"A Stitch in Time Saves Nine"

  Axioms, proverbs, old sayings are all in jeopardy of obsolescence.  Let's face it: nobody uses them anymore.  "Haste makes waste."  Has any person living today ever uttered those words.  No one since the time of Ben Franklin wants to hear trite advice offered by some self-appointed sage.
   An exception to the above is the use of such pithy aphorisms by neurologists, or at least one.  Having recently been in consult with four such esteemed professionals, it is clear that they all tend to hark back to the presentations of their medical school years.  Why else would  two separate neurologists, in different practices in different cities, when seeking to determine their patient's cognitive level, ask him to spell a word, and then spell it backwards, and the word used by both doctors is the same. Spell "world."  OK, now spell it backwards.  Same word, he could have studied for that test.
    After Neurologist #3  had tested the "world" spelling, he moved on to a more sophisticated assessment:    He asked what does this statement mean to you:   "A stitch in time saves nine."  The patient paused briefly and then launched into a rather lengthy  collection of words, smooth -flowing but circuitous in nature.  The doctor nodded knowingly and made a notation on his chart.
   While there is not much doubt that there is an  impact on cognitive fluency, something is a little off about  this type of assessment in every case.  This patient has always had a more analytic mind, heavily weighted toward the mechanical: design and graphics and spatial skills.  He was never one to analyze literature, was more of a direct thinker in the vein of say what you mean, don't obfuscate your intention with verbiage.
    So one day I posed this adage to his brother, who has no known neurological impairment, and his interpretation was even more skewed. A while later, I tried again, with two of my grandsons this time.  The older went with an astronomical or scientific version, with the "stitch in time" relating to some circumstances of the universe.  So far, I hadn't been able to follow any  of the three explanations of the axiom.
 But that all cleared up when I asked the eight-year-old.  He said it means:
    If 9 people are camping out and lying down under a blanket, and they are really cold, if you sew it up on top, they would stay warm and that could save their lives.
   Aha!