The Bobbin Goddess

Greeting Dear Ones,

“It’s all fun and games until the bobbin runs out…”

Each time I go to the henhouse, there are fewer eggs these days.  Even though it is warm and sunny—oppressively warm at times—the girls are shutting down their egg production for the season.   Chickens lay according to the light cycle. The Autumn Equinox is on its way and my little feathered friends are ending the tyranny of daily ovulation and just eating their Cheerios in peace (God Bless them!  Can you imagine anything worse?  Ovulating every day, that is, not so much the Cheerios…)  The harvest time has already begun. It’s time for drying the herbs from the garden, collecting the fruits and seeds, and burying treasures of bulbs.  I am like a jay hiding acorns or a mouse taking stock of the larder.  It is a time of hiding and tucking things away for later, hoping we can find them again. We are all preparing for the cold and darkness to come.  It is a busy time of finishing projects—the big Hurry in the hope of a long Rest. Though all of Nature will soon take its rest, in the shop, there is no such thing, as people shuffle in with sweaters to be mended and their fall wardrobes to be revamped.  The bridesmaids’ dresses are turning colors, like leaves, from shades of summer sherbet to pumpkin and cranberry.

On September 23rd, night hours will equal daylight—aequus (equal) + nox (night) and we begin the shift into dark times ahead.  Ancient stories swirl about Persephone’s return to the underworld. Naturally, my thoughts turn to witches, goblins, and bobbins.  What is a bobbin, you ask?  Webster’s dictionary defines it as: “a cylinder or spindle on which yarn or thread is wound (as in a sewing machine) b : any of various small round devices on which threads are wound for working handmade lace” but I know it as that little thing I scream at on a daily basis when it jams or runs out of thread. How does it work in a sewing machine? Well, I am told that as the upper needle shoves the thread through the cloth, a hook rotates, capturing the thread from above and looping it around another thread, this one reeling from the bobbin below. The two threads interlock around the layers of fabric, binding them to one another and a seam is formed.  But you and I know this is a lie.  Really, it’s Magic.  Little sylphs and pixies are in there, sorting things out—pretty much the same way there are tiny fiddlers having pints of Guinness in your CD player—until (play the scary theme music here) the Bobbin Goblins show up and ruin everything.  When the Bobbin Goddess is smiling, your seams turn out smooth and even.  You don’t turn the cloth over and discover that you have accidentally been manufacturing something with more loops than Turkish bath toweling. She is the angel of the underworld of sewing machines.

The bobbin factor is Huge: if things aren’t right below the surface, they won’t be right above. It’s a hell of a metaphor, eh? In modern times, we are not predisposed to see the world sacramentally—as outward signs of inward grace.  We talk more about how “our subconscious intentions are thwarting our ability to manifest prosperity…”  It’s all Bobbin Talk.  Unconscious manifestation, like a snaggled bobbin, often leaves us feeling frustrated. We think we want one thing, but may keep creating something entirely different. Until we understand what thoughts, beliefs and emotions are really running the show of our realized manifestations, we may keep creating what we don’t want. Take a look at the fabric of your life and the way things are coming together for you—how is your inner Bobbin Goddess doing?  What you have around you is what your secret intentions are calling forth. Is there Chaos or Order? Check your closet—does it look like a ship wreck? Mine does. Apparently, I also have an inner yearning for an inexhaustible supply of dog hair, house dust, and crispers full of limp vegetables ready for the compost heap.  So many of us with tangled bobbins are often frustrated that the “world is standing in the way” of us getting what we want or feel we deserve. This often results in a victim mentality. (Please note: I’m NOT a Victim.  There REALLY is a Committee established to thwart the forward momentum of Nancy Bell, whose honored members include every pet, vehicle, or machine I own, every red-light between here and where I need to be on time, and anyone I have given birth to.)  Maybe it’s time to pause, unwind, rewind, reflect.  It’s ok to seek help.

 The shop is a marvelous, often hilarious, intersection of all the forces of Upper and Lower, Darkness and Light, Yin and Yang, Outer clothing and Foundation Garments. We often think of Balance as that midpoint between two extremes. But if we replace our sense of “the edge” with “the Infinite,” then those extremes become meaningless. The “line” becomes a Circle.  We reconnect to Unity and it is then impossible to be Unbalanced. The pendulum swings and patterns complete themselves in time.

 A woman came into the shop several weeks ago with a sewing machine she has owned since the 1970’s.  “I really don’t sew very much,” she explained, “and I have just run out of bobbin thread and don’t know how to wind up more.”  As someone who, by necessity, finds herself winding bobbins on a daily basis, this woman was something of a wonder to me.  I very much admired her humility and courage in seeking help, as much as I marveled that she had made it all the way from Gerald Ford’s administration until now on the original bobbin! Listening from the corner was my beleaguered friend, busy sewing a football field’s worth of curtains for a ballet studio. She just sighed.  Her bobbin runs out every twenty minutes.

 The proper workings of the “surface world” very much depend on the smooth functioning of the hidden, under world.  Just ask anyone wearing Spanx.  There is an elderly man with a thick German accent in the shop.  His wife has MS.  He is trying to help her get dressed and he is having trouble sorting out her foundation garments and getting the tiny bra loops in the dress snapped so that her bra straps won’t show.  What is foundational must stay hidden.  I wonder idly how old he is and when he came here (to America, that is, not the shop—he’s only been in the dressing room about 20 minutes) and if he survived the aftermath of the Third Reich only to be stymied by complexity of his wife’s bra… Finally, muttering in German, he gets her sorted out and wheels her out of the shop. What meets our eyes as we pass each other on the street is only the shell—the barest skimming of the Real Story.

We’re all on this ride around the sun together.  As the darkness in the months ahead makes us seek the light and warmth of our hearths, may we have good work for our hands to do, and good friends to with whom to share our bounty.  May we seek out and cherish our inner Bobbin Goddesses, the mysterious, hidden, inward Feminine part that has such power to make us stop and curse or weep with sweet relief when things go well.  May it all go well! Never before was so much possible.

 Be well, my Dearies, and do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

People who ask us to ruin their clothes

Greetings my Dear Ones,

“Great calm, generous detachment, selfless love, disinterested effort: These are what make for success in life.  If you can find peace in yourself and can spread comfort around you, you will be happier than an empress.” –Rabindranath Tagore

It’s been quite a week, here at my little sewing table.  I am Not happier than an Empress at the moment... It seems like every second person through the door is asking me to ruin his or her clothes.  A mystery customer has come through the cleaners and wants all the flounces cut off her brand new dresses.  These are dresses whose main features are these gorgeous, flowing flounces. Once they are all cut off, these dresses look shorn, naked, embarrassed, like short haircuts that you hope will grow back quickly…What in Heaven’s name possessed this woman to buy four dresses, whose main selling point was a flounce, and then have all the flounces chopped off?  I don’t get it.

Next in is a young mother who wants to wear a dress she just bought to a church event this weekend. It has a flounce.  Guess what she wants chopped off? Yes. Clearly, people have not yet gotten the memo that flounces are “in” and are having them amputated with breathtaking speed, as if we can stamp out this trend quickly and go back to making everything too tight without skipping a beat and letting the fabric pendulum swing the other way. Without the flounce, this mother of four is planning to wear a dress now the size of a swimsuit. To a church function.  Prudence has her knickers in a twist over this one! Why do people ask us to ruin their clothes?  Shouldn’t seamstresses have some sort of Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm”? My co-workers shrug benignly and say “Give the people what they want!” Why is that so hard?

Don’t get me wrong—I am not in favor of flounces either—they don’t enhance femininity so much as they make one look vaguely matronly and old fashioned—rather like one has repurposed a Victorian table cloth into a garment.  My problem is with people who want to change something fundamental to the whole integrity of the item.  Why buy it in the first place? Certain things are not worth fighting in a piece of clothing.  Some things just need to be passed up on with a polite “no thank you,” not taken home and hacked to death with a kitchen knife—or brought in to me so I can do your dirty work! Fashion designers are serving a buffet—most of which they seem to have cooked up on a dare, or under the influence of Methamphetamines, but that’s beside the point—we get to pick and choose what suits us best from the selection.  We don’t have to take things we don’t like.  (Ladies, FYI, I’m pretty sure the “mermaid gown” was just a practical joke to play on brides: you cannot walk properly or sit down in them. You need to strip completely to toilet yourself.  And, you look NOTHING like a mermaid. Admit it!) Let’s just leave the skinny jeans, jeggings, and flounces where we found them and move on to the good stuff, like anything made of tartan or tweed.  

The next woman in the door is wearing a beautiful coat I secretly covet.  It is in shimmering shades of my favorite autumn colors.  She had asked me last week to hem the sleeves, which were way too long for her.  After she left, I looked more closely at the coat and realized that the sleeves had no lining near the cuffs and the fabric, a rich boiled wool, was bonded in such a way that we were actually meant to turn the cuffs up against the outside of the sleeve, as part of the design.  The edges fell open in a sweet little angle that was very flattering and went with the rest of the coat. I turned them to her length and then tacked them in place (with stitches, not actual tacks—for those who don’t sew).  She shuffles up to me holding both paws out and whining like a 5-year-old who has been persuaded to try “just one bite” of broccoli, “I don’t like it…I just don’t like it…” She wants me to turn all that loveliness UNDERNEATH, where it will make her wrists bulge oddly.  As she is saying this, an actual five-year-old, who is waiting for his mother in the dressing room, spits out a brightly colored plastic head from a pin and says to me, “I crunched this up in my mouth but it’s not candy.”  Real five-year-olds are apparently WAY more adventurous than this lady.  “I just want it PLAIN,” she says, with emphasis.  What I hear is “I need this to be ugly.”  I sigh, take her name and number and agree, with what cheer I can muster, to ruin her coat by Thursday at the latest.

As I sit back down to work, thinking that that coat is like a nice kitten going to a bad home, I think about the work of my hands leading me to the work of my soul.  I need to stop judging people’s choices.  This is not for me to decide.  They are entitled to the expression of their own free will and the consequences of their bad choices.  It’s not like I don’t also make terrible choices.  I would probably be just as crazy as some of these customers who come in here asking for nutty solutions to their fashion dilemmas.  The only difference is that I can sew.  I don’t have to reveal my insanity to anyone.  Moi? Have an item in my closet made from three kinds of plaid that still has no arms, three years later? No one ever has to know how many of my own clothes I destroy or how many of my little “creations” have made their way to the Salvation Army dumping grounds in the hopes that some visually impaired person might be searching for the perfect thing to wear to a train wreck… So, you see, I have NO leg to stand on.  Prudence Thimbleton and her smug judgments needs to have a moment in Prayer: God, grant me the Serenity to accept the customers who want me to ruin their clothes; the courage to remove flounces, reveal ankles, and to add another forty yards of tulle to a wedding gown that already resembles a Portuguese Man-O-war; and the wisdom to know that I am just as bad as the rest of them.

No matter who we are or what we do with our hands and hearts all day, we need to let ourselves off the hook for other people’s choices. (Well, most people, most choices…) We cannot make anyone, or their clothing, better than they choose to be.  If they want to stroll the streets wearing jeans like tourniquets and flounce-less costumes of their own wretched designs, who am I to judge? If it were up to me and Prudence, we would all be in pinafores and petticoats; aprons and mob caps would be all the rage.  But the Good News is that I DON’T get to decide.  (You can all breathe a huge sigh of relief!) I remain just a humble “mistress of the cloth,” making commentary on the rips in the fabric of society, which I see from hanging by my own thread.  The rips are not from what we wear, but from how we see ourselves.  When I focus on myself… oh, crap…I look down and notice that I just stitched ten yards with no thread what-so-ever in my machine.  I am so lucky to have this work that engenders so many wonderful opportunities to practice detached mindfulness!

Be well, my dearies, and do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Happily Ever After is Cancelled

Greetings my Dear Ones!

It’s nearly five o’clock and a tiny bride is sobbing in the dressing room.  She arrived just moments ago, on the way to her rehearsal dinner, with her wedding gown, which she has just picked up this afternoon from a bridal shop which supposedly had alterations done.  Only, the gown does not fit.  She tried it on but there was no one there that could do further alterations for her.  They had farmed it out to another seamstress in another town who is now unavailable.  The frantic bride searched the tri-county area and we were the only thing that Siri could burp up.  We invite her in and agree to help in whatever way we can.  Her red-rimmed misty eyes make it clear that she has been weeping.

When the dressing room door opens, I can see a plain, strapless sheath of white hanging off of her.  Her delicate spinal bones protrude through the skin on her back like a whippet’s. She sniffs. “I guess all the stress I’ve been under has made me drop a few pounds…” she mutters.  I cannot help thinking that I have had pets larger than this woman.  The other ladies rush to pin her up and stuff foam rubber bust pads in the concave chest area of the gown, while speaking soothing and maternal words to her about how it will all be ok.  We all agree to stay late to help her. 

Just then, her phone rings.  It’s her bridal party.  They are lost.  They cannot find where they are supposed to meet for the rehearsal dinner because it is part of a Historic Site whose roads do not show up on the GPS.  The groom has the maps, but his phone does not seem to be working.  He cannot be reached. Her future Mother-in-law is trying to take charge of the situation but things are not going well.  The bride explains that she is going to be late.  “There has been a glitch with the dress, and I’m still waiting to hear…”she hiccups into the phone.  She blinks. She can say no more.  A flurry of phone calls ensues during which people check in with her and report their status.  We keep pinning and begin sewing as fast as we can.  The bride changes into her regular clothes and goes out to her car to wait. 

We finish doing what we can just around the time she comes back in. It’s clear that she has been crying harder than ever.  Her eyes are now swollen. “Take it easy,” we say, “everything is going to be fine.  Look, the dress is going to look great on you now—well, at least it will stay up and you won’t have to hold onto it for fear of walking right out of it anymore!”  She attempts a wan smile and puts the dress on again.  The phone keeps ringing and she keeps checking the numbers and ignoring the frantic pleas from her bridesmaids.  Finally, it rings again and she answers it. She goes even paler.  Meanwhile, Prudence and I are having a private chat about how Some Girls make too much of their weddings, how things like Dresses need to be kept in perspective (It’s just a dress, who really cares? It’s not like anyone is dying, right?), how Things Should Not Be Left To The Last Minute (I keep quiet on this one, since I leave pretty much everything to the last minute but Prudence rants on because such behavior drives her batty), and how grooms with dodgy cell-phones should never trusted with the maps.   The bride says a few words, choking back tears, and says “I’ll be right over.  Thank you so much…” She looks in the mirror, at the dress that now fits her, and slumps to the floor and sobs.  We stare at each other in confusion.  What is wrong?  The dress fits. Now what?

A boy with large, worried eyes comes in the back door and proceeds hesitantly to the sound of the crying.  “Aunty,” he says, “I think you need to come.  His breathing is changing.  I don’t think he is comfortable.” She looks up at him. “I just got the call. It is cancer after all. We have to have him put down tonight.  There is no way he can survive until we return from the honeymoon. We’re going back to the vet’s next. I guess I’m going to skip the rehearsal dinner and just show up at the wedding tomorrow instead…” It turns out that the girl had been crying over her dog, who was out dying in the back of her car this whole time!  We help her out of the dress and hug her while she sobs.  She turns to me and says, “Seriously, is THIS how Happily Ever After begins?  My dress has been a disaster, my guests are lost, my mother-in-law is a she-beast hounding my poor bridesmaids, we don’t know where the groom is and I have to skip all the evening festivities to go have my dog put to sleep! Please tell me my life will get better tomorrow! I wish I could just cancel everything but it’s all paid for…”  I have no idea what to say.  My entire mouth has turned to clay. All the usual cheery platitudes about Faith, Hope, and Love just seem tacky and plastic, even if I could spit them out. 

The truth is, none of us know what Tomorrow brings.  We can choose fancy spoons and forks and goblets, color-coordinated napkins and goofy things for our best friends to wear but what good is it if Fate throws a dead dog right in the middle of it?  The weather can change, cell-phones can fail, and I don’t have the heart to look this girl in her mascara streaked eyes and tell her the God’s Honest truth: “Happily Ever After” has been cancelled until further notice.  It never existed to begin with.  It’s been false advertising, Fake News, all along. Thinking that getting dressed up in expensive clothes that don’t fit you, so you can have some champagne with a big slice of dry, white cake while your friends, who are all dressed identically (and somewhat ridiculously), sing karaoke and get shit-faced is the ticket to Happily Ever After is a giant mistake.  She might as well know it as soon as she can. 

As much as fifty percent of the marriages in this country end in divorce and I think the concept of “Happily Ever After" has a lot to do with it. Ask the people who have been married 25, 30, 50 years… Happily Ever after never came.  The magic comes from adapting, not arriving; from growing, not accumulating; from learning, not leaving.  The only option is Happily Ever Now-ing. Now.  Now, that is something we can really sink our teeth into, unlike the “jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today.” As the journey continues, they look back on a life of Happily Ever Now-ing that became the best years of their lives—dead pets, sick kids, crabby Mothers-in-law and all.

I am really looking forward to attending a friend’s wedding in Vermont this weekend.  I know she has put so much love and loving energy into choosing a great reception site and yummy food and brilliant music that will help us all celebrate with great Joy her union with her beloved.  She has done everything to anticipate our comfort and delight as we all eagerly and equally anticipate the merry-making around the love we all share for these two people.  This is a great couple, a great match.  They will make each other blossom and shine in ways that living separate lives from each other never could.   We gather to say we believe in them; we support them; we come to bear witness and to bless this union and all that it brings.  

But this Day…this “wedding” day is just a day, just One Day in their lives.  For a little while, it will be the “Now” that is happening—as it shifts from one horizon to another, slipping from Expectation to Realization, from Future to Past.  One version of Now will involve the dramas and cares of planning and preparing, one will involve Joyful dancing, one will involve the cleaning up, savoring the memories, and wondering just what did Uncle Larry do in the men’s room?

Being a Vermont wedding with super cool people, of course there is going to be a Barn Dance! There are no destinations at a dance—and this seems to be a better metaphor for marriage than any “happy after-ing” that never comes.  Rather than setting goals based on targets, why not set goals based on learning? Happily Ever Learning, Happily ever Growing, Happily ever Nurturing?  Being the guardians of each other’s spirits, each other’s creativity, and solitude. When we release ourselves from the idea that another person or situation will “make us happy,” we become open to the possibility that Happiness is not outside of ourselves.  Happiness is not something we receive, but something we share, from within.

We don’t choose a destiny.  We choose being open to Experience with another soul partner.  This person is going to dance the dance of Life with us.  Being a good dancer does not mean that you are there to carry your partner.  Having a strong partner does not mean he will carry you. Good partners know how to connect and also how to get out of each other’s way.  They support each other’s ability to shine. They tune into each other through their individual and separate, primary connection to the Beat, to the Music flowing through all of our individual movements.  How can we dance with another who does not hear the same Music?

There are divorced 57-year-olds still looking for “the one.”  As if a partner is a destination who will make all the difference, not one of multiple pathways to creative self-exploration.  There are young people who think having to communicate clearly is a “failure” to be understood magically and intuitively by a beloved. (How can she love me if I have to tell her what I want?) They want “Happily Ever After,” not this dance of Give and Receive, this endless exploration of “How can we dance better together?”  They want Ideal Partners. But we are not here to be the best partners.  That is not the goal. We are here to be the most connected to the Music.  We are here to help each other be the physical manifestation of our best Connection—to each other and to Spirit.  Sometimes it will be graceful, sometimes not. Whether we limp, hop, or waddle, we are here to become The Dance.  THAT is Happily ever Now-ing.

I salute the resilience of those who remain committed to their partners and the courage of those just beginning their journey. May you hold each other carefully—sometimes tightly, sometimes loosely, and Keep Dancing, always, in the Happily Ever Now, whatever that may bring.  

Dance well, my Dearies, and do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Back to School

Greetings Dear Ones!

It’s that happy time of year when clothing everywhere is on sale and the children are being rounded up, put on buses, and taken off to government-sponsored institutions where they can’t annoy their parents for six hours a day.  A recent influx of school uniforms to hem has set off a wave of nostalgia in me. Prudence Thimbleton smooths a plaid skirt, sniffs, and notes with satisfaction that the Catholics of today are looking just as lumpy and awkward as they did a hundred years ago when she was in school.  And girls are still fighting with their mothers about how high the hem should be.  In the spirit of “Back to School,” having gotten stuck behind a big yellow bus trundling its shipment of little inmates to the local primary school during my morning commute, I decided it would be fun to stop everything and issue a pop quiz to you, dear readers, to see how well you have been paying attention.  Nothing strikes terror into the heart of one who has not studied like hearing that there is a pop quiz, eh? We are all life-long learners.  We should expect pop-quizzes:

1.       My goal in getting you to do this quiz is:

a.       To satisfy the whims of my inner “teacher” who traded her chalkboard for tailor’s chalk and really misses getting to be bossy

b.      To make you think seriously about the glamorously decadent life of a seamstress

c.       To distract you from rummaging through your closets, examining your Fall wardrobe for stuff to bring here for us to fix (Please, no!  We are swamped….)

d.      To help you squander just a little more time before you break down and start doing the thing you really SHOULD be doing right now, instead of taking mindless quizzes.

2.       This is a service industry.  As such, the Customer is always:

a.       Right

b.      Late

c.       Confused about whether or not she can enter by the back door and if it is open but there is no sign

d.      All of the above

3.       When people see the large sign out in front of our shop, indicating that there is parking in the rear, they typically:

a.       Park in the rear lot

b.      Park at the neighbor’s house (on private property)

c.       Park on the sidewalk

d.      Park right in the road, ignoring the honks and extended middle digits of passing local drivers

e.      All of the above, but mostly b, c, or d.

4.       When one delicately points out that a customer has chosen an unsanctioned and inconvenient (for others) parking spot he or she will:

a.       Immediately spring to park somewhere else, with gracious apologies and gratitude for the information

b.      Tell me “I’m only going to be a minute,” in a tone whose subtext is actually, “I don’t give a rip, the heck with other people…”

c.       Mumble that it is too far to walk from the back of the parking lot all the way to the door (these are usually people dressed in athletic gear)

d.      Just keep talking as if she/he has not heard

5.       The people most likely to park in the back of the building and make the “long walk” to the front entrance are:

a.       The elderly

b.      The infirm

c.       The disabled

d.      Anyone except the robust looking woman in a velour jumpsuit on her way to the gym.

6.       We inform every customer at least 14 times when he or she drops off clothing to be fixed that we “don’t take plastic” (i.e. we don’t take credit or debit cards for payment). To a man, woman, and child, they smile and nod and say things like “oh, right! Good to know!”  Upon pick-up, when it is time to pay for services rendered, they invariably:

a.       Whip out a credit card and act stunned/miffed/insulted that we cannot accept it

b.      Ask if we take Venmo or Paypal instead

c.       Inform us that no one uses money anymore

d.      All of the above

7.       We don’t take credit cards because:

a.       The surcharge on cards is too great—there is not a large profit margin on hemming a pair of pants and people would squeal if we raised the prices.

b.      We are hoarding suitcases of cash in unmarked bills so that we can all disappear to Argentina after next Prom season.

c.       It is God’s honest truth that we who are clever enough to put a new two-way waterproof zipper in your decrepit anorak are simply too stupid to figure out how to make that “square” thing work on a phone with a slow-speed internet service.  We’ve tried. Over and over. We are good at what we do.  Technology isn’t what we do.  (Remember, we are those loveable, anachronistic creatures who still remember how to sew.)

d.      All of the above

8.       We are all working with quiet industry on our various projects when out of the blue, one of the seamstresses will mention a customer we have not clapped eyes on for months.  That customer then:

a.       Is never seen again

b.      Appears within 90 minutes or less with a heap of pants he needs to have hemmed by the next day. He proceeds to prance about in the dressing room for the next 45 minutes, trying to decide if one of his legs is maybe a wee bit shorter than the other…or maybe it is longer?

9.       Having accidentally realized our incredible powers to “MAN-ifest,” we decide to “Woman-ifest” and summon a customer we REALLY want to see: namely, the Cookie Lady, who once brought us a plate of freshly baked cookies to thank us.  She only did this once but we have called her “The Cookie Lady” in hushed and reverent tones ever since.  We focus our intentions on her and her glorious oven and she:

a.       Is never seen again

b.      Comes in six months later with some sweaters she wants mended for her dog (and no cookies…)

10.   We handle several wedding parties every month, all year round.  Normal Bridal sadism includes but is not limited to:

a.       Insisting all her bridesmaids buy a $300 dress they will NEVER wear again that needs $90 worth of alterations and is a color that makes healthy twenty-somethings look like they are in liver failure.

b.      Insisting they all wear dumb shoes that match and hurt their feet

c.       Crash dieting and snapping at everyone because she is “Hangry”

d.      Dropping a dress size at every fitting and then complaining about the cost of alterations

11.   Normal Bridal Sadism should NOT include (but sometimes does)

a.       Forcing a pregnant or nursing bridesmaid to wear the same  dress as everyone else, regardless of what must be done to make it fit her—like buying a second dress and sewing two together (Don’t laugh—we do it!)

b.      Asking her not to bring her nursing infant to the wedding as “children aren’t included”

c.       Insisting the bridesmaids all learn a dance routine they will have to perform at the reception—hemlines have to be up so no one trips.

d.      Insisting that the bride’s mother come dressed as a punk rocker, despite said Mother’s weeping and protestations in the fitting room.

12.   A man comes in to have three pairs of pants hemmed.  He goes into the fitting room to change. When he opens the door, I discover:

a.       A man wearing pants that are too long for him

b.      A sheepish grin on his face

c.       A pile of mystery “powder” all over the floor

d.      All of the above

13.   The mystery “powder” is

a.       Gold Bond (Extra strong Mint) powder with which he has enthusiastically powdered his nether regions

b.      Foot powder that has fallen out of his shoes like snow

c.       God knows what else

d.      All of the above

14.   The pants he is trying on are black.  After we are done pinning the first pair, he agrees to try the grey pair.  When the door opens again,  I now discover:

a.       He has hung the Black pair neatly on a hanger

b.      He has thrown the black pair on the floor and stepped all over them, covering them with white powdery foot prints

c.       He wants to know how much it will be to dry-clean pants he has never worn yet

d.      All his clothing is now covered in powder

e.      B,C,and D, but not A

15.   It’s raining cats and dogs.  A customer leaves the shop and dashes out to her car.  She is back in moments, asking if she can use our phone because:

a.       She cannot get to her phone

b.      She is locked out of her car

c.       She needs to call her husband (who is asleep IN THE CAR)

d.      All of the Above

16.   Which of the following statements is NOT true?

a.       Tailors are called “Cutters” because the Latin root taliare means “to cut”

b.      Being a tailor is fabulously lucrative—a highly admired trade with enviable social standing

c.       Tailors have a bunion named after them

17.    From the corner of a tailoring shop, one can see:

a.       A drug deal going down outside

b.      That your pants desperately need to be taken in

c.       Little slivers of the whole wide world

d.      All of the above

18.   The more one gets into the details of a tiny task and focuses on perfection:

a.       The more one achieves Zen mastery

b.      The less the customer will notice

c.       The more likely one is to thirst for adult beverages

19.   The most important Lesson I have learned from working as a Seamstress so far is:

a.       That pretty much every problem can be solved

b.      If you keep cutting, it will still be too short

c.       I’m not very good but at least I’m slow!

d.      I REALLY need to remove all the pins I have poked into my heavily padded bra, the Victoria Secret Bombshell that, in haste, makes a perfect double-barreled pin cushion, before I go to the grocery store!

20.   From sewing, or from ANY job you do that involves people, problems, and solutions, it is possible to learn:

a.       That people are nuts and you’re one of them

b.      That you would prefer to be a Hermit

c.       Compassion and Commitment to Excellence (whether it is appreciated or not)

d.      All you ever need to know about love and life and Being Awake in this lifetime

e.      All of the above

Well, it’s time to tally your score.  Give yourselves a hundred points for every correct answer and then scale your grades in the following manner, according to this rather warped “Bell” (ha ha)(couldn’t resist) curve:

If you are a Baby Boomer:  Well, you’ve worked hard, as you have your whole life probably.  We have you to thank for so many things but we still haven’t forgiven you for being the generation that thought it was a good idea to put linoleum over hardwood floors… Stick to wearing pleats and give yourself a B-

Gen X: You didn’t do quite as well as you could have, or should have.  You never do. You tried, of course you did, but your cynical vigilance just didn’t pay off this time.  Born too late to have Real Character and too soon to have digital skills, you are just beepers in a cell-phone world.  You could take the test again but it wouldn’t do you any good. I have bad news for you: waistline heights are going back up and you get a C+

Millennials: Congratulations! You Showed up.  Give yourself full marks just for breathing.  You did great. You Are Great.  Your trophy is in the mail. Nothing more is expected of you today—relax and get back on Snap Chat.  Don’t even THINK about tapering your pants again. You’re Done! A+

Gen Z: Ok, Homeschooler—you’re too smart already. Hand the phone back to Mummy or Daddy—don’t forget to reprogram it first so he or she can use it again without having to summon a Millenial. Please spend some of your day learning to sew!!!

Be well, my Darlings, and do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Some Random Thoughts on Chaos

Greetings Dear Ones!

You know when you look out the window and see not one but TWO of your customers attempting (simultaneously) to park on the sidewalk in front of the shop, despite a Large, Clearly-Printed Sign indicating that there is a parking lot in the rear of the building, that either a.) you now reside in Italy, or b.) a big load of Chaos is about to walk in the door. These are not people who follow The Rules. 

You might think anyone such as myself, who owns not one but THREE Jack Russells, is no stranger to Chaos.  And it is true.  Chaos and I have more than a passing acquaintance with one another.  I do all the chaos-inducing activities like work with animals and children and people who think they still have the same inseam they had when they were sixteen.   But the chaos in the shop is a whole new breed! 

I like Order.  Order is safe, predictable.  In the realm of Order, people behave, machines behave, and we are stable, calm, and competent.  Order is having a place for everything and everything in its proper place. We can find things like seam rippers, safety pins, and knitting needles without having to sit on them and be surprised. We don’t have to spend half an hour crawling on our hands and knees to find the female side of a snap that has vanished into thin air.  Order is good lighting, clean surfaces, and cheery civility with strangers who participate willingly in mutually-agreed social protocols.  It is wearing one’s undergarments as God intended them to be worn.

Order is also about having time. It is NOT someone arriving unannounced at five minutes to five with a full bridal party for a gown fitting, or insisting that you need your new jeans to cleave to your bum like a second skin by Friday. “There’s more to life than fitting in your jeans,” croons pop singer Ed Sheeran but some of these folks aren’t buying it.  Fitting in their jeans is Very Important to them.  They want it to happen NOW.  So is having their Harley Davidson patches sewn on their leather jackets while they wait.  People are constantly and randomly dashing in to stop us from The Thing We Are Doing and diverting our course to Something Else.  We try to stick to a plan but we know what happens when mice and men plan… Mainly that neither has a suit ready for the weekend! Chaos is the journey to the underworld, where bobbin goblins live. It’s the tragedy that strikes suddenly that means a bride no longer needs her wedding gown after all.  It’s the man who forgets he has a screwdriver in his pocket and sits down. It’s the black gunk shooting out of the iron all over the hundred-year-old christening gown you just restored.

The phone is ringing off the hook today.  A lady calls.  She cannot find her shoes.  She leaves an extended message on the answering machine about all the places her shoes might be, one of which might be our shop.  The next beep is her saying that she checked her own closet and they were there. (Unexpected Order. Which is another name for Chaos, really.) The cleaners call us. They have lost a purple dress.  We do have a purple dress that we cannot determine an owner for but alas, it is not the purple dress they seek.  It seems that there are two rogue purple dresses at large in the universe, perhaps many more.  We have been trying for the past two weeks to determine the owner of our mystery dress.  Few things are more mortifying than phoning a series of previous customers who have already picked up their orders, asking them if they are missing a purple dress.  It smacks of something slipshod, a lack of Order.

The interruptions don’t stop. A girl comes in the door.  My friend, who has spent a portion of her morning receiving hacked emails from a person who died three years ago, looks at the appointment book and asks “Are you a Bride named Bethany?” “No,” she says, “I’m a Maid called Melanie,” and we all burst out laughing as if we are part of a “Who’s on First” skit. We no sooner get her shuffled off to the fitting room with her gown, when a woman comes in and wants her blouse altered.  “I really like this blouse,” she says wistfully, “but not enough to stop eating.”

I survey the devolving organization of our time and work space and decide to learn what I can about Chaos theory.   To my utter dismay, it has something to do with Math.  Ever since Sr. Davidica’s reign of terror in eighth grade, I have thought I cannot “do math.”  The truth is, I “do” math every damn day.  We all do.  Math is one of the representations of Order throughout our world.  It provides the foundation for Geometry, Physics, and how to make correct change for customers who pay cash.  Apparently, it also says that things can change unpredictably, without warning.  It turns out that Chaos theory “is a branch of mathematics focusing on the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions.”  I think this means that we need to start, not only at the exact same starting point, but in the identical conditions for an action to be predictable and even then, it isn’t.  In real life, this seems nearly impossible. Take leaving for work:

The Same thing happens every day, in that I leave my humble homestead in a 2006 Subaru (I know, I wish it could be a horse and carriage too… or an ox-cart!) and head to my place of employment.  I am that theoretical pendulum heading out to work and back.  However, the infinite variety of initial conditions changes the potential outcome and determines whether or not I drive with one hand on the wheel, one hand on the accelerator, with both feet flying out behind me or have the leisure time to put my lipstick on at red lights, like sane people. The initial variables include anything from not finding my car keys, the level of caffeine in my bloodstream, or discovering a dead sheep just before it is time to leave.

Having made it to work, somehow, by the stroke of nine, we show up each day, not just to hem men’s trousers and discuss ladies’ undergarments. (Not with the men who are there to have trousers hemmed! “Heaven forbid,” says Prudence!) We are there save Humanity, one pair of pants at a time, and to be a force for Good in this world.  We are here to Love and Serve. To listen, comprehend, then transform your personal Chaos manifesting as a broken zipper. Working with us and against us are the forces of Order and Chaos themselves.

Order is using a machine, exactly as you have always used it, expecting the same result.  Chaos is finding out that you have just stitched approximately ten miles with no bobbin thread. And removed all the pins as you went.  For those of you unfamiliar with what a bobbin is, it is a tiny spool of thread that operates underneath the needle, unseen, in synchrony with the upper, visible needle. What it does for real, besides snaggle and rip itself out is anybody’s guess.  I leave the rest to your imagination.  All you really need to understand (all anyone does, really) is that not having one is a Bad Thing.  Bobbins are part of the underworld of sewing.  They work in darkness and they sometimes do good things—like magically making nice stitches underneath the fabric.  But mostly, they are just the Devil’s dice.  Having one last around an entire hem is like a benediction from the sewing angels.  It’s like finding a lucky penny.  It’s a Sign from Heaven that you are Loved and that All is Well.

All day long, we tread the borderland between Order and Chaos.  We have all the thread in color-coded racks on the wall—hundreds of spools.  Instantly find the right shade and this is Order.  Forget to put it back, Chaos.   Our attempts to straddle this fundamental duality is what Balance is all about.

I wake each morning striving for Balance; I let the dogs out to empty themselves in the garden (Order) so they don’t do it on the rug (Chaos).  I feed the sheep and chickens in their pens—fences are the Order containing Chaos.  I attempt to connect equally with the Yin and the Yang nature of existence.  However, when I have one foot on a clean carpet and one foot in Dog poop, I do not feel balanced. Life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping, yet ultimately meaningless.   I want to scream.  I feel like smearing their little hairy bodies in gravy and leaving them outside for the Natural Order to reassert itself in the form of a hungry bobcat or coyote.  Who are we to allow these canine fugitives from the Natural Law to soil our carpets? But I digress…

We are always in the known territory, surrounded by the unknown.  And the Chaos, like junk mail on your kitchen counter, encroaches with every breath.  I remember helping my father mending fences on the family farm.  He once paused from wrestling with a particularly thick bittersweet vine, sweat dripping from his brow, and surveyed his land.  His shoulders sagged a little as he said, “In ten years, left alone, no one would ever even know this farm was here.  The vines would eat it all away.  There would be nothing left.”  It’s hard to believe that Chaos won’t eventually win.  I feel the same way about dirty laundry.  And so it is in the shop.  Entropy is at work every day.  We think we are there to patch holes and tailor designer fashions. No.  We are there to labor against Chaos and Entropy and jab at it with our little pins, one pair of jeans at a time, until it is finally five o’clock and it is time to go home and find that the lawn has eaten the house, the dogs have eaten the garbage, and more junk mail has arrived in our absence.  

But…. SOMETIMES….When time passes, and all the right tools are at hand, and the phone is not ringing, and we find ourselves at one with the needle and thread thimble-driven through the silk, when we get so engrossed in what we are doing that we no longer notice we are doing it—it is there and then that we are located precisely between the Order and the Chaos.  We are in the zone.  We are the embodiment of Zen, of Tao, of Beingless Being.  And then, from these tiniest of views, we may absorb the biggest pictures.

Order and Chaos are the two most basic, binary subdivisions of Being.  No matter what you do, if you love and serve your fellow men and women, you are battling the forces of Chaos, for the Chaos is within them, as well as you.  The tide is against Order.  You have your own bobbin goblins aplenty.  And yet, despite relentless and overwhelming Chaos, we all continue to strive in hope for Order, for Serenity.  It is what the multi-billion dollar industry in self-help books and clean closets is all about.  There is something Holy and sanctifying in this struggle.  All of us, attempting to build, help, or heal; nourish or nurture; patch or tuck—when  we call forth Order from the Chaos that surrounds us, when we use our words to create actions, and actions to create results, we are not only as deeply human as we can get, we are also participating in the Divine.  We revisit Genesis.  We are co-Creators.

Be well, my dearies! And do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Who Buys Your Clothes?

Greetings Dear Ones!

“I’m having second thoughts about this outfit,” says a middle-aged, frumpy woman who has squeezed herself into a skin-tight neon pink and orange neoprene dress adorned with gigantic zippers that look like barracuda teeth.  “It’s for my son’s wedding in two weeks’ time and I just don’t know…”  Her shoulders slump as she turns to consider herself in the mirror.  “I just don’t know why I bought this… What do you think?  Does this even look Ok?”

“Is your son getting married in a tank?” I want to know.  Prudence Thimbleton shuffles up to the nearest eyeball to look out, aghast.  From the neck down, this woman looks like she should be feeding dolphins at Sea World.   On her feet, we expect to see flippers, instead of bargain pumps from Payless Shoes.  From the neck up, she looks like any other dowdy citizen of Frazzletown, with mouse grey hair parted in the middle and hanging lankly to her damp neck.  Her lips purse, her forehead wrinkles delicately.   She is confused but I know exactly what happened:  She fell asleep at the wheel and let her inner Party Goblin go shopping without her.   Some voice in her head told her she needed to make a Big Splash at her son’s wedding—or at least masquerade as if one was imminent.  Hence the dress tighter than scuba gear and made of the same material.  We have been seeing a lot of neoprene dresses lately.  They are oddly popular, out here in the wretched provinces, so many miles from the coast.  Perhaps people are taking the rise in sea levels a bit too seriously… perhaps fashion designers just decided to make the whole outfit into a version of Spanx.  In any case, I have yet to see a woman look like she is actually enjoying the physical sensation of wearing a wetsuit in high heels.  Many women, in dressing for their offspring’s wedding, panic and try their hand at wearing some sort of “power” outfit that is outside their normal scope.  (Ladies, is this really the time for that?) Perhaps this woman feels that the other females attending the wedding—her ex-husband’s new wife, the mother of the Bride, and crabby Aunt Sue are gnarly mermaids she must subdue?  Maybe, subconsciously she wants this vaguely dominatrix outfit to convey a message that she raised a son, so nothing scares her, not even cake…

“Is there anything you can do to this dress to make it look more feminine?” she wants to know.  “All these nickel zippers… in the light of day, it looks…well, a little aggressive…”  Yes.  Yes, it does.  It looks like a shark has gnawed on her, lost most of its teeth, then burped her forcibly back onto shore, hitting a sherbet truck.  Her inner dolphin trainer, who chose this outfit, is probably off water-skiing, or sleeping off an overindulgence of pineapple-infused rum and left her inner Little Old Lady to pick up the pieces.  The bewildered person standing in the dressing room is not familiar with briny buckets of smelt; she is a baker of bread, a church-goer, a respectable citizen who wears sensible shoes and never gets library book fines.  She does not understand why she bought this dress.  None of us do.

Many’s the time Prudence Thimbleton  has wanted to ask a customer, “Pardon me, Madam, I’m just curious…exactly what part of that little ensemble you have put together made you look in the mirror, sigh with satisfaction, and say YES… This is how I choose to represent myself today?”  Or, in this case, “is this how you wish to be commemorated for all time in the wedding album?  Did you not get the memo that the Mother of the Groom is supposed to shut up and wear beige?”

But I get it.  Truly, I do.  I feel for this woman who let her inner Party Goblin and inner Dolphin Trainer get together over a few too many pina coladas and make this choice she now regrets.  We all have rogue inner ingénues who show up and toss crap into the cart at TJ Maxx, or late-night click on items from Nordstrom’s that we would never dream of purchasing in the light of day when our more sensible monitors are in charge. Nothing makes me thirstier for adult beverages than taking all my clothes, one by one, throwing them on the floor and realizing that I have Nothing to Wear.    Well, nothing that the “me” who has shown up that day really likes.   Nor is that “me” entranced by the idea of running naked for the rest of the day.  (These are the days I not only hate all my clothes, but the body that goes into them too.)   You may not know this about me, but I have a team of personal shoppers whose job it is to squander my money filling my closet with crap I do not like that does not fit.

Ralph Lauren is quoted as saying “Fashion is about something that comes from within you.”  Well, what if what you have “within” is a cast of sadistic demons and giddy trollops?    Perhaps you have a few of these characters too? There’s the inner anorexic  all hopped up on Dexatrim who convinced you that you would actually be a size six by June (she lied) and told you that you would need that full-price silk skirt you will never wear but can’t get rid of.  (That is not a garment as much as it is a monument to hope and disillusionment.) She also begs you not to discard those slacks that have not fit you since the eighth grade.  She is a skinny little hoarder.  Getting even with her is the chubby girl who retaliates by buying an assortment of maxi-dresses that might as well be burlap sacks.   Then, there is your inner Grandmother knitting you wooly confections out of homespun yarn—capes and shawls and woolen slip-covers as if you live on the Nebraska Prairie in 1850. (Wait, maybe that’s just me?)  The inner hippie just adores all those one-size-fits-most (most what? Animals? Vegetables? Minerals?) Indonesian batik dresses—the scraps of which are turned into table cloths for Pottery Barn.  And who bought all these suits? Were you ever in business? Are you secretly a corporate lawyer in your spare time?  I don’t think so.  Tiny little Exercise outfits?  Why so many of these with tags still on?  Why the mounds of tattered, paint- stained, sit-on-the-couch-binge-watching-Netflix-and-eating-Swiss-Cake-Rolls clothes in every size?  Church clothes, 18th Century Clothes, 1940’s dresses, Vintage Velvet Hippie dresses--WHAT are we supposed to wear to work Today?  You’ve got everything from “Geriatric Cave-dweller” to “Pole Dancer”--Why do none of your fashion “statements” say “Competent, Highly-trained, and Capable Professional”?  You are letting the wrong goblins shop for you.   

When we say “I have nothing to wear,” what we really mean is that “there is nothing here for who I am supposed to be today.” I might have to masquerade as a Responsible Guardian at a parent-teacher conference; or as a person who does NOT deserve that speeding ticket, or someone who turned down a movie deal on the way to her son’s soccer practice.  (You can take that last one as anything on the spectrum from “getting the starring role as an actress in a movie to deciding not to buy one of the discounted DVD’s in the bargain bucket at Wal-Mart.)  I might just need to be a Matriarchal Tree Sprite, or an innocent Five-year-old who likes any color as long as it’s purple, or some unfortunate throw-back to the Eighties, with shoulder pads that would be the envy of any linebacker.  I have no idea who I am going to show up as…

When I was growing up, my options were more limited.  I had three choices:  school uniform, church dress, or barn clothes for doing chores on the family farm.  I could only be three people—student, sinner, or serf.   My mother bought all our clothes.  She was a savvy bargain hunter who bought things “big” so they would last longer before they were handed down. I went off to college and had no idea how to wear anything that wasn’t plaid.  It’s been a problem ever since.  The people in my head are not always the people who want to wear what is in my closet.   The people I have to show up as, as a Responsible Adult, are not always the people who run amok in a thrift store with my credit card.  Consequently, I have plenty of options for the inner Tree Sprite to wear while she fiddles on a tree stump but few of these attires could be worn in public.  (She is a close cousin of the inner Trollop who likes shoes that are bad for the knees.)  Crabbit Prudence Thimbleton watches all this with a wary eye—the inner Church Lady on alert for dubious hemlines and sensual impulses.  

I learn a lot from the customers who come in with their own struggles, whether they are frumpy, frazzled mothers of grooms or trendy young men exercising their God-given right to look dapper.  I am delighted to see the number of youthful souls coming into the shop to revise their “look” and fit and to create a wardrobe that reflects their individual sensibilities, however odd they may seem to those over the age of forty.  The cleverest among them are up-cycling clothing from second-hand shops and bringing it to us to refine, revive, or revise according to their needs.  It’s refreshing to see that our clothing chooses us just as much as we choose it. People simply glow when an outfit is “Them.”

From my standpoint as witness in the fitting room, I realize that these aspects of our Being are not just roles we are playing.  Our clothes are not simply costumes that help portray us as hero, clown, martyr, or lost child.  They are part of the complexity of us as humans—part of why we frustrate ourselves so much and potentially a source of delight too.   We LOVE it when we get to wear the thing that sings “ME.”   Self-awareness is the antidote to self-obsession.  Who are we? What do we really need? How do we want others to see us? Do we really want to wear something that gives us more opportunities for penance than a medieval hair shirt? We have to work today with today’s best answers to today’s questions.  The answers might change for us tomorrow.  That does not matter. 

When we are triggered to abandon some part of ourselves—to condemn the Inner Trollop, Pixie, Sinner, or Saint—it is a form of self-mutilation.   When we have no idea who is buying our clothes—we have lost touch with all the vibrant, creative, eccentric, insecure, reckless and bizarre parts of ourselves who are calling us to see them, to welcome them home.  We all have these fabulous  fashion archetypes lurking in our minds and closets—from tweedy professors to harlots.  And we are Bigger Yet, far bigger than the sum of all of them. We cannot abandon these selves to wordless fears and judgments—“did I do something wrong by being authentically who I am? Does this dress make me unlovable ? Will I be fired if I wear comfortable shoes to a board meeting?” These questions are not based in Love.  If we begin to live just one day at a time, with our most heart-centered wisdom in This moment, we can trust that the best learning will come to us from whatever decisions we make.  When we know and LOVE  All of who we are, we will know exactly what to wear.  And whoever shops for us will be Ok.

Rock on, Inner Dolphin Trainers!

Be well, my darlings, and do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

It's the little things...

Greetings Dear Ones!

I am beginning to think I was not meant to be a saint by doing little things.  “BIG things, done with Great Flourishes…things that can be done quickly and impressively, with the stroke of a magic wand, or a sword…things that involve galloping horses or fire...these seem like they would suit me better,” I think sourly, as I round hour thirty-nine of what will become a forty-five hour job to remove all the lace from the bottom of the scalloped hem of a wedding gown, only so I can slash six inches off the bottom and start sewing all that lace back on.  I look intently at the seam ripper I am using and wonder if it is strong enough to open a radial artery.  I simply cannot go on… The sun spins by the window and the colors of the days shift like a kaleidoscope.  And yet this chore drags...  I have no memory of breakfast, no plans for lunch, no memory of my former life.  I have no children, no pets, no houseplants gasping for water on my windowsills…All I have ever done and all I shall ever do forevermore is remove the lace from this damn gown.

The lace has been stitched on with a clear strand of a filament, like finest fishing line, in dizzying circles, over and over and over itself, anchoring five yards of this frilly ornament to a piece of fragile tulle as if it must one day withstand the force of the Apocalypse. The shop feels like it is 105 degrees Fahrenheit and I am trying not to get my sweat or blood (from jabbed fingers) on material that shreds if I pull on it too hard.  Each stitch must be picked out carefully with tweezers—and the only way I can see it properly is to have magnifying glasses and a hot white light held inches above it. A subtle variation in sheen is my only clue that a thread is there.

The other ladies are working briskly—machines are whirring, steam from the iron punctuates their progress with pronounced hisses.  Hangers click on the racks as they finish mending one item after another.  The shop hums with productivity and progress. Except in my corner.  Hidden behind this frothy mountain, I think about the stories I read as a child—about how bags of millet were mixed with bags of sand and friendly ants helped the kindly heroine (who had saved them all just that morning) sort it all before the witch came back.  I could use some helpful ants now!  These stitches are just the right size for ants.  I pick away steadily, bitterly, knowing that there is no way out but Through.  The only witch here is me.

 Growing up, I remember hiding out in the bathroom during afternoon chores at the barn with a book my sister had received as a prize for winning her class spelling bee.  It was called The Lives of the Saints and it was filled with thrilling tales of martyrdom and valor, courage and bravery—all the goriest details of their triumphs over worldly temptations and devils in the form of misguided town magistrates. There was not a single mention of achieving glory via lace removal. The closest saint was St. Therese of Lisieux, “The Little Flower,” who, like Mother Theresa, understood the importance of doing “little things with great love.”

Ah… Love!  That’s what I am missing!  I have no love for this lace, this gown, nor the modern Fairytale tradition of dressing women up in fabric mountains worth thousands of dollars so that they can pretend to be a Princess for a day. 

When my children were little, I read to them every night before bed.  One night, I read my son a classic fairy tale about three sons who went out to seek their fortunes in the big bad world.  The first two sons quite predictably squander their fortunes and imperil their lives by attempting to win the hand of a Princess, whose evil father puts them under an enchantment when they fail.  It falls to the youngest brother to survive the tasks set before him and to free his enchanted brothers.  He is a good and wise son and is probably doing this just to make his mother happy, since it does not seem that these older brothers were all that nice to him and he is the only one to leave the cottage with his mother’s blessing. Though he is younger and smaller and weaker, he is clearly her favorite.  Now that I think of it, this is probably the sort of story told in days of yore to mollify bullied younger brothers… but I digress.  We read pages and pages about the youngest brother’s courage and wit and cleverness and in the end he triumphs, mostly due to his strong Moral Character.  I read with rising and falling drama in my voice as we near the conclusion.  When I get to the end, where I say “and so the wicked King could do no more.  He gave the Princess’s hand in marriage to the youngest brother and they all lived happily ever after.”   My son five-year-old son is scowling.  He had been all in during the deeds of valor, cheering for the youngest brother all the way as he rode horses of various colors up glass mountains and whatnot, but now his eyes are hot and dark and he looks scornful. Something about the ending has greatly displeased him. I am curious.  Is it that women should Not be given as prizes? (No, they should NOT)  Is it that no one could hope to live happily ever after with a father-in-law like that? Is it that the older brothers don’t say thank you?  I ask him what bothers him about the story. He pauses, shakes his head, and says “that poor boy…that poor, poor boy.”

I pry a little more. After all, the boy marries the princess and becomes a prince. He wins! What’s the problem? Finally, my son looks at me with his clear, blue eyes, and begins to explain: “He won a princess.  Princesses are a lot of work.  They need princess shoes, a princess dress, a fancy bed with lots of mattresses and no peas—not just a regular bed.  They need all the princess versions of everything.  This is going to cost him a lot of money.  He’s going to be poor again in no time.  I wish the prize was just a bag of money he could share with his mother so they would not be poor.  Now they have to take care of a whole Princess and princesses cost a lot of money.” He shakes his head sadly and sighs. Needless to say, I nearly wet my pants at the notion that my frugal five-year-old is an authority on the fiduciary constraints of royalty.  

So I read the same story to my seven-year-old daughter and she has no problem with it.  She loves to talk about princesses and to dress like one as often as she can from the overflowing trunk of dress-up outfits I have made for her and her neighborhood ladies-in-waiting.  She smiles. Princesses are supposed to be expensive and beautiful and glamorous.  Who wants to be a pre-pumpkin Cinderella? No One. For her, the Moral Character is not as important as the glass slippers and the glittering gown, the bigger and more sparkly the better! 

Remembering how these separate genders responded to fairytales as children makes me smile as I sit picking lace.   What are weddings anyway but an excuse to spend a whole lot of money so that a girl can be a Princess for a day?  A castle, or something vaguely resembling a castle, must be rented; court musicians must be hired; linens for two-hundred and fifty guests must coordinate within two Sherwin-Williams paint shades of the bridal bouquet; and a Royal Banquet with an open bar must be served.  All because two people love each other and need to share a Health-Care Policy. Does the groom want all this?  I suspect he would rather have a pony. Or a small sack of gold.  Probably the sack of gold. But no, everyone pretends for a day that they now have a kingdom.  The rival Kings and Queens and their significant others are summoned by royal proclamations printed on hand-stamped parchment and encouraged to part with many sacks of gold.  Guests are encouraged to purchase items for the palace from a Registry—so as not to let their own lack of taste interfere with the required furnishings of the royal household. The female inner seven-year-old is saying Finally, I get to stuff my little piggies into some itty-bitty shoes and wear the BIGGEST damn glittering gown I can find, while every inner five-year-old man within reach of his wallet is groaning and saying “I wish I had just ridden away on that golden horse while I had the chance! Why did I do all those feats of valor?”   

For whatever reason, we as a species need to convince ourselves that Magic really happens, that champagne is as good as derma-bond at sealing two souls together for life, and that if a girl gets to have a good party dress for a day, she won’t really notice that she will have to spend the next sixteen years of her life as the grubby version of Cinderella, driving her bickering brats to soccer practice in a minivan that smells vaguely of dried ketchup and dead hermit crabs.

I sigh and look down at the gown all over my table and lap and legs.  This particular Princess has no idea how long this is taking.  She has no idea how much work this is.  Her mother has been in twice already to complain about how much the rest of the wedding is costing, delivering the not-so-subtle subtext that we are the serfs who should not expect to get paid much for this, this little “hem”—the napkin rental alone has already cost her plenty. I think seriously about the energy I am putting into this gown and realize that it is full of grumbles, not good wishes.  I need to restore my own faith in magic, in the Fairy Tale of “Happily Ever After,” not “Grudgingly Ever After, Until Debt Do Us Part.”  

I know that our energy inhabits our work, long after it is finished—that everything we do receives our blessing or our curse, whether we want it to or not.   We can taste the love in food others cook especially for us.  We can feel the love in hand-knit socks hugging our feet. We can see the love in a neatly made bed with the pillows fluffed just so, or a love note packed in with our lunch.  We know that little things done with Great Love bring the most happiness to our aching lives.  It is good for our own souls to do this, no matter how tedious the task, no matter it may be received by others, or not noticed at all. We are, every one of us, magical creatures.

I DO want this dress to be a blessing—since I am not allowed to set fire to it—so I settle my mind around an old rallying cry of “if you can’t get out of it, get into it.”  I learned this many times, growing up, having been discovered in the bathroom with The Lives of the Saints while the barn chores weren’t getting done.  I surrender and give myself The Speech: The work does not do itself, Nancy.  It must be done and it must be done by YOU.  NOW.  So just do it.  With all the love you can muster.  If you can’t love the work, try to love the person you for whom you are doing it.  If you can’t do that; at least love yourself enough to do your best.  Take pride in your work, no matter how trivial or cosmically and existentially Absurd it may be.  One stitch or pitchfork at a time. Sometimes, Good People have to do Stupid Tasks and do them Well because it’s not about the work—it’s about the test of our spirits. At least that much of any fairytale is True!

Be well my Dearies! And do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

All Buttoned Up

Greetings my Dearies!

One of the biggest sources of shame I witness on a daily basis, besides the basic, garden variety forms of body shame, is around buttons. Why don’t people learn to sew on a button? I have yet to see a person come in to the shop to have a button re-sewn and plunk it down on the counter with an air of blithe confidence and cheery, self-respecting expectation.  No, they cringe, they apologize, they confess, they twist in torment that they did not think to swipe a hotel sewing kit when they had the chance in Rio…  (Whatever happened to having sewing kits at home?)  Why don’t people know how to do this?  They act like they should.  (“I agree, they Should,” rants crabby inner Prudence Thimbleton.  “What kind of Wasteful Slackers drive across town and pay the likes of you a whole Dollar to sew a button on? It’s disgraceful! No proper education is complete without knowledge of how to change a tire, how to make a simple meal, and how to sew on a button!)

I have told you not to expect any practical sewing information from this blog—as there are others out there who can do that so much better than I.  However, in this case, for the sake of alleviating Shame from my fellow men and women, I will offer a brief tutorial:  Firstly, a button needs to be what we call “shanked” if the button if it is to be used to actually close something.  It needs to accommodate the buttonhole. If you sew it flat up against your pants, there will be no room for anything to go under it and the strain on the thread will just make it pop off again. All you do to shank a button is hold it away from the fabric as you sew it on—hold at a distance that equals the thickness of the fabric to go under it.  For example, on a shirt, you might only hold it away the thickness of two pennies, for jeans, it might be as much as a quarter inch.  It’s a little bit of a balancing act to hold the button away as you sew it but if you can drive a motor vehicle and operate a microwave (not at the same time, of course!), you’ve done harder things. Stop whining. If you really want training wheels for this part, you can simply place a toothpick or match-stick over or under the button then stitch down over it into an adjacent hole, but who has time for that? A button usually has two or four holes; stitch until each pair of holes has been bound five or six times. A little trick—use three pieces of thread at one time in your needle. Then only stitch twice. Or use six threads and only stitch once.  (The math part of this is so fun.) However, a needle eye that can accommodate that number of threads at once is probably too big for your fabric.  You should use smaller needles and lighter threads on lighter fabrics. Six threads per hole should be plenty to hold a button securely. To make the shank, hold the needle and thread between the fabric and the button, remove the toothpick, if you used one, lift up the button, and wrap the thread tightly around the exposed threads between the button and the fabric several times until the button is standing up on a perky little “stalk” or shank. Tie off the thread under the button. I don’t actually tie a knot—I just use my needle to make the thread disappear off into the fabric and cut it.  There! Spread the word.  I don’t regret the loss of income one damn bit!

I spend an inordinate amount of my time sewing buttons on things.  Most of them, going four at a time on the outer sleeves of men’s sport coats, serve no purpose whatsoever, which vexes me.  Life is short.  What am I doing squandering my dwindling youth and strength and eyesight on vestigial buttons? In biological terms, their function has dwindled and been rendered meaningless by the evolution of the coat over time.  They remain as useless decoration only.

The Germanic hordes that brought the Roman Empire to its knees, eventually became so civilized that by the 13th century, they were the first to use buttons to keep their clothes on. Those clever Germans!  The idea gradually swept Europe and everyone has been buttoned up ever since.  Sleeve buttons became a thing in the 18th century, when sleeves were tighter than they are now—supposedly buttons helped one pass his hand through the sleeve.  Suit jackets followed masculine swagger of military uniform designs.

 I’m not sure this story is true—I defer to my friends who are actual fashion historians to corroborate or deny this tale.  If it is not true, at least it is a fun story—which is about all you can hope for in this wicked world. Supposedly a General—I’ve heard it was Frederick the Great, ruler of Prussia from 1740-1786; I’ve also heard it was Napoleon, liked nothing better than to ride out and survey his troops arranged in rows and neatly turned out in spotless uniforms. Marring the scene were these grubby soldiers who insisted on sweating, getting dirty, bleeding profusely, and—worst of all, in the days before Kleenex—wiping their snotty noses on their sleeves.  In order to keep the lads looking snappy, he ordered buttons sewn in rows on the bottoms of their sleeves so as to scratch them when they tried to mop the blood, sweat, or snot off their faces, in the hopes that the threat of minor physical pain could supply what basic public decency could not. More likely, buttoned sleeves may have enabled surgeons to give urgent treatments to injuries near the hands during battles.

In any case, until recently, men’s suit coats all came with working buttons and button holes on their sleeves. Not that long ago, in the days before casual or “button-down Fridays” turned into “no buttons, ever, everyday” and swiftly devolved into the current garb of the modern Wallmart Shopper, men wore jackets all the time, not just for business. A man’s shirt was considered his underwear.  Even farmers and day laborers and shopkeepers (ancestors of Wallmart employees) wore suit jackets. When exerting himself and getting hampered by his clothing, a man would roll up his sleeves, rather than remove his jacket. Taking off his jacket would be akin to stripping to his underwear—or a somewhat deranged 21st century woman painting the exterior of a three-storey house in her bikini (wait, that’s another story…)

Clothing was serious body protection from the elements and people, even men, wore aprons while working to protect it. Clothing represented a much higher percentage of a person’s personal budget and was highly valued. One of my favorite pastimes (right up there with eating homemade peach ice cream from Rota Spring Farm) is trolling the Old Bailey accounts online to read stories of “criminals” accused of stealing clothing in the 18th century. Fascinating stuff!  This is a great way to learn about what people were wearing and how it was valued in society and in the courts—the descriptions are sometimes hilarious.

All this to say that the buttonholes were cut (that means they worked—they weren’t pretend), the suits were individually made to spec and the sleeves could be rolled up.  Form followed function.  Modern bespoke and high-end (i.e. expensive) suit buttons still work. This is a chance for dapper dudes to wear one button undone so they can show off that it is a really good quality suit.  But most jackets today are not bespoke (made to order).  Off the rack jackets no longer have functional buttons or buttonholes—this is to facilitate tailoring them, i.e. make my job that much easier, so that I can cut the buttons off and lengthen or shorten the sleeves to suit either a man with the wing-span of a T-rex or a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. Manufacturers, in trying to accommodate everyone, have designed suits that fit no one. Buttons on those suits are purely decorative.

One can only surmise that these conspicuously useless (often made of plastic, yuck) buttons stay there for the same reason men wear ties--#1 it’s always been like that, #2 it looks vaguely natty, #3 most men are so baffled by matters sartorial that it never dawns on them to agitate for change, #4 they are too busy tapering their trousers into tourniquets from the knee down to notice.

In college, I used to eat lunch occasionally with one of my favorite philosophy professors. She was about 8 years older than my roommate and I, which seemed like a lot back then, but she seemed to enjoy our company.  I asked her what made her want to study philosophy. She said that she started graduate school as a biochemistry student but when she found herself on a research project that involved stroking the backs of centipedes until they peed into little vials, she knew that she needed to find something less pointless to do, hence Nietzsche and Goethe. Personally, I saw her life up close and I am not certain that lecturing to hung-over undergraduates about the contributions of Heraclitis and Aristotle to western thought was any less pointless. I observed her youth and idealism and how it was being squandered on exhausted people more interested in discovering the ancient Greek principles of Brotherhood out behind Lambda Chi Alpha and I thought there must be much more exciting things to do in this world. 

Um, yeah… like sewing on buttons.  Thirty years later, here I sit, on my buttons, sewing...  Buttons that don’t even close anything.  I might as well be stroking centipedes. 

We all have these meaningless little tasks involved in our work.  Sometimes the work is exciting—you get a big project, like your version of a wedding gown, and there is all this drama and pressure…  You spend four whole days removing lace that has been attached microscopically with fishing line and you are over budget before you even begin to hem the gown…  The mother of the Bride comes in, glaring at the bride and bellowing about how she has just been charged $600 for the rental of linens for the reception, and it’s not a good time to mention that the gown is taking a lot more time than anticipated… And time is money… well, not in this case, since no one will have the courage to tell this Mother of the Bride, so we will do the rest of the work for free… So Time is just time in this case… Time you now spend thinking about buttons and how sometimes having little boring things to do, mundane and simple chores with some anecdotal link back to the snot of Prussian soldiers, is not so bad.   

Be Well, my dearies, and do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Does this need to be said?

Greetings my Dearies!

No joke, countless versions of this phone call actually happen on a regular basis:

The phone rings.

I say:  “Good [morning/afternoon], Nancy speaking, how may I help?”

“Yeah…uh, hi…” a young man’s voice falters.  Having just dialed the phone and waited patiently for someone to connect, still, he seems disoriented to be talking to another human being and needs to collect his thoughts.   “I uh, have a question…  I’m trying to buy some pants off the internet.  They’re work pants and they don’t make them anymore.  The smallest size I can find is a 40 but I am a 34.  How hard is it for you to make them smaller? Is that something you even do?”

 I want to say: “Well, DUH!!! You just called a tailoring shop, buddy. Do you know what that means? It means we take your clothes, cut them up and sew them back together—usually, but not always, in ways that make them fit you better.”

I actually say:  “Well, sir, yes, we do indeed take in men’s trousers.  We are a tailoring shop.  That is exactly what we do.” I add briskly, “however, to take a waist in as much as six inches is going to alter the basic geometry of the pants so much that they won’t look right.  We can take them all apart and remake them, but that won’t be the twelve-dollar fix you are hoping for…”

What he says: “Really? What do you mean? Do you think it would make them look bad?”

What I want to say: “Dude!  Do you even know how much of a goober you would look like if we did that for you? Seriously?  It would look like your bum ate your pockets.”

What I actually say: “Well, men’s pants are designed to be taken in at the back.  When you take six inches off the back, first of all, the pockets get too close together.  Look at the pockets now—they are not separated by six inches to spare.  You will also have to have a lot of fabric taken out of the crotch. If we take it only from the back, the side seams will no longer be at your sides.  The front will look weird.”

What he says: “Ohhh… gee… I hadn’t thought of that. Well, I don’t know what to do.  40 is the smallest size I can get.”

What I want to say: “What kind of work is this you do, that you are the tiniest man wearing these pants?  How come all the pants for this kind of work only come in larger sizes?  Should you consider changing jobs? Maybe you could eat more at lunch…”

What I actually say: “Well, if you bring them in, we can remake them to the best of our ability, but that means taking them all apart and basically starting over.  They might not look the same when we are done.”

What I also want to say: “Honestly, just forget it. They will look like dog poop. And furthermore, it will be a complete pain in the arse to do all this; work pants are triple-stitched, you’ll crab about the price and it won’t even be worth it to us in the long run because we will lose all the profit each time we have to redo something you are unhappy with, and you will never be happy with the result.”

What he says: “well, I haven’t even bought them yet.  I’m just trolling around on the internet looking for them.  I don’t even know if it’s something I’m going to do.  I was just calling to find out if you did that sort of thing.”

What I say: “Yes, sir, we do.  We do alter pants.  But there are limits to how much we can alter them that are still economical and effective for you.  There are men who drop a lot of weight and want their favorite pants altered to fit them but at a certain point, it’s just better to buy a more appropriate size.”

What he says: “Gotcha.”

I say: “Thank you for calling, have a nice day!”

Saying what we think, saying what is true, and being able to communicate clearly without hurting someone’s feelings takes all the verbal ingenuity and discretion of a foreign diplomat.  When a bride with an ill-fitting gown asks us why the zipper is rippling so much and doing a snake dance up her back—“Does the gown need to be taken in? There seems to be too much zipper.”  We cannot proclaim, ‘Dear God, Woman, are you out of your mind?! That zip ripples because it is lodged on a roll above your hips.  We need to let that out two dress sizes.  No amount of gut-B-gone underwear is going to save you now…”  Instead, we shrug diplomatically and say, “Maybe we could do that…We can also make some adjustments in the hips—we know how to fix it. Don’t worry.”   The customer never knows if we have let things out or taken them in.  All they need to know is that it fits better in the end.  The less we say the better.

In today’s political climate, it is trendy to “say what one thinks” no matter how rude it is by old-fashioned standards of polite convention.  However, I happen to think Eric Hoffer was right when he said “Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.” I am a huge fan of honesty in general but I question how baldly it should appear in the work place.  Honesty need not be painful. My genuine fondness for people means I usually have to struggle through some verbal calisthenics to say what I mean.  Do I really want to tell a dear old lady that the reason her collar won’t button is because her dowager’s hump, which rivals that of the famed resident of Notre Dame, has pulled up all the extra fabric?  Do I want to tell a man that his cuffs were full of body dander or that I know what it is he really “spilled” on his crotch?  As seamstresses, we know things about people that they might rather we not know and we need to be somewhat careful how we let them know we know, in ways that protect their dignity. Because, after all is said and done, we ARE HERE TO SERVE. Or we try to be. Sometimes, we have to fake this a little too.

I’m not saying we should ever be untruthful, don’t get me wrong! Flattering inaccuracies are like cute little Jack Russells that will come back to bite you in the buttocks.  In his book The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz talks about being “impeccable with our words.”  Impeccable means “flawless, faultless, without stain”—literally, it means “without sin,” since its Latin root is peccare, or “sin.” I like to think of it like a verbal Hippocratic Oath for seamstresses, or anyone who wants to flourish in life or business, to “do no harm.”  Or, in Recovery circles it’s known as “Say what you mean; mean what you say; don’t be mean when you say it.” This goes a long way in the dressing room when one is faced with a myriad of unfortunate fashion decisions.

Good language is the knife with which we carve truth from fiction—it can be a weapon or a useful tool.  Just this past prom season, we had a girl come in at the last minute with an “emergency”—a beautiful but complicated gown that we had to alter in a day because she refused to wear her first gown, which she had purchased months before and had altered at a rival shop in town.   The seamstress in that shop had made unkind comments about the girl’s weight and the girl had collapsed in grief and self pity and didn’t want to attend her prom at all after that.  Her mother, in desperation, had found this other gown at the last minute and wondered if we could change it quickly enough—but even more important than that, could we make her daughter feel good about herself in it?  Stories like that break my heart.  Yes, of course we could. And we did.  She looked like a radiant princess.   

When we choose our words carefully, we build bridges for our spirits to find one another and guide each other to better places.  We build collusion, cooperation, and trust.  We are able to be on the same team.  I can jump into your boat and say “where do you want to go? I will help you row.” Using language that cuts these ties and alienates us may feel satisfying in the moment but it does not serve a greater good.   Ultimately, it sets us adrift, going nowhere.

This little shop in a tiny corner of the great big world contains every element of that world as much as a cup of sea water contains the sea. Our pool of customers represents each economic and political stratum from poor day laborers, who will not pick up their work until pay-day, to the heiress who has brought ten silk blouses back from her latest jaunt to Italy. We are “Sew-cialists” who sew for everyone.  We service the mayors and selectmen of three towns as well as the local cat shelter, which needs custom slip-covers for its cages so the cats won’t fight. We work equally for male-strippers, people needing fetish costumes, and children receiving their first communions.  We do all the tailoring for a reputable men’s store, as well as all the fire fighters and police uniforms. In winter, we patch sweatshirts “while-they-wait” for migrants who have no coats and repair ice booties for dog paws who ride to the groomer’s in forty-thousand-dollar SUVs.  In summer, we create clothing that can be slipped easily over someone in a wheel chair and swimwear for the handicapped.  We do custom alterations for every kind of amputee, spinal scoliosis, or physical departure from “the norm” that you can imagine. We make eye patches for a man who has lost an eye and soft head scarves for cancer patients who have lost their hair.  These are deeply precious souls from every slide and margin of the political spectrum and I hate how they sometimes talk about each other.

I feel deep dismay around the plummeting level of discourse in our country today. Sure, some of it feels good.   Some of it feels like cleaning a wound that has festered too long. I too fantasize about what I wish I could say to people who irritate me.  But there is a difference between cleansing and carving out fresh injuries. I have an acquaintance who rails against “PC” (politically correct) language.  She does not think we need to be inclusive or thoughtful of other people’s feelings.  This makes me crazy, like she’s saying let’s just slaughter all the polar bears.  I say please, for the love of Civility, bring it back, not just to the work place but to every place.  Let’s make P.C. stand for all sorts of things like Polite Civility, Protecting Customers, Pain-free Clients, Personal Contact, Perfect Compassion, Professional Courtesy, Peaceful Co-Existence and of course, Pin Cushions! (Feel free to send me your ideas—this could be a great list!)

The other day, I drove home in the darkness and saw that I had left a light on in my home.  I had departed in the daylight and could not see that light glowing when I left.  But as darkness descended, the light became visible.  In its way, the Darkness was showing where the light was.  We can be that too.  As others descend into their darkly “honest” rages, we can be beacons of bright yet equally honest Politeness that used to be so ubiquitous we were unaware of it. We can preserve this endangered language of Helpfulness, of compassion and friendship, of building tribal bonds and community—Old Fashioned and formal and stuffy as it may be—it might just help us find our way Home where we remember we are all Family.

Be well, my Dear Ones! And do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

A Hero's Journey

Greetings Dearies!

Before I even begin, I must tell you that the following story is True. Well, mostly. There are a few of the usual em-BELL-ishments… Yet the subject of this story has given his full permission to have it published in this blog. 

People have been asking me if I worry about folks recognizing themselves in my stories and my answer is “I most certainly hope they do!”  I hope we all recognize ourselves!  We are all some version of these beloved customers in the shop, struggling to make something fit us better in some way, whether it is a pair of pants or Life itself.  We are all Magnificent and Weak. But my shop “characters” are not really Real—merely believable.  As their guardian, I change their sizes, nationalities, ages, or genders to scramble their descriptions beyond recognition.  I told you on page one: “All the names (and other identifiers) have been changed to protect the insolent.”  But I digress. On to this week’s True Story—a Mother’s Fairytale:

Once upon a time (last week), there was a handsome young prince who recently (this past June) came of age and was wont to set out in the world and seek Adventures. He announced to his mother, the Queen that he wished to go see the world or at least some of the bigger National Parks.  (She is not really a queen but we know she is probably a Princess of some sort because she sits for hours at her spinning wheel, just as all the storybook princesses do. And when princesses grow old and crabby and start bossing people around and threatening to chop the heads off woodland creatures if they poop on the carpet one more time, they get the reputation of being Queen.  So, for the purposes of this story, we shall call her the Queen.) The Prince said he wanted to travel, test himself, experience adventure, and reconnect with Nature.

Frankly, the queen thought this was a terrible idea.  She had been hoping he would reconnect with Nature by introducing himself to the Palace lawn mower and vanquishing a few weeds.  She sighed. She could see the zeal in his eyes and she knew in her heart, like all fairytale mothers, that it was time to send him on his way with a bannock and a blessing so he could leave home and have some sort of heroic quest to find Himself, or some apples, or a Golden Fleece of some sort.  (“Ooooh! Yes! Please let it be a Golden Fleece!” she thought, momentarily thinking of her spinning wheel rather than her darling son.)  The Prince's plans, she found out, were to travel in his mother's  Royal Carriage, a Ford SUV,  with an exceptionally clever and talented damsel who, though of age, had no driving license. The thought of him driving cross-country with no back-up driver—especially since he had racked up no fewer than FIVE moving traffic violations in the previous five months—made the queen Very Nervous indeed.  She issued a very unpopular Royal Decree: No Ford.  Besides, heroic journeys are always, at least partially, on foot. (I don’t recall Hercules setting off in an air-conditioned SUV with full stereo and satellite navigation system, do you?)  There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth but the Mean Queen held firm.  The King, the prince’s father, stepped in and offered some Royal Air Miles but the damsel bagged out.  She was not interested in a Heroic Journey on public transportation.  Only the Royal SUV would do. So the Prince had to decide to go alone, which, if one thinks about it, also makes more sense for a Heroic Journey anyway.  What hero brings a girl on a Quest? He might save one or two along the way, or need them to save him, but either way, they tend to pop up according to plot demands.

So the Prince continued his plans solo, though sadder at the loss of the SUV and the companionship of someone so lovely and clever. He graciously and gratefully accepted his father’s Royal Air Miles and packed an enormous rucksack for his adventure. When he had installed his tent, gear, clothes, and toothpaste, it weighed nearly 55 pounds.  He decided not to bring the big camera.  He took out half his clothes.  He got it down to a manageable 48 pounds.

The night before he left, he saw his mother, the queen, putting some green things in his shoes, hidden under the insoles. “What are you doing?” he wanted to know. “Are those leaves?” he asked, wrinkling his nose in suspicion.  He was used to her doing witchy things with herbs.

“These are not leaves,” she said, “this is in case of emergency. It’s called money. It’s very old-fashioned stuff but it still has magic and might come in handy.”

“Oh, I don’t need money,” he replied airily. “I have my phone. I am a thoroughly Modern prince. I use Venmo and Paypal.”

“Well,” she said, “just in case.  If anything happens, you can pull these old ‘leaves’ out of your shoes.  They might be helpful. Each one has a little number in the corner.  That will tell you how much it is worth.”

“Where is your itinerary?” she wanted to know. He waved the phone at her again. “Your list of contacts?” Phone. “A map?” He just kept smiling and looking at his phone.  By this point, he was texting someone.  He didn’t even hear her. He was looking at slice of glass barely four inches by three inches on the palm of his hand, through which he could see anything, anywhere, except that which was right in front of him.

The King arrived to take the young Prince to the airport and lifted his pack.  He groaned and said a few words that don’t really belong in fairytales and insisted the Prince repack.  The Queen intervened on the Prince’s behalf and said that Experience is a wondrous teacher and that all astute young men learn the same way to pack lightly in the future. It is a rite of passage she would not have him denied. So off went the old King, muttering, and the young Prince, also muttering, with forty-eight pounds of Experience-just-waiting-to-be-had on his back and a sliver of the whole world, all he needed, in his pocket.

In the silence that descended after their departure, the Queen performed all sorts of prayers and enchantments to keep her naïve Hero safe upon his quest.  As in all proper fairytales, she sent her Blessing after him to prevent him from harm, as well as a few Guardian Angels. In her heart, there was deep foreboding and misgiving, so she asked Archangel Michael to tag along too, totally forgetting that he has a sneaky sense of humor.  She did not sleep that night.  “What the hell was I thinking?!” she asked herself a thousand times. “How could I let my only son be flown to VEGAS of all places—that den of Sin, where he would have to spend a night alone, just so he could hop on a Greyhound bus for 5 hours to get to Zion National Park?” At least the King had thought to book him a hotel room near the airport. At least he had his phone (the Prince that is, not the King)(though one presumes he had one too) and she could text him every twenty minutes and check on him. Again, the Prince that is, not the King.)

From the moment the Prince arrived at Logan Airport, the journey was doomed.  His flight was cancelled due to engine failure.  The next available flight was five hours later and went to Phoenix, not Vegas.  He managed to get a connection to Vegas and turned up very late at night, only to discover his good father accidentally had booked him into an over-21 hotel which refused him entry. Undaunted, and with the use of his phone, our Hero managed to transfer his reservation to a different place, where he slept until he nearly missed the bus the next day.  After five hours discussing saxophones with a cool jazz musician, he was dropped off in Saint George, still two hours away from his destination. The Queen was frantic when she found out from his sister, Princess Tattle-tale that he had taken to hitch-hiking! (The Prince immediately blocked them both from all his social media posts.)

In old-fashioned fairy tales, the hero does not need to have booked a campsite ahead of time—but our modern Hero was chagrined to learn he should have thought of this, especially at the height of tourist season.  Seeing him standing at the information booth looking forlorn and perplexed, wilting under his enormous pack, two young women from New York took pity on him and invited him to share their campsite.  The three of them shared a fire and a conversation that lasted until the wee hours of the morning about Life and Direction and the Vision Quest that each was making in his or her own way.  The Queen slept more easily that night, knowing angels in the forms of confused twenty-six-year-olds were guarding her son and asking him why the hell he was shouldering such a heavy pack. 

“I’m kinda lonely, Mom,” he said two days later, on his third call to the Queen that day.  She noticed that he was calling more frequently. It turned out that a heavy pack was a lot of work. (Surprise, Surprise!)  It was hot in the desert. He was exhausted from sleeping on a mattress pad that deflated a few minutes after he fell asleep.  He kept waking up on rocks digging in to his bruised shoulders.  He was getting nosebleeds from the dryness. He had to walk miles to go anywhere or do anything.  He found himself just sitting alone in his tent looking at Snapchat. He was being plagued by squirrels. Squirrels? Seriously? The Queen was confused.  She had never heard of these sorts of torments in the Myths and Legends she read to him as a child. Were there no monsters to slay? No Truths to defend? No Virtues to discover? “They aren’t like the squirrels at home,” he insisted, “These are wee bastards! They are CRAZY!”

The next day, after an amazing hike, followed by a trek into town to buy groceries, he returned to the campsite to find his tent wiggling furiously. It was filled with squirrels after some pistachios he had left in his pack.  They had chewed a hole in the tent, holes in the pack and some of his clothes and they had jobbied all over everything. Two of them were dead, from heat stroke or perhaps from nibbling his socks. The tent reeked of Squirrel Excrement and expired rodent. Thoroughly disgusted, our Hero picked up the whole tent and dragged it to the nearest river to wash all his gear, including his sleeping bag, as best he could. As he was doing so, his phone—that magic window on the world, that umbilicus to Starbucks, Venmo, SnapChat, and his parents—slipped from his pocket and into the river, along with all the Squirrel turds, and Died.

Now, his Adventure would really begin….

For the next two days, she received random text messages from him on alien numbers, as kind strangers let him borrow their phones.  For fifty-six hours, she did not hear from him at all, as he navigated his way back to Vegas, to the airport, to Boston, without the use of a cell phone or watch, relying on helpful bystanders to tell him the time. When she finally collected him in Boston, she was surprised to see how Calm he was, how Serene. How Changed.

“You know, Mom,” he said thoughtfully, “the moment my phone died, suddenly I wasn’t lonely anymore.  I just went back to the river and piled rocks for three hours.  I couldn’t think of what else to do.  And then, it was just great!  I got so into piling rocks and being with the water and the river and the sunlight.  It was magical.  I was like that young swamp-rat I used to be as a little boy, before I ever got a phone, down behind the old Tavern in the marsh, playing for hours with no real plan. Just Being. I went on a great hike and because I could not take pictures, I stopped and stared at things for as long as I wanted. Sometimes I sat down on the path and just Looked.  And I realized that that was what I came here to do. I really did connect with Nature. I saw all these people rushing by, click-clicking away, and I thought about how much they were missing.  I thought about my friend who took his life.  I thought about the music I love. I thought about past and all sorts of things.  It was awesome.  I connected with real people too.  My last night, a Mormon family took me into their home so I would not have to wait at the bus station alone.  They had a piano and I played for them.  They loved it.  I learned that people everywhere are basically helpful and kind, except in Vegas, which is an ugly, ugly, insane place! I lost ten pounds schlepping all my squirrel-scented crap around and I learned I can survive without any of it, even a phone—in fact, life was so good without my phone I’m not going to get it fixed right away! In a weird way, breaking my phone was the best thing that happened. It turns out that the only person I really needed to contact was Me.”  The Queen smiled at him with tears of joy in her eyes.  Everything had turned out Perfectly. 

All they have to do Now is live Happily Ever After. May it be so.

And for all you dear Readers too!  BE Well and do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. If you have read more than three of these blogs and liked them, please consider subscribing!  Thanks! I promise not to sell your email to a tartan lingerie company!

Mating for Life

Greetings My Lovelies!

According to a Field Guide to the Natural History of North American Birds, bequeathed to me by my beloved Uncle David, “when their breeding efforts are complete, the males of most of the duck species in the Northern Hemisphere molt from their brightly colored nuptial plumage to a dull, cryptic plumage. Their brilliance is dimmed—they go into ‘Eclipse’.”  The eclipse plumage is generally retained for a brief time—sometimes for weeks or months, sometimes until the following spring, sometimes until the young flee the nest with his car keys and credit card.  Until then, male ducks just sit on the couch and blend in with their natural surroundings as much as possible so as not to attract predators or irritated spouses with “honey-do” lists. Basically, male ducks have the water fowl equivalent of “the dad bod.” They don’t regain their fancy breeding garb until there is some advantage of impressing females in advance of the impending breeding season.

At the shop, wedding season is still going strong.  We have as many as ten full wedding parties on the racks. Huge white dresses, the size of small yurts, are destined for beaches, back-yards, and ballrooms; court-houses, carriages, and country-clubs.  They are all extravagant confections in more shades of white than a bee can see.  A wedding dress is one of the most memorable garments a woman will ever wear. Above the invitations, the flowers, the cake, the gown stands out as a symbol of the bride’s temperament .  Some reflect exactly what she wanted; some reflect how she was steam-rolled by other, stronger, adult females in her tribe.  The suits and tuxes we are altering for the men have not such variety.  In fact, if we are not super conscientious about pinning labels to each one, it would be easy to mix them up.

We are one of the few species on the planet where the female is now the most ornamented. In most species of bird, she is the dull one, the camouflaged one. Today’s Wedding fashion and “Courtship Plumage” of the young male is getting to be more and more like “Eclipse” plumage with each passing generation but it wasn’t always the case. Long ago, men were every bit as frilly, fancy, powdered and high-heeled as women, some even more so.

The “Macaronis,”of Yankee Doodle fame were upper-class British youth that took a grand tour of Europe, many to France and Italy, in the 18th century.  Supposedly these youths were given their moniker because they had developed a taste for the exotic dishes of Italy, including the pasta. When they returned home, they often wanted to emulate the vivacious fashion they had seen abroad. Rather than don the typical matching suit of breeches, waistcoats down to the knees and long vests of their fathers, these fellows created a trimmer look and used wild, mismatched colors. They pushed the limits, as teenagers do, with embroidery, ornamental swords, and jewelry.

A group of six men and their groom have just figured out that their particular wedding is less than ten days away.   One of their women-folk alerted them to this fact and four of them called within an hour of each other. They “aren’t in any hurry,” so they say, but they might as well get these suits altered before their mothers, wives, and girlfriends take to drinking gin straight from the bottle and prodding them with sticks.  Within hours, I am faced with tailoring a row of medium blue (the hot color this year, it seems) suits. Also, as part of a newer trend, they have opted to buy suits they can all wear again, rather than wearing rental tuxedos. The younger the men are, the more they need the waist in, sleeves up, and shoulders out.  These guys are all “ripped” as they like to say, which is what will happen to their pants if we don’t make the right adjustments.  They come into the shop one at a time and make jokes about the others all having “dad bods.”

“Yeah… heh heh, this is the last time [the groom] will ever be these measurements! He can’t wait to get through the wedding so he can relax and have a dad bod,” says one dude with glee.  I am curious.  I want to know what a dad bod is. The Urban Dictionary’s top definition of Dad bod states that it is “a male body type that is best described as ‘softly round.’ It's built upon the theory that once a man has found a mate and fathered a child, he doesn't need to worry about maintaining a sculpted physique. Having a "dad bod" is a nice balance between working out and keeping a beer gut.”

 It goes on to say, “If human bodies were cuts of meat, the dad bod would skew more marbled rib eye than filet mignon; or, if human bodies were sea mammals, dad bod would be more like a grazing manatee than a speedy dolphin. The dad bod is more mudslide than mountain, more soft serve than sorbet, more sad trombone than clarinet, more mashed potato than skinny fry. The dad bod is built for comfort.”

So, basically, dads are just ducks in Eclipse Plumage.  Right from the beginning, from before the wedding day, women are going to have a completely different relationship with their bodies. The women are going to try harder, spend more, have more fittings and more costly alterations.  Their bodies will be far more affected by the bearing of their young.  And yet, not once, have I ever witnessed a bridesmaid saying “Yeah, [the bride] will never see these measurements again! She can’t wait to relax and start working on her Mom bod.  She can’t wait to quit working out and worrying about what she looks like. She can’t wait to be soft and round and cute in a socially acceptable way that shows she’s just a family gal taking care of her family. ” Nope. Never heard that yet.

None of these young guys has a “dad bod,” but clearly, they are well aware of the concept. They are looking forward to the physical manifestation of Complacency that will be their reward for having twenty-three thousand discussions about what kind of flowers to put on the cake. They don’t give a shit, as long as there is cake.  Any kind of cake. They don’t really want to discuss that either. With that bite of cake, they get to keep eating cake forever more, until death do they part or Jenny Craig weeps.

I pick up a brand new suit to be worn by the father of the groom.  It is labeled “Portly Short.”  This is the Men’s Store label version of what a Women’s store calls “petite.”  Petite clothing is created shorter in the waist and leg length than regular clothes, otherwise, the sizing of the widths is similar.   I cannot imagine women feeling comfortable with the label “Portly Short” but the men don’t seem to mind at all.  It kinda just tells it like it is and they are ok with that.  Nothing proclaims “Dad bod” like the words “portly short.” They would not thank you to be called “petite.”  There is something far too delicate about that.  They don’t mind being called portly or short as long as they come off as strong.  We don’t say men are petite. We say they are “stocky,” “rugged,” “built,” or “big.”

A little while later, an impressive bride overflows the dressing room, pouring through the doorway into the shop like suds overflowing a bathtub.  She is handsome and well-built, as well as very tall, and rides out on a foam of tulle like a Sea goddess clothed in white surf.  While her groom will look nearly identical to his men, No One at this wedding will look anything like this bride! She looks triumphant. Yet, up close, we can see the tell-tale gaps under her armpits: the dress needs to be tweaked and taken in.  She comes on a weekly basis, having lost more weight, to have us adjust things yet again.  Her wedding is still a month off.  We have made so many changes to this dress that I fear I am beginning to live out one of those philosophy questions about “when is the ship not the original ship if I gradually replace every single board and rebuild it with another board?”  I am beginning to anticipate her wedding with even greater joy than she is, merely so I never again have to deal with the lace overlay on her ever-shrinking bodice. (It never before occurred to me how lucky most folks are to see a wedding dress only Once!)

Unlike swans, ospreys, coyotes, and termites, the primates known as Homo sapiens do not generally mate for life. While some of us naked apes may find one partner and stay with them forever, never straying, history tells us that it has not been the norm for our species. Nevertheless, marriage, a social technology, has sprung up in most societies and on every inhabited continent and we all do our best while we can.

Another bride comes in for a fitting—this one is a middle-aged bride on her third wedding. Her white dress is similarly voluminous.   She is cranky and difficult to please. She fusses over the layers of tulle and the glittering belt of rhinestones at her waist.  Above the swooping neckline, her jowls sag and she furrows the wrinkles on her face in displeasure.  After she leaves, we wonder why a vigorously “petite,” middle-aged woman would want to do the whole Big White Gown thing at all.  Why not get a more flattering gown in a more flattering color?  Perhaps an elegant dress?  Maybe even blue jeans… Pretty much anything would make this woman look better than the ten yards of tulle making her resemble an enormous lemon meringue pie (with droopy lemons).  Did she like how she looked in her previous wedding gowns? I wonder.  “Maybe her maidenhead keeps growing back!” says a colleague.

The truth is that wearing the color white has more to do with Joy than purity and is a purely western tradition dating only to the 19th century, when Queen Victoria broke the status quo at her 1840 wedding and rocked lacy, ivory-colored silk satin. Women's magazines embraced the look's innocence and simplicity, calling white "the most fitting hue" for a bride. Its popularity caught on and has yet to flag. Around the world, women of other cultures are just as likely to wear red, as the most auspicious color for a wedding. We had a bride in last week who wanted a red wedding dress but she was “afraid to break with tradition.” I told her about how positively Stunning and Magnificent my sister-in-law had been in her deep red velvet bodice with white skirts. Far from being bold and cheeky, she was just wearing a color that was More Traditional than the current traditions!

American brides didn't always wear white.  Before the Victorian fad swept across the Atlantic, most women wore their “best” dress, regardless of what color it was.  The idea of wearing an extravagant dress for one day only and one event only, never to be worn again (except by succeeding generations) was something that poorer people could not contemplate.  White is not a practical color for daily wear. Only the wealthy could afford such a high-maintenance garment.  So white is not even as much for “purity” as for status and the ability to show off squandering a huge whack of money.  Personally, I’ve always thought it strange that women buy their dresses and men only rent their tuxes for formal occasions.  For both genders, dressing up is only temporary—or Occasional (i.e. for the Occasion).  

A young Bride-to-Be is back the shop with her soon-to-be groom, asking if we can tweak his already tight tux and make it even tighter. “I want to show off his bod,” she explains, lustfully clawing his chest.  “Everyone at this wedding needs to see what a great bod this guy has!” He smiles sheepishly. This is the “bod” he is going to have until the moment he starts eating cake.  She better enjoy it while it lasts.  From the looks of things, society will forgive him for “going to seed” the moment she conceives, but she might not!

Be well, dear ones, and do Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy