being, you might say, a puzzle of a different sort—sort of a Rubik's cube with yours truly playing Mr. Rubik) adjusting the prospective cut lines from the pre-printed to the actual, the cautious scissoring, inch by inch, of the pattern paper, the studiously meticulous pinning of the measured and scissored paper to the aforementioned rich chocolate brown (72 percent, and did you know that's actually a health food known to reduce high blood pressure?) corduroy, and the even more persnickitous snipping of the cloth itself, taking as much time as necessary to ensure utter accuracy including scissoring of the little triangular tabs provided for critical alignment, the joining of disparate parts with a myriad of straight pins, and then the inch-by-inch-by-inch (or centimeter-by-centimeter-by-centimeter, eh?, for you Canadian readers, millicubit-by-millicubit for you Evangelicals, though—trust me on this—you are definitely stumbling around in the wrong book) feed beneath the stainless steel foot of the trusty Singer®, the double stitching of seams, the steam pressing of said joinery to flatten them between steps, figuring out the button hole attachment (which I'd failed to do when assembling the previously mentioned disaster shirt)⁴, and learning how to install a zipper.

Suffice it to say, I spent hours on the effort. Hours. Days. Over more than a week. Nearly two.

I tried the set on. It pretty much fit. Fifteen pounds less and a hair stylist and I could have looked like the model on the envelope.

I was ready to take on the world and as it happened the biggest gig of my fledgling career was coming up.

The group, did I mention the group? No? Four of us. Two guitars, a bass and drums. Raring to move on up from the garage to the Fillmore East. I was the frontman. Played a Les Paul. We had booked a gig at the local college. Homecoming weekend. Could easily be more than a thousand in attendance. Maybe two. Practicing our asses off faced with a very serious row to hoe.

That last sentence is more than a little portentous, considering.

Wale is an ancient name descended from an Anglo Saxon word for the raised ridges in a plowed field. No doubt that's why corduroys always remind you of hornworms. And, too, of King Arthur whose castle ruins are on the Welsh coast. (Wales, Wales the gangs all here—while Lancelot is diddling Gwen.)

Our other pop fashion role model, obviously, was Jimmy Buffett. So laid back. So casual. The conundrum is obvious: dress up or dress down? The answer was encoded in his 1974 release “Pencil Thin Mustache.” Jimmy told us, “Now I'm gettin' old I don't wear underwear ...” Aha! One could dress in both directions at once!

So I wasn't wearing underwear when I took to the stage in front of, let's go with thousands, thousands of college kids intent on partying down. In my memory the crowd was vast and memory is all that matters, really. In my carefully tailored bell bottoms and vest and a purchased shirt. (Learning to stitch up a respectable shirt would have to wait.)

The thing about memory is that we modify as we go along. The more often you remember something, the less accurate it becomes. Scientific studies have absolutely confirmed this phenom. The past occurrences you remember best are the things you recall abruptly after years and years of neglect. Then, bingo, clear as a bell and accurate down to the last stitch.

Which means that something like this, which has haunted me down through the decades, sprung into my dreams, weighed into my stream of conscious, or is it waded? Drowned me in embarrassment and remorse. Something this momentous, reported now, to you, could have morphed into, I don't know, fiction? Almost as if I were making it all up?

The latest university study, as I write, using a large sample population, indicates that most of us lie to others at least 5 times a day. Five! Not counting the endless ways we lie to ourselves. We are a sadly sorry excuse for sentience.

But no. There were witnesses, too many. You could hire a P.I. and find them if it matters that much to you. Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida, mid 1970s, Homecoming, something up could be dug.

The stage was a raised platform at one end of a soccer field. No backstage. No green room. Just us up there with our gear. No hell below us, above us only sky and etc. After our second song the audience was going wild. Over the top. I dropped my guitar pick which bounced backward, turned toward the drummer, and bent to retrieve it. The wide wale, clearly not great, ripped from the rear waist band to the zipper. This was less Gerry and the Pacemakers or Paul Revere and the Raiders, and more Jim Morrison than I had in mind. Anita Bryant would have fainted.

“Let it all hang out” is an understatement.

So you see?

These days I am drawn to expiate, to set things right, to do well what was once done poorly. And so, I am set upon an epic hunt, needle held high as a suspended harpoon, thread coiled on the deck of my imagination, until that date with destiny, when I spy the quarry from the lofty heights of my mental crow's nest. Thar she sews, boys! Thar she sews!

********

NOTE PER FOOTNOTES: Substack starts off with new numbering each time I post a story. But Footnotes in the original book are continuous and often refer back to previous super important stuff. So original Footnote #s are included below in [#]s.

1 [13] Invented in the mid-18^th Century.

2 [14] Invented in the mid-15^th Century. As today, the wealthy got their goods hundreds of years before the rest of us.

3 [15] These?

4 [16] And why did you have to bring up button holes again?

Copyright© 2019 Cecil Bothwell All rights reserved.