O. Henry Ending

Stitches in Time

A mother’s miracles with needle and thread

By Kate Goodrich

When I was very small, my mother worked small miracles in cloth and wool. Tiny clothes, too small for me, she fashioned for my doll. The very sweetest, my favorite by far, was a pale yellow sweater, with each of its little pearly buttons in the shape of a bunny. These treasures just appeared: I never saw the knitting and purling, the cutting and stitching, the post-bedtime hours and all the love that went into creations such as that lump of yellow wool no bigger than her hand.

Much later, I tried my own hand at knitting under her guidance. But my “scarf” came to a desultory halt at 6 inches in length, the needles jammed into immobility by the intensity of my efforts. I never took up needles again but marveled as off the ends of hers spun such intricate patterns as the curved heel of an argyle sock.

No project was too small — or too large — for this seamstress extraordinaire. She did not hesitate to tackle reupholstering a couch or fashioning a set of lined floor-to-ceiling drapes for our dining room. To most every piece of clothing she made for us, she set her unique signature — a creative trim or appliqué or fringe plucked out by deft hands.

But there is one creation of hers, indelible in my memory, that also carries a great burden of guilt. On a Saturday expedition to an old fabric emporium in a run-down section of Philadelphia — where normally we would never have ventured without my father — my mother patiently endured my rejection of one bolt of cloth after another as she roamed the store’s dusty, claustrophobic aisles hoping that her next suggestion would prove to be The One. The ivory brocade we finally selected was so lovely that I almost wished I were getting married instead of merely singing in the high school chorale affair.

Having resurrected five yards of the stuff from its dusty sepulchre, my mother proceeded to construct a wonder that Cinderella’s fairy godmother would have envied: The shimmering ivory brocade was slowly transformed into a floor-length sleeveless gown with a wide, rose-colored moiré sash. My pleasure and anticipation grew each time I stood for another fitting and stroked the gown’s folds, feeling like that glass-shod princess. And like the fairytale heroine, I wore my lovely dress only once. It grieves me to say that a case of nerves during the evening’s big performance caused me to sweat profusely. The dress was stained beyond repair.

I didn’t know then that, over a lifetime, “favorite” clothes flow in and out of a woman’s closet like money in the bank: I figured this would be my favorite dress forever. I thought only with guilt and deep regret of the dozens of hours and zillions of stitches my mother had invested to make — what? Make a dress? Not really.

Like the new drapes and the transformed couch — and the yellow sweater with bunny buttons — the dress, as an object of beauty, was ephemeral. But as an act of love, it is permanent. For my mother’s only desire was to make her eldest daughter happy and, for one special evening at least, to feel very beautiful and grown up.

So, thanks Mom. I haven’t forgotten. Never will.  OH

After living and working in Boston for more than 40 years, Kate Goodrich retired to Wilmington in 2013 to be near the beach, where she can be found most seasons in a chair engrossed in a good book.

O.Henry Ending

Hammered

The nuts and bolts of hardware therapy

By Bill McConnell

Let’s be brutally honest: We all desperately need it. It can transform a moment from mundane to memorable, capture our imagination, fuel our inspiration and send us gleefully tripping down memory lane. Of course, I can only be talking about one thing — hardware therapy.

Don’t laugh, it’s a real thing. I’ve seen it, lived it, in fact. One minute you are kind of down, a little depressed. Not to the point of being suicidal, but not quite ready for prime time. Hmmm, you think, What are my options?

You could quell the funk with an ice-cold adult beverage. Lots of folks do and far be it from me to be a buzzkill. But just for the sake of silly argument, let’s say you’re not in the mood for booze. You could resort to one of the fine mood-altering pharmaceuticals advertised incessantly, if you can manage to ignore the pesky side effects the fast-talker spends half the commercial warning us about.

Or, option 3 — trumpet fanfare — hardware therapy. Surely, you’ve heard of it.

It typically starts with a hardware store shopper in the loosest sense of the word. These shoppers, women as well as men, normally have no shopping cart or basket, no friend or business acquaintance to interrupt the dream-state. They have no real intention of buying . . . well, anything.

Therapy is serious stuff, and thus must be done with a singular mindset. You wouldn’t want to compromise any gains with idle chitchat or — an actual purchase. Instead, the dreamer ambles along the aisles of the local hardware store, perhaps munching some free popcorn, stopping occasionally, carefully inspecting a New Age glue guaranteed to fix a boat or stick your fingers permanently together.

The shopper-turned-dreamer may wander down the aisle of death where all manner of potent pesticides and traps await. The happily illustrated label of a fire-ant poison looks inviting. A plastic owl with a rotating head watches every move. One might wonder why the fire ants haven’t figured out why everyone’s suddenly dropping dead.

Pushing on, our patient of hardware inevitably runs into the Pinewood Derby display, a sure trigger of lost youth. The 7-inch-long wooden blocks call out, beckoning to be transformed into Indy racers. The display has weights, shaping tools, body skins and polishing compound that promises to make the axles spin faster. Wind tunnel testing would be a nice touch, the dreamer muses.

Finally, like a hammer drawn to a sixpenny nail, the dreamer comes to the tool aisle, a must-stop on the therapy tour. This is where hardware therapy truly taps into the gray matter twixt our ears. Souls are soothed by the anticipation of the gentle buzz of the palm sander and the quiet whir of a compound miter saw. Problems fade away like sawdust in the breeze.

The tool aisle is the retail equivalent of an old-fashioned river baptism. Here, the sins of past projects are washed away. Dreamers know this and immerse themselves shamelessly in a sea of router bits and wrench sockets. About this time, a beautiful thing happens: Tranquility sets in like a slow-drying caulk and real hardware healing takes place.

It starts with a quiet self-confession: “I’m not sure I can do this.” This is the ground zero confession of all do-it-yourselfers. We know the deck has to be rebuilt and the sink isn’t going to stop dripping on its own, but are we worthy? Jesus was a carpenter and he didn’t have a set of modern tools, so maybe there’s hope, the dreamer reasons. Slowly but surely, hardware therapy works its magic. It illuminates the possibilities.

Before you know it, the clouds of doubt are parting. The time to hesitate is over. A plan begins to take shape. Boom! Just like that, our dreamer transforms into a do-it-yourselfer. So next time you need a little lift, consider a session with the nuts at your local hardware store. Where the next project is but a dream away. Oh, and don’t forget the popcorn. OH

Bill McConnell is an award-winning freelance writer and reluctant DIYer. You can shoot the nuts and bolts with him at mcconnell@carolina.rr.com.

O.Henry Ending

Nettleton Nightmare

The nettlesome side of “Greensboro’s Shoe”

By Charles A. Jones

When I recently noticed my accountant was wearing non-Nettleton tassel loafers, I winced. In 2012, O.Henry magazine glorified Nettletons as “The Greensboro Shoe [in] the golden age of haberdashery.”

I frankly do not understand all this bootlicking heaped upon a brand of shoes that evokes, for some, painful memories of being bullied and mocked by the fashion police in junior and senior high schools.

My time in hell was three years at Kiser from 1967–1970 and one year at Grimsley ’70–’71. The “uniform” of our generation’s equivalent of the Hitler Youth (aka “Brownshirts”) was a pair of Nettletons, black socks, and often an Izod shirt featuring, appropriately, a vicious alligator. Penny loafers were allowed as an alternative to Nettletons but never with pennies in the slots at the front of the loafers — unless you had a death wish. Such fashion deviations brought instant and brutal punishment by the Brownshirts. Another taboo: wearing “fake Nettletons”

But not everyone who sported Nettletons was a bully. I remember a good guy from the Kiser years whom I will call John Brandt, who wore the prized loafers. When a bully stepped on the tip of his Nettleton and turned his foot to grind the shoe’s toe, John hit the guy in the face the very next day at his father’s suggestion and dragged the bleeding offender to the principal’s office.

My parents for whatever reason would not let me buy Nettletons. My feet were also too big and too wide for the shiny penny loafers (which my parents did allow) flattening the inside edges of the shoes.

Another fashion offense that put me in harm’s way was donning a pair of white or light colored socks, a lightning rod that drew instant fire. I remember a dangerous duo — let’s call them Lane Smith and Paul Downing, who were both Nettleton-wearers — seeing me commit just such a fashion offense. Rocking back and forth on their feet, they mocked me by sarcastically singing “We like those WHITE SOCKS!” Lane once expressed his disapproval of me by spitting on me through the gap in his front teeth. Once, when the bottoms of my feet were badly cut and I had to wear white socks, I covered them with a pair of dark ones so I would live another day.

Nettletons or “Neds” as they were called, became meaningless after I left Greensboro’s public schools. At Oak Ridge Military Academy, Wake Forest University and Campbell College Law School, one’s academic performance and character were much more important than a shoe brand.

In 1981 I joined the Marines and never had to worry about what to wear — and I didn’t have to go to Younts-DeBoe and spend a week’s pay on a pair of shoes. For field duty, the uniform was “boots and utes” — combat boots and a standard utility uniform (camouflage). I became elite based on merit, not on footwear.

Ironically, shoe problems still haunted me during my initial Marine training. My wide, flat feet didn’t fit comfortably inside narrow combat boots with little support. What were benignly termed “conditioning hikes” were in fact long marches on gravel roads (a great way to see Virginia’s countryside while wearing a helmet and pack, and carrying a rifle). My feet began to look like bleeding hamburgers. I tried everything for relief, including wearing hose and — get this — white socks. The only relief came when I got wider boots.

Civilian clothing was permitted after hours, but fellow Marines, despite their regimented training and esprit de corps, never ragged anyone for wearing faux Nettletons or white socks. I doubt they even knew what Nettletons were. I realized that high school was over and that mature adults do not really care what shoes or socks one wears as long as one is a competent, humane individual.

Despite the very strong signal I got from the beautiful people and show-offs that I was CLEARLY not one of them, I have led a successful and fulfilling life to age 64. And I will never be nostalgic about a status symbol that symbolized, at least for me, the cruelty that insecure adolescents are capable of inflicting upon one another.

Without fear I wear white socks as I write and edit this article, and I — who still have the fire of a Marine — look forward to meeting Lane Smith and Paul Downing one day to revisit the good old times and maybe even using the end of my fist to point their chins to their “Neds.”

Charles A. Jones is a retired Marine Corps Reserve colonel, a lawyer and a writer. He changed the names of those mentioned in this article to protect the guilty.

O.Henry Ending

Mad Bride Sydrome

Going whole hog — or whole Dog — over weddings

By Cynthia Adams

The average American wedding now costs over $33,000. Everything about a wedding reads like fiction. Case in point: the wedding of a young friend I’ll call Heather.

Heather, a normally even-tempered girl with a serious job, descended into MBS — Mad Bride Syndrome. Notably, she opted into an honored wedding tradition: attention-hogging. She was careful not to include attractive women in her party.

Heather’s a looker — sleekly athletic — but not a single one of her bridesmaids was of more than average looks and none had Heather’s stunning figure. Even the flower girl was cute, but not too cute.

I love weddings. Where else do you get so much theater and drama, with champagne and cake served at the end? And though I may seem a willing party to many, I am the last person anyone should consult. (I tied the knot at another friend’s wedding, discretely taking my vows inside a utility closet during their reception rather than going through the whole drama. We splashed out on a great honeymoon instead.)

The fact that brides still sometimes seek my opinion tells me something: Their inner circle threw up their hands and gave up. As someone known to court disaster, seeking my counsel reveals a level of total desperation with wedding planning.

Heather began texting me things that had me questioning her rational mind:

What did I think about script versus block text on the wedding program?

What did I think about a Tyrannosaurus rex groom cake for Les, who loved dinosaurs as a child?

What do you think about the playlist for the reception? U2 first, or Fergie? Lex likes U2, but I dunno, she texted.

Huh? Heather’s increasingly nutty messages made me gawk but, this doozy zipped onto my phone screen at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday:

I don’t want visible panty lines at the wedding. What do you think if I tell the bridesmaids not to wear underwear?

Bridesmaids going commando?

Heather hammered out this message while testing 10 different fingernail polishes — each fingernail a different color — while working her power job as an assistant district attorney.

She spent that day asking felons, court reporters, and even one probation officer, what they thought of the various polish colors — Shell, Veil, Whisper, Nice and Naughty, Sassy and Bridal Slipper. Heather has a good memory, so she had each color memorized. She was truly ticked off at what one uppity clerk had to say.

Thing is, I don’t even recall what I replied to Heather’s panty query. But on the Big Day, I could not drag my eyes from their derrières as they made their pantyless way down the aisle. The only competing thing that drew my eyes away from their bottoms was their hair.

Bridal hair deserves its own essay.

Heather’s bridal hair was Marge Simpson–huge, and the bridal party’s up-dos appeared to be sized in descending order of importance.

But Heather isn’t alone in lusting for something magical atop her head. My mother has dedicated, by my quick calculations, at least $99,600 and more than 204 days of her life — nearly a full year — to her hair.

My sister inherited the trait. On her birthday, she sent me an email about a recent hairdo gone wrong. When I asked exactly how bad her hair was, she emailed back something about Dog, a TV bounty hunter and his mullet.

I asked if she had wanted a mullet.

Actually no, she replied. But if I knew about Dog, I also knew about his wife, who had a hair color even worse than his. Whose hair looked more chewed than cut. My sister added she was pretty certain that when she sat her ass down at the salon, she hadn’t requested to be a reality celebrity look alike to Dog’s wife.

It was a slow morning, so I mulled over Dog’s mullet and chewed-off hair. I mulled over Heather’s quest to be perfection from fingertip to wobbly bottoms and towering tops.

At Heather’s outdoor wedding, I was tapped to do a poetic reading, as lightning flashed and a deluge broke. Rat wet, with multiple hair products streaming down my face, I determinedly, gamely, gripped the microphone and invoked Pablo Neruda’s poetry.

Taking my seat, I am sure I heard the whisper: “You know who she looks like? Have you ever seen that bounty hunter’s wife?”  OH

Cynthia Adams has spent the past year trying to undo a hair-misfire. She remains mesmerized by weddings.

O.Henry Ending

Things That Go Burp in the Night

Including iPads

By David Claude Bailey

Even in this hi-tech age of vigilant home security systems, things still go bump in the night. And what sound is more frightening than the thump of a tablet or laptop sliding off the bed onto the floor?

“It’s just my iPad,” my wife, Anne said in a semislumber. “Happens all the time.”

What doesn’t happen all the time, I learned when I brought her morning cup of Earl Grey in bed the next morning, was the screen going black save for an ominous, flickering blue aura on one edge.

I’ve watched as my wife has become addicted to watching ospreys hatch in Washington state; getting all hot and bothered while slinging barbs on Facebook at relatives with opposing political views; and, worst of all, howling aloud after watching another YouTube “Funniest Cat Video Ever.” Selfishly, I like her being iConnected. I can ask Anne to put things on our social calendar, issue reminders (Emergency: We’re almost out of kimchi) and make urgent requests (Let’s have Korean barbecued pork belly for supper tonight, requiring said kimchi).

The tone of voice she assumed the morning after the drop was the same one she used when our springer spaniel had its first seizure — grave without any opening for humor. We needed to go to the Apple Store, she announced, a place she knows I despise.

“Can’t I first send out an email asking for advice?” I wondered aloud.

“You can do whatever you want, but I’m going to the Apple Store as soon as I can get an appointment,” was the reply.

Email dispatched. Within seconds, O.Henry’s resident comic wrote, “Drop it again. LOL.”

Meanwhile I’d been trolling the Internet for advice.

At www.ifixit.com, I found a number of distressed iPad owners with either poor typing skills or bad grammar or a poor command of English or a combination thereof.

“Hi my touch panel is broke but screen is warking I am change the screen but after I fix all part screen not come on but sound is coming what I can do please,” wondered Roofi.

Someone named Haris suggested: “Try to tap it with your hand on its back frequently and then press power button.” A flurry of grateful responses followed agreeing that spanking your iPad is not a bad thing.

I waited until Anne was out in the garden and took her iPad to the woodshed. Nothing.

The genius at the Apple Store was oh-so-sympathetic and confirmed that Anne’s iPad was still alive by plugging it into his MacBook Air. The screen, however, had broken off all relations with the rest of the computer. The geniuses at the Apple Store, like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, don’t do repairs. But for a mere $279, Anne could get a refurbished iPad and they’d help her retrieve from the iCloud all her stored and treasured URLs for the World’s Funniest Cat Videos, not to mention the password to the Starz site where she can view Outlander episodes a day early.

I asked the genius how broken an iPad had to be before they’d refuse it as trade-in for refurbishment. Couldn’t I just take it apart to see if I could fix it?? Anne looked at me as if I had suggested performing DIY brain surgery on our spaniel. The genius was a little shaken. I could try it, and if I brought back anything resembling an iPad, they’d swap it.

With Anne’s blessing I took my friend’s LOL advice and dropped it on our car’s floor mat from a height of about a foot. The luminous, cheerful blue of the startup screen blinked on and, Maria and I were declared brilliant — until the screen went black again that night. I dropped it a few more times and the screen came back on looking like a tie-dyed T-shirt. Far out!

Plan B: a rendezvous with one of iCracked’s local iTechs. Frank Harmuth assuaged our fears; what I had been doing was fine. “We call it burping the iPad,” he said at the Starbucks in Barnes & Noble’s at Friendly. Wrapping Anne’s in a weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal he “burped” it again — to no effect. A few alternate moves produced temporary flashes of luminescent blue. “I don’t want to break the screen,” Frank said, explaining that it was attached to the computer by a male and female connection via a wiring harness. The original drop had resulted in a sort of coitus interruptus. Jiggling and lightly tapping the iPad usually restored the lost spark, so to speak — until it needed burping again, he explained. Noticing that he was afraid to give it the Maria and David treatment, I said, “Can I try it?”

I did a hard drop from the height of a few feet onto Starbucks’ hardwood table and Bingo: IfixedIt. The cats are back. The latest political diatribe comes via Facebook. Anne’s watching her bird chick cams again. Outlander’s in the queue.

And I’m now known, at least around our house, as the resident iGenius.  OH

David Bailey, O.Henry’s editor at large, doesn’t suggest hard burping your iPad or trying to iFix your laptop without Frank Marmuth’s expert guidance via FrankH@iTechs.com.