Stitch in Time As a repaired shirt becomes more of an original, it still takes the author back. Words by Brad Wieners
We’d been playing in a sprinkler—that much you can dope out from my soaked shorts. I’d been a bear, or some other beast on all fours, roaming the wet grass, the smaller boy clinging to me, his brother coming to his rescue, everyone soon in a heap. The boys are almost two and a little further from three. They love to be chased like naughty puppies and tickled. Now we are resting, near but in our own worlds. We’re in the yard of the house we wanted for the first boy, the one we never thought we could afford, but we found a way. Then there were two. I’d had the shirt for a few years at that point, but that image is what I remember. Twelve years later, the younger dude says, “Yeah, you wore that the whole time I was growing up.” Back in January 2020, I brought it to the elves at Worn Wear, the free repair service that Patagonia offers at its original
retail location in Ventura, California, among others. “Have I got a challenge for you!” I told Kolby, the cheerful “tech” I found behind the desk. He held up the short-sleeved garment and grinned, seeing me clearly through the back panel. Did I tell him this was the second time I’d challenged Pata- gonia to save it from the rag bucket? That the SoHo, New York, store had miraculously resurrected it once before? Naturally. To my relief, this seemed to work: He relished the challenge and the intramural throwdown. Kolby also indulged my embarrassing affection for the shirt, listening patiently to my sentimental summary of all we’d been through together. We agreed it might be too far gone this time, a see-what-we-can-do situation. Then Kolby and the repair elves had to close up shop like everyone else because of the pan- demic, and I wondered if I’d ever see that shirt again.
It’s difficult for me to keep memories separate from the photo- graphs that record them. I learned this first from visits to my gram’s house well after I’d moved away. A bit bored during a holiday, I’d leaf through her photo albums, the Kodak Instamatic snapshots held in place by those little glued-in corners on thick black “con- struction paper” pages, the occasion penciled in chalk. In time, what I remembered of Christmases and birthday cookouts, making mud pies and Matchbox cities, beachcombing and stone-stepping through streams all rested on what I saw in those pictures. Now, de- cades on, there are filters on my phone to simulate the lighting and emulsion of those prints, and it’s my sons’ childhoods that have begun dissolving from living memory into pixels. And right at the boundary of what I actually recall of their earliest years, and what I only recall because it was photographed, is a simple plaid shirt.
(left) Photo courtesy of Brad Wieners’ family
(right) Brad Wieners and his sons, happily reunited with the plaid shirt that was a fixture of many childhood memories. Tim Davis
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