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.
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