Feng Shui

My dear fabulous daughter,

I have been reading a book about the ancient Chinese philosophy of Feng Shui, and after the first few chapters I found myself nodding my head as a dawning understanding grew and continued to expand in my brain as I learned about the important influence of chi in one's home. As you may know, chi is the circulating life force in Chinese philosophy and medicine, and as such it is essential that it be allowed to flow freely about one's home in order to ensure the proper well-being and prosperity of the inhabitants of the household. I read with particular interest the paragraphs decrying the ills of storing worn out and unused items within the house as this results in the stagnation of chi and I was galvanized into immediate action to inspect the far reaches of our lovely home on a campaign to free chi!

I was very quickly able to determine that your dear father has unwittingly been responsible for a great deal of chi stagnation in our house, especially in the area of our bedroom closet. As you know, he has a particular reluctance to relinquish possession of any part of his collection of single socks, his mountain of stretched, shrunken and stained 20+ year old T-shirts, or his innumerable ill-fitting baseball style hats, stained with who-knows-what, in charming colours like bright orange, Tweety-Bird yellow, and sick dog dropping brown, and bearing the names of sewer cleaning equipment and garbage truck companies. You will also recall one of our oft debated but never changed household rules: only your father has the authority to determine when an article of his clothing is worn beyond practical function or the bounds of decency. Only after much soul searching is he able to set aside the beloved article of clothing and buy a new one to replace it - however, he will not actually throw worn items away, but rather delegates these detestable items as "fishing and lawn-mowing clothes" and keeps them in various locations around the house and garage. Spurred on by my newly found knowledge of Feng Shui, I have come to the undeniable conclusion that your father's lousy luck on his various and numerous fishing sorties in recent years is the direct result of the stagnated chi related to his unfortunate attire. In an effort to restore harmony to the home and to assist your father in re-establishing himself as the successful hunter/gatherer of his younger years, and as a better dressed one I might add, I have now seriously committed myself to the daunting challenge of divesting him of numerous chi stagnating articles of clothing.

My usual tradition of dealing with your father's threadbare hole-riddled sock pairs is to tenderly roll them up, wrap one cuff over the rest of the neat little bundle they form and to place said bundle in his designated sock pile after I have cut their holes into neat square and diamond shapes so as to allow him to clearly see and freely acknowledge they haven't a redeeming thread crossing their geometric designs when next he comes across them as he prepares for work. At this point he is better able to permanently dispose of them with only a hint of reluctance in his Steve Nash wannabe toss towards the trash basket. I have decided to expand upon this method of gentle persuasion, but because of the negative and destructive implications connected with taking scissors to clothing articles, I have instead adopted a method of "fixing" your father's fishing and lawn-mowing wardrobe.

Your father was only too pleased to see me busy at work at my sewing machine last week with a pile of his jeans and shorts. The first item I repaired was the pair of swim shorts purchased many years ago when the very first Costco opened in Vancouver. These shorts are a shade of green similar to that of a peeled avocado that has been left too long unattended, and they have white, grey and purple cheetah spotted side stripes and were hardly attractive when they were brand new, however their exceedingly low price in 1980-something enticed your father to possess them and now with their rips and tears and the sadly deteriorated inner swim lining ... well, I need not say more. My first course of action was to cut away the majority of the shreds of inner lining and sew straight across the remaining scraps so that the interior of the shorts was now lovely and taught with very narrow openings through which to put one's legs; second, I sewed closed the rip in the right rear side under the pocket by incorporating a large puckering dart; third, I sewed closed the large rip in the left rear side by creating a new seam, from waistband to hem, that rendered the left side of the shorts a full 4 inches narrower than the now puckered right side. Next I moved onto a pair of severely grease-stained and ripped blue jeans. Both knees were torn and the rips were ragged and several inches wide and high due to decades of hard wear and washing, so I turned the jeans inside out and sewed the edges of each hole together, incorporating wide swooping curves to encompass all of the offending tattered material. The result was that once the jeans were turned right side out they bent at the knees in the opposite direction of a natural knee bend. I busied myself for over an hour in my hasty and creative repairs to the remaining pile of worn out clothes, then neatly folded all articles and interspersed them amongst the rest of the clothes in your father's side of the closet.

It was my thinking that when next your father embarked upon a fishing or lawn mowing expedition he would notice the vigorous repairs to his clothing, glower, perhaps snort out a brief oath, then have a laugh and throw the item away. So you may imagine my shock this past weekend when I returned home from the grocery store to see your father in the front yard mowing the lawn and wearing the aforementioned green swim shorts with white, grey, and purple cheetah spotted side stripes for the entire neighbourhood to see. They hung unusually low around his hips with a large pucker in the right rear and the back centre seam was pulled over to the far right rear because of the new seam I had made. I squinted at him over my bag of groceries to determine if he was sporting a defiant look of triumph upon his face, however, there was nothing there but his good nature as he stopped the mower to say hello to a passing neighbour who was out walking his dog. Your father chatted away, seemingly oblivious to the atrocious and somewhat indecent fit of his shorts. I said a brief hello to the neighbour then hastily charged towards the front door, holding in a belly-laugh, but not before I saw the quizzical look on Mr. Holland's face as your father turned away from him and bent over to retrieve the dog's ball.

When your father had finished with the lawn he came inside and I poured him a tall cold beer and watched him give an absent-minded tug at the hem of his shorts before he sat down on a kitchen chair. I remarked upon what a good job he had done on the lawn and he told me about all the neighbours with whom he'd chatted and expressed how delightful it was to live in such a friendly neighbourhood where all the neighbours had such ready smiles. I watched his face closely as I remarked upon what excellent physical condition he had maintained all these years since he had first purchased his shorts and I couldn't resist asking him if they still fit him as well 20 years later. He gave a slight frown and said that actually, no, the shorts didn't feel quite the same as they had even a few weeks ago when last he'd mown the lawn - that he hadn't been able to pull them up very well and they seemed a little tight - he must have seen something in my face at that moment as I was struggling to maintain a wide eyed innocent expression of deep interest, for he leapt out of his chair and tugging at the hem of his shorts demanded to know if I'd done something to them. Gales of laughter ensued from both he and me and the offending shorts have not been seen since.

Now I await his discovery of the recently repaired jeans...

LOVE YOUR WONDERFUL MOTHER