 |
|
December
23, 2005. Tyler ducked quickly into the living room where we were all sitting, and neatly tossed a blue, long-sleeved Oxford shirt across my mom's lap, and then ducked back out again. We all snickered. What? A shirt, OK. What is this shirt? Mom picked it up and turned it over in her hands, and I said, "Look for a logo?" and she did, and lo, there it was, the embroidered name of his employer, a large bank. My mom sort of smiled, as if to show amusement that he'd just given her a gift of a shirt, from his bank, what the heck, but oh, that's kind of sweet, and then I laughed with realization. "He wants you to fix the cuffs!" "What?" "I'll bet you anything. I bet that shirt's not a gift. I bet he just wants you to move the buttons on the cuffs so the shirt fits better." "What??" "Yeah, he had me do, like, three of his shirts when I was down in Houston. Like somehow, moving buttons is some expert sewing skill that I possess that he does not." So we all got into this sort of indignant conversation that sounded suspiciously close to Kids These Days and How the Educational System is Failing Us in General, and I tried to stay out of it because I had the opportunity to take Home Ec or Applied Arts in junior high, and I absolutely eschewed them in favor of taking Fine Arts and/or Chorus. I wanted desperately to be a painter at age 13. Then again, sewing a button was just common sense, for me. I wouldn't really touch a sewing machine until college when I took a costuming course, and needed to help with our season of shows, and a final project. But buttons? Easy peasey. I did three of Ty's shirts in Houston, in quick order, laughing all the while. Who doesn't know how to sew a button? Finally, Ty came back, and my mom looked at him quizzically. "Oh yeah," he said, like a salesman, "Those cuffs are too big? And, so --" and stopped a bit awkwardly when we all started laughing. I was reminded of this today when I got to leave work early for the holidays - a button popped off the front of my coat, loosened from the constant contact with the strap on my DJ bag. It's a good-sized button, and so it made this distinct plinky sound as it dropped. I carefully tucked the button into my change purse for later, and grinned a little as I remembered I had a few socks that needed darning, as well. Perhaps I'd make a morning of it: me and my common sense and a needle and a thread. go
back to the index |