Made by loving hands at home
I was in 7th grade at the tail end of the ’70s, just before the academic world changed. At the time, 6th grade was the end of elementary school, 10th grade was the beginning of high school, and the three years in between were called “junior high.” Within a few short years, the 9th graders got moved into the high school, the 6th graders took their place in the junior high building, and those in-between years were dubbed “middle school.” Oh, and both Home Ec and Shop became electives.
In my day, though (she said, cursing those young whippersnappers on her lawn), they were a required part of the 7th grade curriculum. Sure, it was end of the ’70s, so a handful of boys signed up for Home Ec, just as a handful of girls signed up for Shop, and we all sang “Free to Be…You and Me” together. (Okay, kidding about that.) But we had to take one or the other. Since I had already discovered that I liked and was fairly good at cooking, I figured I could coast through Home Ec. I was wrong — because cooking was only half the class. The other half was sewing. And instead of coasting, I very nearly failed.
Oh, I learned how to hand-sew a button back on when it fell off, a skill which I’ve managed to retain to that day. But cutting out a pattern, threading a sewing machine, and actually attaching the fabric according to the directions all escaped me. I chose the simplest pattern imaginable — a top essentially made of four squares of fabric stitched together at the corners — in a loud pattern (hey, it was the ’70s) that would hide any mistakes. I worked on it assiduously for days and days. And I could not get it to look anything like something a human being could wear. I think I must have ripped out every seam at least half a dozen times. I got an F; only my good grades on the cooking part of the class allowed me to pass. Oh, the shame.
This scarred me for years. YEARS. In the last 15 years or so, as I watched various friends learn to knit sweaters, sew dresses, string necklaces, bead earrings, and crochet adorable caps with kitty ears, I contented myself with the thought that since other people made perfectly good clothing and accessories, I really had no need to do it myself. Part of me wanted to be crafty, to put my own handmade stamp on my wardrobe — but the rest of me remembered that humiliating semester in 7th grade and shied away from the very thought.
Then, last week, I was contemplating getting rid of my two favorite sweaters. Both are cashmere/wool blend v-neck pullovers, identical but for color, and they’re the softest, lightest, coziest things I’ve ever worn. But one of them had an unrepairable hole under one arm, and the other had a stain just below the point of the v-neck. I started searching the Internet for ways to salvage them, and lo, I found something I could do with even my minimal domestic skills.
I started with the stained sweater, since it was otherwise intact. I washed it in hot water and dried it on high, which shrank it from boxy to snug and felted the yarn so it wouldn’t unravel if I cut into it. Then I sliced it right down the front, from neck to hem. I stitched on some buttons bought at the local fabric store, snipped small buttonholes (the felting saved me from needing to know how to sew a buttonhole), and voila: a cardigan, with one button conveniently hiding the stain. The buttons are unevenly spaced, and it gaps a little bit unless I leave the top button open, but even though it’s an obviously hand-crafted look, it’s not half as amateurishly ugly as I was afraid it might be.
The next one is going to be a little more challenging. I’m going to cut open both side seams on the body and restitch them shut a little more snugly, thus making the sweater more fitted while hiding the hole under one arm inside a seam. I’m not sure if I want to sew it from the inside to make the seams invisible, or use embroidery floss to make visible stitches on the outside. If I do that, I may have to figure out how to make decorative stitches around the neckline, too, just so it looks planned.
It’s a little intimidating, but I feel like I’m finally laying the ghosts of Home Ec to a long-deserved rest.
Filed under Uncategorized, progress | Comments (2)Boylston and Berkeley
In the early-to-mid ’90s, I worked frequently as a freelance copy editor for a Boston advertising agency. It took up several floors in a spectacular wedding cake of an office building at 420 Boylston Street, on the corner of Boylston and Berkeley. Across Berkeley was an enormous, soullessly modern office building. Diagonally across the intersection was the old Museum of Fine Arts building, which had long ago become the home of Louis, a high-end menswear store. Across Boylston was a row of small buildings with an Au Bon Pain (still there) on the ground floor.
I mention this in so much detail for just one reason: Robert B. Parker died yesterday, and his fictional private eye, Spenser — by all the clues in his books — worked in that same building, or rather, in a fictional building at that location. It couldn’t be anywhere else. Spenser says repeatedly that his office is on the corner of Boylston and Berkeley. He talks about being within sight of Louis. And in several early books, he talks about being able to look into the windows of the office building across the street, and later refers to how that building came down to make way for new construction. I remember standing in the conference room with one of my fellow copy editors, looking out at the intersection and agreeing that we had to be in the right place.
The ad agency is long gone, and now, so is Parker. But Spenser, first name unknown, lover of Susan, beer, and Dunkin’ Donuts, is still with us, and always will be.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)Going with the flow
I was planning to use the new year as an excuse to get more aggressive about my desire to try new things. Then I was felled by the head cold of doom. I managed to struggle through New Year’s Day and even get out to socialize a few times, but I’ve basically spent the last two weeks sitting on the couch, swilling tea and coughing until my vision got swimmy. Good times.
In an act of desperation, I went to Walgreens and bought a nasal rinse. You know what I’m talking about. You put warm salty water into it, and then you squeeze the warm salty water into one nostril until it runs out the other. I was all over it in theory. Wash out my nose so I can breathe instead of coughing up a lung? Great! But in practice, all I could think was, “This is going to be like when I was learning to swim and I kept getting water up my nose and choking and I finally had to buy a little nose clip because otherwise I was afraid to put my face in the water.”
I told myself, “This counts as trying something new.” I also told myself, “There’s nothing to be afraid of; you are in complete control, and if you get too freaked out, all you have to do is stop.” Nonetheless, I stood there over the sink for a good 5 minutes before I got up the nerve to give it a try. Let me tell you: the sensation of water going through my sinuses and over my septum was a confusing combination of “um, this really shouldn’t be happening” and “hey, that actually feels like it’s working” that left my primitive brain ping-ponging between “keep going” and “holy crap you’re going to drown stop now!!!!!”
Clearly, I didn’t drown, since I’m here typing this. And darned if it didn’t help. I’m pretty sure I got better faster than I would have with a face full of gunk. So now I just have to overcome the fear of turning into a big hippie singing the praises of stuff like sinus rinsing.
Filed under Uncategorized, fears | Comment (0)An unassuming hero
In 1942, as the Nazis began to deport Dutch Jews to concentration camps, an executive at a spice company who had already moved his wife and two daughters from Germany to the Netherlands realized there would be no second chance to run. The family went into hiding instead, living in a suite of rooms concealed on the upper stories of the company’s warehouse at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam, helped by a handful of employees who smuggled them everything from newspapers to potatoes. They hoped to hold out that way until Germany was defeated and the war over.
You know how this story ends, of course. Someone still unknown betrayed the family to the Gestapo, and they all died but the man: Otto Frank. His younger daughter’s diary also survived, and when he finally returned to Amsterdam in 1947, he had it published, giving the world the best-known document of the Holocaust. But we wouldn’t have the Diary of Anne Frank without Otto Frank’s secretary, Miep Gies.
Gies was nearly arrested herself on suspicion of helping the fugitives. She risked her safety again by trying to bribe the Gestapo to let the family go. When that failed, she went back to the Franks’ ransacked hiding place to retrieve their belongings and save them against the day they might, however improbably, return. It was Gies who found Anne’s papers scattered across the floor, gathered them into a suitcase, and kept them — unread! — until she could give them to Otto Frank.
After the war, Gies and her husband, who had also hidden someone in their own home, settled into obscure domesticity for more than 40 years. In 1987, though, an American writer persuaded her to write a memoir, and she became — in her 80s! — a much in-demand speaker for Anne’s diary and against Holocaust denial. Still, as recently as her birthday last winter, Miep Gies modestly maintained that many others had done far more to fight the Nazis than she.
Miep Gies died today, just a few weeks shy of 101, having insisted until the end that she was no hero. With all due respect, I disagree.
Obituary in the New York Times
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (2)Tut, two
I’m not sure what it says about me that in an exhibit full of extraordinary and beautiful objects, some of them almost 3,500 years old, what I found most emotionally compelling was a small oval piece of ivory, no larger than the palm of my hand, carved to resemble a duck with its head curved gracefully to its side. It was a box, about an inch deep, with a top that swiveled out to reveal a gentle hollow. According to the label, it was probably used to hold some kind of cosmetic or perfumed salve.
The translucent greenish-yellow scarab at the center of an elegant pectoral was more mysterious. Scientists only recently discovered the scarab was carved not from semi-precious stone, but from glass — and not manmade glass, either, but glass found only in the dunes of a small corner of the Sahara, created by something that melted the sand there at a temperature higher than that of lava. Maybe it was a meteorite even more ancient than the pyramids, but there’s no sign of an impact crater anywhere near. No one really knows.
The stone bust of Nefertiti was more inspiring. Her serene gaze and full lips reminded me that she was considered the most beautiful woman of antiquity. She was also Tut’s stepmother (his mother was one of his father’s secondary wives) and his mother-in-law (because he married her daughter, his own half-sister). And before her husband’s death and Tut’s succession to the throne, Nefertiti may also have been the powerful co-ruler of Egypt in her own right. Not a woman to be trifled with, to be sure.
The many golden, bejeweled artifacts were certainly more shiny. I’m a magpie; I love jewelry, and I certainly ogled a few things and imagined how they might look on me.
But that little duck-shaped ivory box was — I’m grasping for the right word — lively. Playful and utilitarian at the same time, something I could imagine on the dressing table of a boy king. Even though was tucked into a box and buried with him, not to be seen again for more than 3,000 years, it wanted to be held and used. I just stood there for a good five minutes smiling at it, delighted.
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