Jeans Save Lives.

Dear Doll-face,

I came to work early today, to let the manager leave early so I could be home with my mom through Sunday helping clean out grandpa's apartment. As I came in I knew I had two pairs of pants to hem, but there was a third bag in the bin with my name on it.  It was something new that came in today.

I opened the bag to a pair of very large and rough jeans.  Seat ripped out, holes everywhere.  They wer awful. I rolled my eyes and just assumed that someone must love them an awful lot to drag them to a cleaners for repairs when they were so obviously so far gone.

So I tore patches off donated jean parts, sewed up the butt, and sat for about 3 hours stiching slowly between customers.  At nearly 6pm a guy came in and I was still stiching away. He leaned over and looked and said, "I'm here for a pair of jeans, in fact that looks like them."

I was relieved.  There were still lots of holes but now that I had a person in front of me I could ask him what mattered and what didn't.  We settled on repairing one last belt loop.  He hung out while I stiched it up really quickly.

I also made a sick fort out of drying drop cloths.

I noticed the customer had bandages around his hands and wrists, but I didn't want to pry.  Instead I asked, "So what's so special about these jeans?"

That's when he recounted the story.  Last week he was biking (motercycling) down back to Macomb from somewhere in Wisconsin (a 900 mile trip he said).  He was going to make the ride in one day.  It was hot, so he didn't wear his biking gloves.  He blew a tire going 90 miles per hour on a highway road. He fishtaled to try and reduce his speed, but still took a decent spill.  His hands were cut up to crap, and he luckly skidd most of the way on his butt, not his back or head.  Those walmart brand wrangler jeans that I was slowly restiching had probably saved his life, and were all that protected the skin on his legs.

Major respect as I made the last knot and charged him $2.00 instead of the ten that I'd been thinking about all evening.  A cool story discount, that was my rational anyway.

I decided to hit you with a back to back since Michael and I will be leaving with Bella tonight for my mom's and won't be back until Sunday night or Monday morning. I'll try and blog while we're up there, but no promises.  I miss you kiddo. Love you lots.