Greetings Dear Ones!

I got a very odd phone call yesterday. To tell you the truth, if I was the sort of person to suspect people of doing bad things, I might have had the sense to be alarmed, instead of naively mystified. “Always suspect the worst,” says Prudence, “then you can't be disappointed.” But I wasn't disappointed. Far from it.

A male voice said “Are you a seamstress?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“I thought so,” he said, sounding pleased. “I looked you up on Google. I need your help. I need to come show you something.”

“Sure,” I said, “what is it?” assuming he had ripped his pants.

“I’m not sure. I need to show it to you in person.”

“Is it clothing?” I asked.

“No.”

“Hmmm… I really only work on clothing, Sir. Can you describe it? If it’s curtains or cushions, I’m not your gal.”

“No, it’s not anything made of cloth. I don’t know what it is. It’s some sort of tool. I don’t want to try to describe it. I’ll just confuse you. I need to see you in person. Is your address [the right address]? Are you there now? I’ll just come show you in person.”

I didn’t know what to say. Prudence was comforted by the thought that a student was in the shop with me—one who, if needed, could be counted on to brandish a thread ripper and go for the jugular. After a pause that seemed too long, I said in weak, interrogative tones “um…yes….?”

“I’ll be over at 11,” he said and hung up.

Precisely at 11 o’clock there was a rap at the door and I opened it to see the delighted, congenial eyes of a middle-aged man, peering over a mask, cheerfully waving a wooden stick with metal feet and a long metal clamp at one end.

“Can you help me?” he asked. “Can you tell me what the hell this thing is and how it is used?”

I recognized it instantly, laughed, and pointed him to the dressing room, where two of the same such sticks leaned against the mirror.

“Ah! You have the same thing!” he said, growing more curious. “I thought it was for sewing. But the guy at the antique shop said it was an antique! He didn't know what it was either. ”

“Perhaps it is, but I doubt it,” I said. “It’s just an old skirt marker!”

He laughed.

“Well, I’ll be…” he mused. “How does it work? What does it do? Is it for men’s clothes, like cuffs and stuff?”

“Well, if the men are wearing skirts it could come in handy, I suppose. Traditionally, it was to help mark ladies’ skirts. When you hem a skirt, you want that hemline to be parallel to the floor. You can’t just make a skirt the same length all the way around from the waist down. You need to measure from the floor up. Given the different configurations of human anatomies, some people need more fabric in the back, some in the front.” His eyes glittered with delight as I pantomimed first a larger bum, then a protruding stomach.

“Whatever else you make here, you’ve certainly Made My Day,” he said punningly. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to have this mystery solved. I love learning about old tools. My son and I share this game. He's very ill. We take turns finding old tools and figuring out how they were used to take our minds off things and keep us challenged to learning something fun. We knew this was a tool but had no idea how it worked.”

I grabbed some spare cloth and showed him. “This folding piece of metal holds the fabric in place; these holes here are where we can set the pins, here—look at the bottom, the stick has numbers on it like a ruler, so we can keep the distance consistent. And this little screw allows you to clamp it all at the right height.”

His excitement at each revelation was contagious. “I can’t wait to tell my son!” he said, beaming. “He was the one who first thought it was something to do with sewing. But neither of us knew what to call it. That’s why when you asked over the phone I had no idea. What is it called, anyway?”

“I just call it a skirt marker,” said me, the girl who calls rulers “sticks with numbers.”

“So simple,” he said. “Hey! Would ya look at that! It’s written right on the bottom of it ‘Skirt Marker.’ How did I miss that?”

“Thanks to skirt markers, people in skirts can look like they are walking on level ground, and not constantly uphill or downhill.” We both laughed with relief, as if this fact changed everything for the better. He tipped his cap, thanked me profusely, and left.

I turned to my mentee at the cutting table. Being able to take accurate measurements and use appropriate vocabulary for tools is useful in any trade, a fact that seems to be emphasized relentlessly by recent events. A few weeks ago, I got a call from a nearby non-profit group in possession of a magical soul who wants to learn to sew. Would I consider mentoring her for the next six weeks and teaching her some hand-work skills? Indeed I would! She is from another country but language is not our barrier. No. It's worse than that. It’s the metric system. She does not think in inches, nor I in centimeters. The numbers on the vintage skirt marker make perfect sense only to me. On everything else, from tea to tweed, we agree completely. Who knew that measuring things would prove such a divisive challenge?

The first thing we made together was a copy of a skirt she liked. It is a beloved skirt she brought from her own country. We put it on my cutting table and traced it. I showed her how to draft a pattern from it. Then we cut it out of fabric that had been donated to my stash by a generous local benefactress whose deceased mother had been a seamstress. Over the next two weeks, my student patiently sewed it all together by hand and did a marvelous job.

Yesterday, we started to make her a new dress, using a vintage pattern that she found in one of my dusty boxes on the top shelf. That’s when the trouble started. We left our “gounding” in what is “real” (ie her old skirt we had used as a model) and ventured into the theoretical, in the form of a “pattern” or plan. She kept insisting that our numbers were “wrong” that we were making it too small. The pattern was at least thirty years old and had been cut out at its smallest size. I tried to convince her that we only needed to increase some of the margins a half an inch (a total of four sizes if you factor in included seam allowances) and that we couldn’t just increase everything or it would be a weird shape. The math and its conversions were making us dizzy.

“Fine,” I said, eventually. “Let’s just make it as big as you want; we can take it in later,” knowing full well that Experience is the best teacher. (This is why I make it a point never to rescue young men from the side of the road who have run out of gas, after being warned repeatedly to check the fuel guage as soon as they start the car!) After all, how do you think I came by this information? Did I listen to those who knew better? Certainly not. I had to make a jumpsuit that could only fit Bumpo the clown (for a friend who was seriously insulted) in order to learn that lesson. When we basted it all together and held it up to her body in the mirror, she was horrified to discover that she could also smuggle in a small Baltic state if she had to. Then we could not stop laughing at our own foolishness. “Look on the bright side,” I said, wiping my eyes, “with our handy skirt marker, at least you’ll appear to be smuggling level!”

This week, as during the previous weeks, I’ve had to work all weekend to catch up on time lost serving at the pleasure of the District Court of the State of Vermont. Like an oversized jump suit, nothing about jury duty went the way I expected it to go, which is all I can say about it, but I learned a lot. Much to Prudence’s astonishment, NOT everyone thinks the way she does about things. (“But, they SHOULD!” she huffs.) Words get confusing. Meanings get distorted by our goggles of personal experience and bias. Trying to decipher meaning from testimony, including audio recordings taken on site during the incident, is even worse than converting inches to metric. It's like being back in Professor Stitt’s American Poetry class and holding each squirming word up to a looking glass, microscope, or telescope. Twelve people can listen to exactly the same testimony and come to just as many different conclusions. (One vociferous rooster on our team came to at least thirty-two possible conclusions alone.) More than once, I had to reckon with the fact that I don’t always see things quite the way others do. “What is the Truth?” I want to know. “It doesn’t matter,” insists a fellow juror whose horns are beginning to show. “We cannot know the truth. We just apply the law.” To me, they ought to be one and the same, like a ruler with inches on one side and centimeters on the other. To know one is to figure both. Apparently not. Unbeknownst to me, Innocence has its own metrics. Somehow, we got our job done with remarkable civility, decency, persistence and patience. A good lunch helped. It was not easy.

Over and over I appreciate the same things: Firstly, no wonder the founding fathers set up our government to minimize citizen involvement and restrict it to voting and jury duty! We “masses” comprised of seamstresses, bank tellers, electricians, and ex dolphin trainers turn to rabble pretty easily, especially when you collect all our cell phones in a bucket and tell us we can’t have them back until we agree unanimously. Secondly, other perspectives are incredibly valuable. We all have different ways of measuring.

Taking the measure of other human beings for any purpose—be it clothing or crime—requires specialized tools but there is a vast difference between measuring and judging. Unexpected things result when those you work with don’t understand the yardstick you are using. Sometimes they are hilarious, sometimes not. Virtue cannot be quantified by an overarching set of units. Like the skirt marker, it's only by measuring up that we can be on level. As we debate hemlines and democracy in general, we find that some of our tools are very old, but they still work beautifully, if we just learn to recognize and use them well.

Keep Mending, Dear Ones! Thank you for your good work!

Yours aye,

Nancy