Air On A Drawstring

Okay, okay, so I didn’t exactly scale the North face of the Eiger, or any of that show-offy adventurer jazz, but, for me, traversing that brushed ridge of processed cotton, and emerging heroically on the other side of the tunnel beneath with my valiant drawstring cord intact was just as big a deal.

No St Bernard dog thumping through the snow with reviving brandy could not have brought more blessed relief, or offered a more welcome sight than that cord emerging into the light …

You see, my intrepid friends, in these days of lockdowns and cock-ups, it’s the little things that can make all the difference to a man’s self-esteem.

See, in going against my natural grain, I shattered the glass ceiling of my self-doubt, raising myself to heights I thought no longer possible …

Yes, I successfully rethreaded the drawstring in my old dirty-petrol grey hoodie!

No, no, you don’t know … you can’t know … the fear and loathing that had coursed through the very fabric of my being, not to mention the fabric of my hoodie, the other night when I noticed the drawstring hanging long as the meandering Nile on one side of the hoodie hood, and on the other … the gaping void, the great unfilled eyehole, a vast unexplored cosmos of nothing! 

The long, dark night of the hole had begun …

No string attached …

Gone, sucked up, taken by three-eyed aliens or disillusioned tooth-fairies, or maybe woken at night, and dragged off, wailing silently and uselessly, by renegade elves  …  well, no longer exiting the eyehole on the left side of the hood like in the good times.

What to do, what to do!

Well normally, I would just yank the whole thing through and ditch it.

Maybe curse the odd time when I couldn’t draw up the hood cosily round my shivering noggin on less clement days, but, with a sigh, I would let it join love’s labours lost, or the long list of things I mean to do, but, you know … I can’t even finish this sentence I’m so discouraged …

For shame … but at least I would feel properly aggrieved, and even justified in my resentment of how the universe conspires against me, in little ways, mostly, to make me feel just a little more inferior by the day.

Not what I was consciously thinking all this when I noticed this sartorial, er, drawback … 

It was late at night when I made this grim discovery … work finally finished and sitting on my own, on the edge of the bath in the bathroom, checking on Twitter, everyone else in bed.

And, guess what? Tired as I was, my eyed dreary and red from eight hours at the computer, and wrecked from the lack of exercise, I leapt up and shouted, ‘No!’ …

‘I’m not having this, damn it … no, by golly, I’m going to fight back, I’m going to get this goddamn drawstring back just the way it was’ …

Actually, I just sat there, but I did start looking around the bathroom … 

Thoughts arrived … something to do with taking out the string, and feeding it all the way through from one side to the other …

Did I hear somebody one time talking about using a safety pin, or a needle, maybe …

I spotted a hair clip … maybe, maybe …

Just call me MacGyver …

One side of the drawstring ended in a gnarly knot, the other just … ended.

Not too promising … 

So I essayed gripping the gnarly bit with the hair clip, in a deft pincer movement involving right thumb and index finger — a classic gambit — and approached the eyehole on the left of the hood … yes, yes, I had taken the hoodie off first!

I ventured this union of clip and knot into the opening, tentative at first, poking it in, maybe a few millimetres, while left thumb and index went atop the ridge, their only contact with the outside world, and tried to draw knot and clip through from above, coaxing it along through the fabric …

Oh, I must have progressed a whole 10 or 11 microns (1000 times smaller than a millimetre, fact fiends!) when the sudden ease of clip movement informed my discerning brain that clasp and knot had gone their separate ways, were undone … 

I was undone!

Curses …

What now?

Well, I tried again … advanced maybe a few centimetres this time, but then the same uncoupling …

Things were getting serious now …

My very course in life had been reshaped … now, finally, I understood my true purpose  … I had to get this thing through …

AND THEN IT STRUCK ME!

What if I tried and bring the gnarly knot itself through… it could work … it had to work!

It was slow at first, but this time joining middle finger to thumb and index of both hands, I could just discern the mole-like movement of the knot beneath the surface, and WE WERE MOVING …

Oh the thrill, the high, the quiet exhilaration, as this underground braille trail operation on knot and drawstring wended its way, painstakingly, stalling occasionally at more awkward bends — the Eiger sanctions — on this long road to freedom, but forging, forging ahead…

Oh, I started to get cocky now, my fingers those of the virtuoso, feeling and guiding, speeding up slightly, pausing for grace notes of infinite dexterity and precision, the silent music of the drawstring thundering noiselessly through the night, this knot now Orpheus in the underworld of soft, fluffy cotton …

Oh how my heartbeat rose as this underground locomotive negotiated each turn and seam … the far eyehole drawing ever closer and closer …

There was no time to hire the usual maraca band, or more subtle, lone bagpiper to salute my heroic gnarly knot when he would emerge, blinking shyly but appreciatively into the light of liberty and destiny, after his dark, dark odyssey, so I would have to be my own welcoming party …

But what of it, I would be there, wouldn’t miss it for anything …

And … at long last, there he was, the first fine threads stepping gingerly through the opening … pushing against it, and stopping …

Oh, no, not now … NOT NOW! 

The knot was too big to slip easily through into the bathroom light, but, never fear, my now well-practised digits knew what to do … if breech birth it must bet then breech-birth it would be …

A forceps delivery …

By now, I felt these hands could do anything, their delicate deftness fused with precision and unanticipated power, and I reached for the hair clip that still lay there on the shelf forlornly, still smarting from having failed on its initial mission.

This time, I instinctively knew that hair clip would rise gallantly and gracefully to the challenge …

Working at the soft, cobalt strands, together we forced through more and more of the knot, until, with one last, ingenious flick, the whole lot was through …

Back from the Upside Down.

We had done it  …

I stood to attention before the bathroom mirror and nonchalantly tugged each side of the drawstring until they hung elegantly — now two, of course — and jauntily assured in perfect symmetry, on either side of my hood. 

I tightened the string on either side to once again feel the soft reassurance of my hood closing around my flushed cheeks …

I had worked it out.

Literally and metaphorically.

Life and my hoodie would never be the same.

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