Lisa Scottoline: Buttoned up

Here’s consolation for the end of summer.

You get to wear old sweaters.

And by old sweaters, I mean a 30-year-old sweater.

I have been with this sweater longer than Thing One and Thing Two, combined.

It’s a cashmere cardigan, and I bought it at Harrod’s, on a trip to London. It cost about a hundred bucks, so today that would be three million dollars.

I’ve worn the sweater so much that I owe it money.

What do I love about it? It’s hot pink, cute, and has three-quarter-length sleeves. What it is about three-quarter-length sleeves that makes you happy?

God knows, but if you have a sweater that you love, you know I mean.

Do you remember that old song, Do you have jeans that you really love?

That song was not written for middle-aged women.

I have no jeans that I really love.

I have tons of jeans and I hate them all.

If you have jeans that you really love, you don’t weigh enough.

Now sweatpants, I love.

And even yoga pants, I love.

Anyway, I was invited to a birthday party for my adorable godson, and I put on the pink sweater, but then I realized it had a button missing. It was the third button, so I couldn’t hide it, or flop over the collar, or try to disguise the fact that I was a slob.

I tried on a few other sweaters, but I wanted to wear the one with the missing button, and suddenly the fact that the others all had their buttons seemed conventional or maybe even uncool. After all, ripped jeans are certifiably cool, and you can even buy jeans already ripped. So why not sweaters with missing buttons?

I could be starting a new trend, one that would appeal exclusively to vaguely eccentric middle-aged hags like myself.

So you know what I did.

I wore the sweater with no button to the party.

Nobody noticed, and the world did not end.

But still, when I got home I knew I had to give up my sweater, if I couldn’t find a matching button. I looked all over the house to try to find a matching button and I even went to my massive box of buttons, which contains little plastic packets of every button I’ve ever been given in my entire lifetime, so now all I have is a ton of random buttons without the clothes they go to.

I pawed through them but couldn’t find the right buttons, or even anything close enough, then I got the idea that if I couldn’t find a matching button, I could just buy a bunch of new buttons and change all the buttons on the sweater.

But to be honest, I couldn’t remember the last time I sewed on a button, much less eight of them. I don’t own a sewing kit anymore, nor do I own an iron.

In other words, I’m a slob, er, I mean, a busy lady.

What do you think, I darn socks?

No, I’m lazy, I throw things away, and if I needed all those buttons changed, I was going to find some dry cleaner who would perform the simple task for me, in exchange for charging me too much, and I’m fine with that.

I have better things to do, like write this column.

But I wasn’t really sure I could find better buttons and the old buttons were super-cute mother-of-pearl buttons, which I love as much as the sweater.

What happened next was that I was just standing there, wishing that I could find a replacement button and uttering creative profanity, when all of a sudden, I noticed a bump in the sweater, looked inside, and there on the seam, sewn onto the tag, was an extra button!

Wow!

A surprise ending!

Forty years ago, some genius in England had sewn on the spare button, just for me to use decades in the future and even in another country, so basically I had opened a portal to another dimension of time, space, and cashmere.

Or maybe not, because I told my friend this story, and she said, “They always do that on nice sweaters.”

Oh.

I knew that.

Or at least I do now.

Look for Lisa and Francesca’s humor collection, “I See Life Through Rosé-Colored Glasses,” and the paperback of Lisa’s bestselling domestic thriller, “Someone Knows,” in stores now. lisa@scottoline.com.

Copyright Lisa Scottoline 2019