Stitching

Five old men, brothers, friends and me, hold court bi-weekly in the park,

always opening the gathering with gentle teasing before picking up the trail

of crumbs of past weeks’ daily minutia, brushed away quickly so to move

on to the body’s disrepair from overwear, pain in all places from the ongoing

mutiny of “corpus-against-us”, then, to the rescue comes the hopeful voice on

medical miracles just around the bend that will extend life, adding to our years

of further crankiness and complaint, and next, speaking of complaint, comes

the mess of current events, setting loose a litany of profanities – in turn giving

cause for Ned to shush with finger to lips and an eye-roll toward the playground

kids – all obligatory ritual to wading in the warm healing waters of nostalgia.

Which brings me around to stitching, which is what this tribe of elders does best,

like stitching together yesteryear’s patches of denim, flannel, first-aid gauze, long

underwear and parachute silk. Granted, not a pretty tapestry. But this day brings us

to stitching, quite literally, from brother Ned, who at age ten discovered the estranged

family cat’s litter of slimy “mice” in the neighbor’s backyard brush, six of them, one

with a necrotic leg choked off by the mother’s umbilicus. Ned goes right to work like

a trauma surgeon, cutting off the leg with scissors and stitching it up with Mom’s sewing

thread. It survived! living a full and happy feline life, never missing the leg it never knew

it had, goes the story. With that as the closing, we start packing up folding chairs, collect

edibles and coffee cups, with thoughts of heading home to put-off chores – at which time

the other brother adds, “Wait, didn’t we drown the other five kittens in the brook because

they didn’t seem to be moving”? True, maybe, probably. They were or were not already

dead, but we’d prefer it be in small-print footnotes we’d never be able to read, even

with strong reading glasses. Besides, Ned deserved his moment, and so did the rest of us.