My son has recently started to develop a rather annoying habit of pulling out strands of our carpet and leaving them in small piles around the house. Previously he had a habit of pulling feathers out of down pillows which we managed to detour. I believe the carpet pulling is just a new manifestation of the same problem. Luckily my wife came up with a solution by giving him a carpet sample square which we may have accidentally borrowed permanently from a design house. This has allowed him to continue with his compulsion unabated. Probably not the best thing to do but it beats what happened to my brother when he developed his childhood tick of pulling on buttons.
Buttons. Of all the things to pick at...buttons. My brother would go to school with one of my hand-me-down flannel shirts on, buttoned and tucked, and come back with nothing but a cape fit for a lumberjack superhero. At first, this wasn’t a big deal. He would put the buttons in his pocket and collect them as little boys do rocks and acorns. When my mom or dad would find the buttonless shirt they would laugh. Then my Dad would make a big production about sewing the buttons back on. Although my mother was (and is) an excellent seamstress my father jumped at any chance to sew something because it gave him an opportunity to tell a long-winded story about how he had to sew up holes in his uniform when he was in the army.
Dad would collect the ripped off buttons from my brother and sew them on, usually with some off-colored thread to make a statement. The problem was that every time he collected the buttons there were one or two missing. “Where are they?” “I don’t know.” “Must have fallen out of your pocket…”. So the missing buttons were replaced with one of the many thousands we kept in a collection of Mason jars in a sewing closet.
As time went on the old man started to get tired of sewing on the buttons but he so loved his army story that there were no consequences to the button ripping except “Don’t do it again”, which I have learned doesn’t do a damn thing to detour a child. Week after week he sewed on the buttons and week after week the button jar kept shrinking in volume. Eventually, it dawned on my parents that the buttons weren’t going missing by accident. They checked his pants. No holes. They checked his room. No secret hoard there. What a mystery.
Then my brother messed with the wrong button. If he had ripped a button on my dad’s sports jacket it wouldn’t matter, or even a button from one of my mother’s dresses, it would have been no big deal. But this kid started tearing off the buttons from his Cub Scout uniform. Desecrating any Boy Scout anything, was in the same camp as ripping pages out of the Holy Bible. You’re flirting with the devil. You just don’t do it. But he did.
The buttons on a Cub Scout uniform are these very large, dark blue masses of plastic with the Boy Scout flor de lis imprinted on them. There was no replacement in the decimated Mason jar collection. In order to replace these buttons, you would have to go to an authorized retailer of Boy Scout merchandise, which were few and far between. The nearest one to us was a good fifteen miles away and as I have mentioned before, nobody was driving fifteen miles for anything unless it was beer on Sunday.
My Dad hit the roof. “Where are all the buttons going son!?!” He still got nothing but an “I don’t know”. So being the resourceful man he was he found some old uniforms and ceremoniously removed the buttons from them for the new replacements, sewed them back on, and gave another, “Don’t do it again” warning. Which, again, means absolutely nothing.
The next time we had to dress up for Cub Scouts my brother shows up missing a top button. This detonated an ‘explicative bomb’ that still makes me uncomfortable. It was time to get to the bottom of where these buttons were going. And after many tears, and a few rounds of my parents playing good cop, bad cop, the mystery was solved. My brother had been ripping off the buttons and swallowing them. Why? I’ll leave that to child psychology professionals. All I know is that he was given an ultimatum. My father would sew on this last button but if another one ever went missing he was going to have to replace the button himself.
I am not going to go further into the details of the rest of this story. All you have to do is picture a little boy in a Cub Scout uniform, head hanging low in shame, putting on arm length, yellow rubber gloves, and disappearing into the bathroom. He never found that button. It’s probably still somewhere tucked away in the cavernous folds of his small intestine. Poor fella spent the rest of his Cub Scout career without a top button. But I’ll tell you one thing, and he will too...that kid never swallowed another one.
