COLUMN: What goes up, must come down

You’d think for a woman whose life is so monopolized by a jacket (see my column: The jacket rules), I’d know a thing about zippers, sleeves, pockets and hoods.

But the truth is sewing is not one of my hidden talents.

Unless it’s so well hidden that I haven’t found it yet.

A seamstress I’ll never be. I won’t buy a pair of pants that are too long unless I absolutely have to and then it’s up to my mom to hem them.

Mind you, I will do the odd bit of sewing, as long as I don’t really care what the outcome is going to look like.

Usually my biggest project of the year involves sewing my son’s name bar onto the back of his hockey jersey. It usually takes me about an hour, and I usually manage to sew the jersey together at least twice.

So you can imagine how thrilled I was this year when I had to sew his name bar on a home AND an away jersey, along with the sponsor name bars on both as well.

It took me two hours and three band-aids.

And you’d think all that time would count for something. But nooooo. Not one but both jerseys had the name bars hanging off of them one day at the rink. This time I just stapled them back on.

But I digress.

My husband and I recently decided to buy my youngest son a new winter jacket. Actually we didn’t have much choice. The zipper on his jacket wasn’t working and the material was torn in a few places. Plus the jacket was ugly. It hadn’t been an expensive jacket so this time around we decided to splurge a bit more on quality.

I bought the jacket on a Saturday.

By Sunday the zipper wasn’t working.

I couldn’t believe it. It hadn’t even been 22 hours since the point of purchase. And by now I had already written his name on the label inside the jacket because I’m paranoid that he’ll lose it. So you just know the store was not apt to take it back.

I struggled with the zipper at the base of the jacket for about 20 minutes. No go. Tried again the next morning. It still wouldn’t work. So I sent him to school with a jacket that was about three sizes too large and told him I’d get the zipper fixed.

I zipped over (pun intended) to a local business who is in the business of clothing, fabric and, I hoped, broken zippers. The first person who looked at it said the zipper thing (she actually had a real name for it) looked to be upside down. Another lady, she told me, could easily fix it.

The other lady came over and inspected the zipper. At first glance she agreed the zipper thing (again, it had a name) looked to be upside down. But then she paused and said, “Wait a minute, this looks to be a double-zipper system.”

So she ran her hand up to the top of the jacket, grabbed the zipper thing that was at the neck, and pulled it down to the bottom of the jacket. “It should work now,” she said.

I walked out the door without having to pay a cent.

Apparently there is no charge for stupidity.