THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 12, 1995 TAG: 9502090100
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: MY TURN
SOURCE: BY KEITH MONROE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
IT'S A typical day for me, which means I am unraveling. The decline of the West isn't seen in big things like war and peace but in a button dangling by a thread here, a ragged sleeve there.
The lining on my blue blazer, for instance, has come detached and a long thread trails out of the sleeve. The little loop on the back of my tie has come undone so the short end can't be tethered and flaps in the breeze.
My trench coat has a similar little tab that I am supposed to use to hang it on a hook, but it too has come loose at one end and sticks out of my collar like a flag on a mailbox.
And, of course, I have numberless socks in need of darning. Every coat lacks at least one button. Several pairs of pants have come unhemmed and are unrolling over my shoes. Obviously I should have spent some of my youth learning how to sew, but I didn't.
In those prehistoric times, cooking, cleaning, sewing and laundering were thought to be the exclusive domain of the female of the species. Such ``women's work'' was not taught to men - unless they were sailors, orphans or planned to open a restaurant. So when women were liberated (often a euphemism for ``forced by economic circumstances to become the second paycheck in a dual-earner couple''), the men were unprepared to perform any of life's necessary little maintenance tasks.
And truth be told, many girls are no longer being equipped with these homely skills of yesteryear either. Often because their mothers couldn't teach them how to make a meringue or hem a skirt if their life depended on it. All of these domestic accomplishments have become lost arts.
When I was young, my mother was a full-time working woman, but my grandmother lived with us and cooked 21 meals a week, served as pastry chef and laundress, and visited the market and post office five days a week. Monday was wash day, and sewing was accomplished at a console the size of a mighty Wurlitzer.
It all seems impossibly long ago and far away, as if I'd grown up in the era of Little Women, went to sleep like Rip van Winkle and woke to find myself in the world of Roseanne.
Now when socks get holes in them, they aren't darned but damned and thrown away. Helpless to sew on a button, I go about with one or two missing from most coats, a veritable symphony of loose ends and straggling threads.
Throwing myself on the mercy of my wife, the executive, is out of the question. Instead of getting stitched up, I'd have to endure a stern lacing about stereotypes, chauvinism and all that. While I agree with her in principle, it leaves me coming apart at the seams in practice.
I suppose I could acquire a pincushion, thimble, needles, thread and other paraphernalia and become an apprentice tailor. But to whom would I apprentice myself? Is there a course on Introductory Home Economics for the non-major I could take?
Even if there is, I am not optimistic about the outcome. My performance of the more ``manly'' domestic work tends to fall into the all-thumbs category. Called upon to drive a nail, change a furnace filter or hang a picture, I usually wind up in need of first aid.
I watch ``This Old House,'' ``Hometime,'' and ``Home Again'' as stupefied as a newly discovered tribe confronted for the first time with gunpowder and helicopters. To me, the ability to grout a bathtub or replace a washer looks like the work of a superior alien species. Sewing seems equally advanced.
The only remaining alternative is to pay an actual tailor to repair my loose ends, but I'm too cheap to consider that. There's also some lingering Puritanism involved. We ought to be able to do these things for ourselves, after all.
So, I go about with my tie taped together in back and a hand over the place where the missing buttons belong. And I don't think I'm alone. In fact, one reason the society is so surly may be the accumulation of little annoyances like this.
We have exchanged home cooking for chowing down on take-out. Rather than the buttoned down look, we are fraying around the edges. Lack of time and talent drive us into wrenching experiences at the hands of auto mechanics. Collectively, we all want our grandma back, keeping the home fires burning.
Instead, we read Martha Stewart and watch Bob Vila while eating our TV dinners dressed in buttonless blazers, our big toes protruding through our socks. Is it any wonder the social fabric is coming unstitched as well? Perhaps civilization rests on a foundation of freshly washed sheets, crisply hemmed slacks and souffles that rise. If so, we're all in trouble. MEMO: Keith Monroe is a staff writer and a guy with more than a few buttons
missing. by CNB