Could You Bring Me a Black Dress Shirt?
Last week, I drove some chorus students to and from a “field trip” so that they could sing together.
That morning, I got a text from Dylan:
“Could you bring me a black dress shirt before 11:30?”
He’d forgotten to wear the appropriate attire. Not only that, but Dylan doesn’t own the appropriate attire.
We had a text conversation, which I won’t bother to repeat. But it ended with me saying, “Do you think I am your personal assistant?”
Then I called Bill, because Dylan said that Bill had a black dress shirt that Dylan could wear. We all believed that said shirt was clean and hanging in the closet.
But in the course of our conversation, Bill mentioned – oh, by the way, the tuxedo pants have a broken zipper.
The tuxedo pants that Dylan needs to wear for tomorrow’s concert. The pants that have been hanging in Dylan’s closet for three months, in anticipation of tomorrow’s concert. The pants that Bill knew last week needed to be fixed, but he forgot to mention it to me.
So first, I went to the gym. This was very good for my stress level, which was severely – and not imperceptibly – rising. I decided that I would find the black dress shirt, and take it to the school, even though this allows Dylan exactly ZERO consequences for his actions. If I hadn’t been driving, I could have let him stay at school and miss the concert – like he missed the school picture, when he forgot to wear appropriate attire. But I was driving the kids, so I was driving him.
As for the zipper, I was venting while walking around the track with my mom at the gym. I had no time to get the zipper fixed, of course, because I would be gone all day with the field trip. I was only venting, having completely forgotten that my mom knows how to sew.
So, because I have a great mom, she drove to my house to look at the tuxedo pants. They were shoved in his closet on top of his sweatshirts. (We found his tuxedo shirt balled up at the bottom of a nice carry bag.)
The zipper problem wasn’t something she could fix. So, because I have the greatest mom in the whole world, she took them to a tailor who could fix them – allowing me to rush off to the field trip with Dylan’s shirt.
When I got to the field trip, I asked his teacher if Dylan had a jacket to go with his tuxedo. I vaguely remembered seeing jackets. She looked on a nearby rack and didn’t find his name.
“Where’s your jacket, Dylan?” I asked.
“It’s at home,” he said.
“I looked at home, and it’s not there.”
“Yes it is!” he exclaimed. “I know exactly where it is!”
A few short hours later, Dylan was home, scrounging through his closets. The jacket was nowhere to be found. We shrieked at each other – him claiming never to have said he knew it was home, just that he thought it was at home.
I was just randomly shrieking.
Meanwhile, my mother picked up and even paid for the now-fixed zipper. She brought it back to us, like new. Dylan would have been wearing safety pins if it hadn’t been for her.
I got a text in the morning, less than 12 hours before the concert: “My jacket was on the rack with my name on it, at school.”
“Great,” I said. “Glad you found it.”