My mother died in March, 2008 after an eight month courageous battle with pancreatic cancer. We were never very close until she got sick, then circumstances beyond both of our controll required that we bridge the gap. We said what we needed to say at the end that made the previous distance between us irrelevant.
Oddly enough, not a day goes by since she died that I don't think of her.
What happens often is when I am shopping and I come across an article of clothing in her unique size. Every single time, I catch myself thinking "Mom would love this!" Then reality sets in.
But an odd thing happened today. I was cleaning out my mother's and my own sewing boxes, attempting to merge them into one. I had some old stuff in mine, but I found some things in my mother's that surely had belonged to HER mother. I held the old faded spools of thread between my fingers, rolling them around, hoping to make a physical connection with my mother and grandmother.
As I got deeper into the box, I made an interesting discovery. The Beltx Bra Back Repair kit pictured above. The packaging was fragile and faded but in tact. I couldn't find a date anywhere in the text, but the $.19 price tag convinced me this was very old. A similar contraption now sells for $1.95.
This started me thinking about how different my mother's generation is from mine, and especially from the four to five generations below mine. My mother came from a time where people FIXED things if they were broken. Today, we throw things away and go get another one.
Case in point to my female friends: when is the last time you repaired a bra that had worn elastic or a broken fastener? If you are like me, probably never. But my mother lived in a time where the $.19 was a lot easier to come by than the $1.00 it would have taken to buy a whole new bra.
In the 1950s and early 60s, my mother's father repaired television sets in the evenings after he got through with his "day" job. I would often go with him to people's homes where the giant boxes sat in a prominent spot in the living room. He carried a large black tool box that contained glass tubes of every size. He was always able to find the one that had burned out and replace it with a new one so the anxiously waiting family could get back to their evening television shows available on the one to three channels available, depending on how big their antenna was. And my grandfather never charged for his services, although we did get some good meals out of the deal. He just charged for the cost of the parts because most of these people were his friends. Back then, you didn't charge a friend for a helping hand.
A few months ago, our giant screen television downstairs just quit working. Not only could we not find anyone to come here to fix it, we couldn't find anyone who wanted us to bring it into their shop. We were told time after time to just throw it away because it would cost more to fix than it was worth. So we did.....and we had to PAY someone to haul it off! I thought about my grandfather and how ashamed he would have been.
Just as I know the next time I clean out my bra drawer and throw out the ones I no longer wear, my mother will be looking down from heaven, shaking her head, wondering where she went wrong.
