Victoria and the Forbidden Stitch

Some days, Victoria seems to be a very smart cat. And, anxious to help with HEDGEHOPPER assignments.

Other days, she is of little or no help. Take, for example, my talk with her last Monday.

She had spent the entire morning on the back porch, snoozing in the shade, and was still curled up in the best chair when I went out to rest my feet a bit and to get her to think through the next Sunbonnet column with me.

“Victoria,” I said, “by the Chinese lunar calendar, this is the year of the rooster, and I’ve been reading that ‘everything Chinese is in vogue’ in the U.S.A. this year. Do you think that HEDGEHOPPER readers ...

“What’s a rooster?”

I hate tabby cats that interrupt me when I’m trying to ask them something!

“Victoria, you know good and well what a rooster is! No, on second thought, maybe you don’t. A rooster is a chicken, a male chicken, that crows and...”

“What’s a chicken?”

“Never mind, Victoria. Forget the Chinese lunar calendar and the year of the rooster. I merely wanted to ask if you think HEDGEHOPPER readers might enjoy a piece that had a Chinese slant to it. I was reading an article about an exhibit...”

“Chinese people have slanted eyes. So do some of us cats! Write about that! Why, one in Atlanta I met a handsome blue-eyed fellow and -- he wasn’t Chinese; he was Siamese, but that didn’t matter -- his eyes were sort of almond shaped. Oh, was he ever popular! One day he...”

“Victoria! Nobody is interested in the friends you had in Atlanta, Georgia. Let’s go back to this Chinese article I want to write. The HEDGEHOPPER deadline is upon us!”

Victoria yawned, stretched herself, and closed her eyes. “Don’t say ‘us’! It’s not my worry!”

“As I was trying to tell you, my dear, lazy, smug one, the Metropolitan Museum in New York has a magnificent exhibit of Chinese robes, and that makes me think perhaps a piece about Chinese embroidery would interest HEDGEHOPPER readers.”

“Suit yourself! But I wouldn’t read it!”

“Not even if I told the ancient Chinese legend of the ‘Forbidden Stitch’?”

Something halfway between a startled look and a disgusted frown came over Victoria’s face. She raised herself up on all fours, arched her back, and stared me straight in the eyes.

“Well, let me tell you, my dear old writing one, I don’t know exactly What a ‘legend’ is but if it’s anything close to those ‘sayings’ you’re always quoting -- like that horrible bit that goes ‘Build a better mousetrap, and the world will be a path to your door,’ why I... I... That guy who invented the first mousetrap put a lot of cats out of work! He should have been shot between the eyes! Why, I... I...”

“Victoria, calm down! Calm down! Take it easy, girl! This has nothing to do with mousetraps!” I stroked her head and the back of her neck and eased her over into my lap.

“That’s a good kitty! Just let the fur on your back settle back in place. That’s it! And let your claws relax. Legends have no connections with quotations.” I kept stroking her head and kept talking, quietly. Very quietly.

Finally, she seemed to feel content and even began to purr as I began to explain the Chinese legend.

“You see, Victoria, Chinese embroidery work is beautiful, intricate, almost unbelievable. Some of the silk stitches Chinese ladies use in their designs are so tiny that they are almost invisible.

“It is said that many dynasties ago -- especially during the Ch’ing dynasty -- the embroideresses could work 30 backstitches to the inch in the Pekinese (that’s an interlaced line backstitch with a loop to the inside) and that they thought nothing of putting as many as 15 tiny Peking knots (French knots) to the inch.

“Nobody knows exactly how the ‘forbidden’ stitch was done, but it was so tiny that young girls began going blind doing it. Eventually, when the emperor learned what was happening, he outlawed this smallest of all stitches. And, from that day to this it had been called ‘The Forbidden Stitch’!

“But, now, Victoria, that’s just a legend. You... Cat, are you asleep?”

Her purring had turned to snoring!

As I said, some days Victoria is of little help in so far as HEDGEHOPPER writing is concerned.

Published June 1981. Click your browser’s ‘Back’ key to return.