The Seamstress
We went for a picnic with some of our friends yesterday out by the lake. It’s strange how I catch glimpses of my parents in me now.
Like when we’re sitting there in folding chairs talking about how to make pizza and one of the girls says how great it is having a kitchen again now that their extension is nearly finished. Occasionally I yell: “Don’t go too far kids!” before returning to the conversation.
But then at other times, I am unmistakably me - the old awkward goofy kid cracking jokes and trying to fit it.
One of us brought a badminton net, which we couldn’t really set up all that well in the sand but we played anyway. Crapminton, I called it. Over the last week Elliot had been volunteered by his wife to help out in her home-based curtain making business. So he’s been stuck behind a sewing machine most evenings. He was on my team and our opponent dubbed him “The Seamstress”.
When he would go to his the birdie, our friend on the other side of the net would shout this out to put him off. “The Seamstress!!! Oh and he misses!” and “It looks like this is curtains for The Seamstress” or “He is sew tired - his game is hanging by a thread”. I had to bite my lip, because Elliot was getting rattled by this and he was a team-mate, after all.
Our friend was trying to get me to join in, but my head was going: “Must…resist…..Can’t….joke…but…..tooo…….TEMPTING,” until eventually I couldn’t help myself. “Are you tired?” I asked, “Look dude, if you get a stitch, we can stop.”
At which point our friend on the other team nearly wet himself.
When he recovered, he said: “What is the mail equivalent of a seamstress anyway?”
“A seamster, I think,” I said.
Elliot, who should know about these things and is nuts about martial arts and Japanese fighting cartoons, agreed but said his official title was one of “Grand Seam Master”, which sounded fair enough.
May 3rd, 2005 at 11:35 pm
“Seamster.” That’s great. Reading this, I nearly ruined a perfectly good pair of trousers myself.