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The mending pile is where good clothes with small problems go to die.
It's like prison for pants -- you might see them again in three to five years. Most serve a life sentence.
"Sweetheart, can you fix this hole in my pocket?" I called out from the bedroom. "Quarters keep rolling down my leg, and a penny slid into my sock."
"Toss them into the mending pile."
"I need them today," I said. "I'll give you the penny in my sock."
"I'm a little busy here," she said. "You'll have to stitch it yourself."
She left me no choice. I wadded the slacks into a mole hill, jammed them onto the mountain of mending, and shot over to Walmart to buy a new pair.
That's what we do these days. We live in Generation Replace It even though we grew up in Generation Patch It.
When I was a kid, Mom patched everything. All moms did. And a few dads.
Most of our clothes were hand-me-downs. They came pre-patched. Clothes that were damaged beyond repair were cut into new patches to fix clothes that could be handed down to one or two more kids.
All of us in the neighborhood wore jeans held together by knee patches. If you didn't, you weren't playing hard enough.
If we donned long-sleeved shirts, the elbows were patched. If we dressed in short sleeves, our elbows sported Band-Aids, because if Mom couldn't patch our clothing, she patched us.
"Can't I just get new jeans?" I asked.
"Don't be silly. I've got a patch right here that's almost the same color. Give me 15 minutes and they'll be fancier than new trousers."
As I grew taller, Mom said she'd sew 6 inches of lace on the bottoms of my jeans. I think she was joking, but I wasn't sure. New clothes showed up at Christmas. The rest of the year, we got patches.
Finally, appliques caught fire as fashion. In the 1960s, our clothes blossomed into trippy collages of ironed-on and sewn-on smiley faces, doves, peace signs, VW buses and yellow submarines. The chaos cluttered our clothes like a far-out sash of Girl Scout merit badges swirled in a kitchen blender.
Not today in Generation Replace It. No longer do we darn socks. When our toes poke out, we throw them out -- the socks, not the toes. The art of appliques faded as society slipped from save everything into replace anything.
Then came the ripped jeans look. Tell your teen, "Oh, Honey, throw those in the sewing pile and I'll patch them up for you," and she'll recoil. Why?
One, you're no longer groovy. I mean, lit. Or whatever the cool word is now.
And two, nothing comes back from the mending pile in less than three to five years. We sentence rips and tears to the heap of no hope, then finally buy replacements when we can't figure out where all our underwear went.
Sometimes, that's a blessing. Last Christmas, Aunt Betty gifted me the ugliest purple-pink-and-orange polka-dotted dress shirt I'd ever seen. Not even 6 inches of lace could improve this thing.
"She'll expect you to wear it to all family dinners, weddings and funerals," my wife warned.
I cringed.
Until I spotted a teeny, tiny tear in the middle of an orange polka dot.
"I will," I promised with a toss. "Just as soon as it returns from the mending pile."
Patch through to Cole at burtseyeview@trib today.com, the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook or @BurtonWCole on Twitter.