It’s a rainy day and I’m thinking about my father. He was a gifted pharmaceutical research chemist with encyclopedic interests. I can see him now, so many evenings when I was growing up, sitting in an arm chair pouring over a random volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Voracious reading fed into a game he played with his good friend Lou Marino which particularly terrified me.

The game was this. First they’d imagine a nuclear war or some other holocaust which reduces the few survivors to Stone Age level. And here I am, listening to grown up talk from another room, not liking the game one bit. We get all the details of the devastation. The next step is to imagine the minimum number of their friends and colleagues needed to recreate modern science and technology. My father would “do” chemistry (with what tools I don’t know). Astronomy also, and mathematics. Lou, a fine engineer, would manage other tasks, creating electrical supply, designing bridges and so forth. They added a physicist, medical doctor, metallurgist biologist, etc., looking for people with multiple skills (since there isn’t much food, remember). Or maybe the game was a sort of Fahrenheit 451 and the object was simply to designate people who could keep a mental archive of all that was lost.

“You’re scaring the kids,” my mother and Mrs. Marino would complain, to which the general answer was, “They can understand a hypothetical conversation.” Not really, or rather, “hypothetical” for me blended seamlessly into reality. Funny that a fiction writer was never part of the rebuilding civilization group. However, now that years have mellowed the memory, it’s a sweet one, really, two friends passing  lazy Sunday afternoons telling stories.

It’s a warm winter morning in eastern Tennessee, enough for a light jacket when walking Jesse the Dog, in the 40s with a clearing blue sky. All seasonal weather, nothing so special in these parts, but it reminds me of those occasional dead of winter days in New Jersey where I grew up that offered an early, early tease of spring long before the first crocuses peaked. Snow was melting, you could see the ground again and smell the earth. Months of winter remained and more snow might be likely that very week, but those warm January days gave hope in the sudden, delicious perfume of muddy ground.

My grandmother was loving, kind and self-sacrificing. Margaret, my grandfather’s lady friend with whom he took up after my grandmother’s death, was none of that. Margaret did have lovely skin, as she often pointed out. She was from New Orleans, but the sun had never touched this lovely skin. Her devoted husband had done every outside chore for her; hats, gloves and long sleeves kept the rays away even in that heated city.

When Margaret moved in with my grandfather, his home became unwelcoming to his children: my mother and uncles. This was not Margaret’s fault, of course. The problem was her cat Bobby who was rendered “anxious” by the presence of  “visitors,” a term which applied exclusively to my mother and uncles. Bobby must not be anxious. That was the rule. Bobby had “asked” for peace and quiet in the house and my grandfather either couldn’t or wouldn’t endure a face-off with Bobby.

Hence my grandfather’s ninetieth birthday party in Houston was a tad tense. My mother, father and I had come in from another city, but had to stay in a hotel. The  party was at a friend’s house because of the Bobby problem. Over coleslaw, seven layer salad and barbequed chicken, the air crackled.

I had never actually seen Bobby since grandchildren were even more “visitors” in the house than children. “He’s gray, so of course he has an ‘M’ on his forehead,” was Margaret’s opening gambit when I asked about the peremptory cat.

“All gray cats have an ‘M’?”

“All of them.” When I asked why, she regarded me with disdain, indicating that Bobby’s low opinion of me was more than justified. “The ‘M’ is for ‘manger,’ because there was a gray cat in the stable when Christ was born.” I said I’d never heard or seen references to this cat. Because I’m an ignoramus, her look suggested. “There was a gray cat. It’s well known.” Well shut my mouth.

My father pointed out that “manger” wouldn’t have begun with an ‘M’ in Aramaic. Margaret said she knew that, but to repeat, “manger” starts with an ‘M’ in English. Apparently gray cats were linguistically advanced, anticipating the development of English at the time of Nativity.

Trying to diffuse the air, my mother said that stables often had cats to keep down rodents. Her father kept cats on the farm for that reason. Margaret was not pleased and pointedly did not pass around her seven-layer salad. “There were no rats in the stable. It’s well know.” The divine gray cat had another function. My father asked what that function might have been, passing the seven-layer salad to my mother who pointedly said, thank you, she didn’t care for it.

“When baby Jesus cried, the gray cat put his paw on the babe’s chest and baby Jesus ceased his crying.”

Now the big knives were coming out. “Baby Jesus did not cry in the manger,” my mother declared.

“Of course he did,” Margaret snapped. “All babies cry.”

“Not Baby Jesus,” my mother shot back. “It’s in the Christmas carol. ‘Little Lord Jesus, no crying he made’.”

“Martin Luther wrote that carol,” my father added loyally. “He must have known.”

“Luther didn’t know anything.” Margaret thumped the seven-layer salad out of reach. “He lived hundreds of years after Jesus. What did he know?”

If you ever sew, even an occasional button, and have less than 20-20 vision, you want these needles. Instead of poking blindly, increasingly convinced that a company of rich men, a dozen Rupert Murdocks, could enter the Kingdom of Heaven more easily than you can get this darn thread though the tiny needle eye, you could use an easy-thread needle. Just drape thread over the notch, pull down, and go. If you don’t have such a needle, I bet you want one now. You better not live in Knoxville, TN.

Last month my mother-in-law Sara was visiting from Italy. When I gave her one of my easy-threads to sew on a button, she was delighted and amazed by American technology. She wondered if perhaps, if it wasn’t too much trouble, we could get a package for her to bring home. An easy request. I called ahead, found a sewing supply store and there they were, two packs. She wanted them both, one for her, one for her son. At the cash register, she realized she’d like three more, one each for her cousin, neighbor and a friend. The clerk was watching this Italian exchange suspiciously, as if we were acquiring materials for some Bad Thing, like bomb building. When I asked, she admitted, reluctantly I thought, that more easy-threads were coming on Friday.

Then her curiosity burst its bounds: “Why does she want so many needles?”

“To give to friends. In Italy,” I added, also thinking that “None of your business” was  a possible response. Her hardening face declared: “Likely story.”

“She’s not going to re-sell them, is she?” As politicians say, this didn’t seem the kind of remark to be dignified by a response. My little mother-in-law with her three packs of easy-threads (which she didn’t have yet) would corner the European Union market and thus bring down the mid-South sewing supply sector?

We paid and left. As it happened, we couldn’t get to the store on Friday, Sara went back to Italy with her two packs of needles, and the next week I called to see if the shipment had come in. Not yet. So 1) the word was out and everybody wanted easy-threads or 2) this clerk figured better safe than sorry and stopped my nefarious plan in its tracks by cancelling the order.Yesterday, two weeks after my adventure with Sara, I called and was told “back order.” A likely story.

I called two more stores and found one that said yes, they had easy-thread needles. Not so fast. When I got there, I discovered they had easy-threads for sewing machines, not hand sewing. “Hey Margaret,” one clerk called across to the other, “do we have any of those handicap needles?” Really? That’s a pretty broad descriptor. Not having 20-20 vision means that I’m handicapped? Since I’m trying lately to shop local and not online, I keep searching for the easy-thread needle in the haystack of this city, in my new identity of handicapped terrorist.