Aristedes the Tailor by Constantine Gochis

My cat has a favorite chair.  It has been so since I sprang for a set of white leather furniture. Not long after its delivery, I noticed that she was purring while kneading it with her claws, in contentment, after having ingested a full can of "Ralph's Liver and Chicken" creating the inevitable cat signature.

Today, there was a deeper cut than usual in my most expensive leather piece. Now, I have friends to whom there are summary solutions for this kind of problem. I however, belong to that category of human that credits the idiosyncratic ministrations of the cat to Divine causality.  I decided instead to investigate a possible repair. Then I would consider anti-cat measures to defy her ingenuity.

I hied me to the Smart Yellow Pages. Sure enough, leather can be repaired.  Heading the list of resources was the name "Aristedes the Taiilor".  There was instant recognition. For some fourteen years of my crossing the street going south on Fairfax Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard, I have noticed the name emblazoned on the second floor of a corner building. The name "Aristedes" has always fascinated me. Plutarch spends considerable time on this hero of ancient Athens. In one of his digressions, Plutarch relates the story of his encounter with a peasant of Aristedes' contiuency, who favored his exile, or, ostracism.

I located the building and suffered some fifty steps to the second floor and importuned a person in the hall way, "Do you know Aristedes the Tailor?"

"I am Aristedes the Tailor," said the person.

He was short, swarthy, perhaps in his late thirties or early forties, with a full head of black hair, and a well tailored mustache. I thought "He doesn't look Greek."  Then again, I have a brother in law who could be his double, if he had any hair, who stems from the island of Cyprus.

"Do you still have the Ostrakon they laid on you,"  I asked, certain that no Grek would be ignorant of the story of "Aristedes the Just".

"It's still hanging," he replied.  I did not get the inference at the time.

"Are you Greek," I asked.

"No," he said. "Mexican. Aristedes Garcia Santiago."  He recited a short geneology, in which several generations of Aristides appeared to have contributed to his making.

We entered his shop, which was cluttered with leather artistry.  Outerwear items abounded. There was no sign of chairs, as such, which augured ill for my furniture.

He detailed why he could not repair my chair, so we went on to name origins.

"Do you know who Aristedes was?"

"No," he answered.

I related the Plutarchian episode to him, wherein a peasant solicited the assistance of Aristedes in the Agora. The peasant asked that he write the very name "Aristedes" on his "Ostrakon" a flat stone on which the voters of the time wrote the names of politicians they sought to exile. The peasant did not know that he was asking the man he wished to see exiled.

"What have you against Aristedes?" he asked the peasant, though he obligingly wrote his own name on the stone.

"Because I am tired of hearing him referred to as 'Aristedes the Just'."



The tailor listened with unremarkable interest. Then he said, "I thought when you asked about my Ostrakon you were referring to my. . . ." and he made several gestures toward his crotch.

"So much for Plutarch," I thought. And Aristedes for that matter.

The Here, Not Here Sensation

When you have been a parishioner at one Church for nearly 36 years, you have seen a lot of congregants come and go. Many of the goings have been through death. I have known well, and less well, a great number of people who came to St. Victor, my parish, who have crossed the threshold--to eternity it is my belief, though I know many think that death is merely the end of the road. Often, I have had the honor of being among the servers assisting the priest in the funeral service. Always, it has been humbling and when I think about it, a little surreal.

I was at another funeral today. Jim had been a regular attendee. He generally sat in the same place when he attended Mass, on the right side set of pews, a few rows from the back. He was a tall, solid man. He had been a radio broadcaster in the years before I came to California, even perhaps while I was a new resident, but I had never heard him on the air. He did have a mellifluous baritone voice which greeted "hello". I ran into him at a couple of parish dinners. He was, as always my fellow parishioners seem to be, a fixture, for years. One can imagine that such a person will always be there. Certainly, I have acted as if there is all the time in the world to get to know people when they are there every week, or sometimes every day, for Mass. I often thought it would be nice to know him better.  But I waited too long.

He was well. Then he wasn't. The time between a final illness and death was incredibly short. He had had hip surgery around Easter.

When I saw him, a couple of weeks ago, at a Daily Mass, he was still tall, but now very thin, and drawn. He was with a care taker. And he sat, not in his usual place in the back, but in the front row.
He didn't look well. After Mass, several people went up to talk to him. I decided that I didn't want to intrude. I would not see him again until today, when his casket was wheeled to the front of the sanctuary and I served at his funeral Mass. 

We are here. Then we are not. That was the sensation I had today, as I have had many times before. The bell tolls as the soul is handed from the earth to God. That image sticks in my mind, for it repeats, and in time, mine will be the casket that rolls down the aisle I used to walk. Some friends will think, I know, that this is another of my eccentric preoccupations, and just purely unnecessary, even silly. In fact, every time I attend a funeral, and given my 36 years I have attended many, I am comforted.

I was recently watching an old interview with Carl Gustav Jung, when he was about 84, and a year from his own death. Jung, of course, was a protege of Freud, until they broke over psychoanalytic philosophy. Asked at some point whether he believed in God, he said something like, "I don't just believe. I know." 

I was startled by the affirmation of this so secularly known individual, although I knew he was, at least nominally, a Christian. But that is what I felt today, and I think I have felt at many another funeral, when I watched the incensing of the coffin and the sprinkling of the holy water recalling baptism. He was here. He is not here. But he is somewhere, and God is there.

At least that is how I look at it. It's how a lot of us look at it. I know. A lot of us think that the grave is the end. Well, I kind of go the way of Pascal. If I am wrong, if a lot of us are wrong, we'll never know about it. If we are right in our "knowing" the joy will be explosive. And I promise not to say "I told you so."