This bit of grandfatherly nostalgia was posted on the groaners listserv.

One day a man and his wife got into a terrible fight. She became so irrational that she sliced the legs off of his favorite pair of pants; he was for some reason extremely attached to them. When he saw what she had done he nearly broke down in tears because of how much those pants meant to him.

He took them to tailors near and far in an attempt to get them fixed as good as new, but not one would even attempt it until one day he found a really old tailor who said he would try. “I have developed a new technique where I can reweave the fabric together so that you will not be able to tell the pants had ever been damaged,” bragged the old tailor. “It will be as if they are growing back together into a new pair of pants.”

“That’s perfect,” cried the man.

“It will take a long time, for it is a very involved process. It will also be expensive, but I am the only one in the world who can do this.”

“Money is no object,” stated the man, so the tailor began to fix his pants.

The man checked in every week to see how his pants were progressing, and every week the tailor showed him how the new process had made the pants grow slowly but steadily longer.

One day when the pants were at about mid-thigh the man walked into the shop, but all the shades were drawn and there was an atmosphere of mourning in the air. An apprentice, recognizing the man from his frequent visits, explained how the tailor had died of a heart attack in his sleep the night before.

“I hate to ask,” said the man, “at such a somber moment, but I’d like to know one thing. The pants he was working on for me, will they ever be finished?”

The apprentice looked at him sadly, finally shaking his bowed head. “I’m sorry, but they stopped, shorts, never to grow again when the old man died.”