What’s Wrong

My kids love to hear the story that I tell about my wife and their mom Cindy. It happened while Cindy and I were still dating, but let me set the background before I start. Back then, Gabriel’s was a single building outlet for seconds of clothing, not the collection of stores that it has become. Many of these seconds would likely have been called thirds today. Each item of clothing had to be examined with an eagle’s eye for flaws. Some were minute like a snag, a slight dye problem, or tear in the cloth. Zippers had to be checker to be sure they functioned properly. There were a number of ways that an item would end up on the shelves or racks of the Gabriel’s store.

This incident occurred one summer afternoon between the times that Gabriel’s store was just two houses in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. They were connected by a covered passageway long before they first expanded to be Gabriel Brothers’ chain. Cindy and I had been dating for probably a year and we were sitting on the front porch swing at her home at Camp Christian in Mill Run, Pennsylvania. It was then I noticed something and said, “Did you get that blouse at Gabe’s?”

She asked, “Why?”

“The sleeves don’t match,” I said.

She scanned her blouse carefully trying to see what I’d seen; looking for obvious flaws. When she didn’t respond, I said, “The patterns are similar, but different.”

The configuration of the designs was exactly the same and about the size of a silver dollar. The design shapes were of the same colors, in the same spots, and nearly the same pattern. The pale greens, lavenders, corals, and sandy yellows all had the same placement in the design, but one sleeve matched the material in the rest of the blouse with seashells, fish, a sea horse, a sand dollar, and waving seaweed while the other nonconforming sleeve was decorated with dragonflies, butterflies, flowers, and grass.

Let me say that Cindy must have worn the blouse for quite some time, it was nearly worn out and until then, no one else noticed. If she’d worn it for any of our dates before, I hadn’t noticed the difference until that afternoon. I’ll finish the story by saying I never saw Cindy wear that blouse again.