That Room is Full of Stuff That Doesn't Mean Anything Anymore
At a yard sale, Amy bought one of those old Singer Sewing Machines that is built into a desk. You press a little spot on the top of the desk, which springs loose a small panel. This narrow panel is lifted off and the sewing machine is rotated on its hinge up on top of the desk and settled flat for sewing. Amy asked me to check the machine over. She said she wanted to learn to sew.
"My mother had one of these," I thought.
My mother did not have a drawer full of special attachments like this machine had. Attachments are small mechanical assemblies that are screwed to the needle apparatus for special stitching. There were devices to attach for ruffling, buttonholes, hemming and a great many more I didn't recognize but were fascinating in their delicate mechanisms. You could spend hours playing with them to figure out what they did.
The machine itself was unreliable. It didn't sew evenly and skipped stitches. It would be infuriating to sew a project with this machine, as well as time consuming to adjust the tension, and set up the attachments. I think Amy would learn to hate sewing if she learned on this machine," I thought.
My own modern sewing machine has 6 attachments, 2 of which I use regularly, and the machine adjusts its speed and power automatically. "We just don't sew that way anymore," I concluded.
I think of the "memory-baggage" I carry around. There are memories of 22 household moves. Perhaps 15 of those moves we packed everything ourselves, "puzzled" our belongings into a Ryder truck and caravanned cross-country with weeping children. I have memories of amebic dysentery, 3 miscarriages with their surgeries, various injuries and failures, folding cloth diapers, dipping water out of the washing machine to use again in the bathrooms when there was no running water, sewing clothes from curtains, and making $40 last all month.
Why do I carry these memories around? Once, it seemed like those memories represented the vehicle that brought me to this point in my life. But they became a weight that hung around my neck and weighed me down with resentment, and contributed to the "great crash of '49" haha, that is, age 49.
Your dad, who has always been steady, has been unusually wise this last year with all that has happened. One of the things he reminds me is to forget the past. "Let it all go," he says. "Today is wonderful, what we have is good."
Today I started again to rehearse something that used to happen in our family. He said "Carito, don't go there. Leave the door closed on that, That room is full of stuff that doesn't mean anything anymore." And I thought of the Singer sewing machine. We don't sew that way anymore. All those attachments meant something once, but they are meaningless now. It's stuff we don't need any more.
