Tonight I spent the last hour and a half sewing a pair of $8 shorts that I purchased about 10 years ago.
Yeah it was a doozy of a tear.
“Sewing $8 shorts?” ….” For real?”..... “ Harley you're nuts, just toss them and get a new pair” most people would say. And that's exactly what many of my generation do.
But why? They are still a perfectly good pair of shorts. They are my favorite shorts and they have value to me.
When I was a kid both my parents worked so I spent many days after school and the better part of most of my summers watching my Grandmother sit and sew.“Grandma what ya working on” I’d sometimes say. She would often grunt and say “ fixin your Grandpa’s brithces he keeps wearing holes in them ”
I once asked her back then why didn’t she just toss them and my Grandpa was quick to pipe up and give me what seemed at the time a 2 hr lecture on how growing up in the depression they didn’t have anything and nothing got thrown away….yada yada yada ….” yeah whatever Grandpa”
What I didn’t understand at the time and what took me a good chunk of my adult life is this: that generation understood value.
As I was growing up in the 80’s and early 90’s things were starting to be made cheaply and being made to throw away instead of repairing ,but what did that teach my generation? What lessons did we miss out on that we aren’t passing down to the next?
If you have the stomach to watch the news, you will see what I believe are some of the effects of this lack of education on value. Most people these days don’t know how to fix anything, some don’t even know it’s an option. We are so used to throwing little things away, when something important needs mended …...well we are creatures of habit and we toss it out like yesterday's garbage.
We toss aside our values, we toss aside our community, and we even toss aside our friends and family sometimes just because it’s not like it used to be. We don’t know how to mend those painful relationships, or mend those broken friendships. We don’t know how to mend our communities that have been driven apart by hate and partisan politics.
I think it’s high time we all learn to sew! We need to teach our kids that things can be fixed, and all that it takes is sometimes a little patience and persistence, because when we see the value left in the ripped up $8 pair of shorts and learn to spend the time to repair them in order to enjoy that remaining value, it makes it a whole lot easier to work on the other broken things in our life.
It would seem silly wouldn’t it?......to spend all that time fixing cheap shorts and not put a little effort into the big things.
-Harley
One thing I always have with me is a sewing kit. I was raised in Alaska, and there were plenty of times I had no access to anything new, and couldn't do without, so sewing kept clothes on my back.
Not so many years ago, sewing was 'the art of kings'. Slaves and serfs couldn't be relied on to produce quality work, and good cloth was scarce. So was money to pay good seamstresses, and kings spent the winter mending their clothes.
The scarcity of commercial goods in my youth has caused me to always endeavor to make do with what was, and reuse what could be.
It is a source of good character lessons, and now that I am old, I find I wish many more had learned it.
Good for you, that you have!
Edit: before you point it out, I did note the actual theme of your post, which is of far more value than a pair of shorts! I but fail to open that can of worms, as I can clearly recall how I learned such lessons, and doubt such wisdom comes from an easy life devoid of sorrow.
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