SAY WHAT YOU WANT ABOUT THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS, but I sewed a button onto my pants months ago, and it’s still there. Mrs. Cady was my teacher at Joliet’s Hufford Junior High School, and although I haven’t thought of her in years, I have her to thank for the button. I remember dreading her class in junior high, knowing that soon I would have to sit in that yellow room and, for the love of God, sew like my sisters. My stomach rumbled every time I passed her room. I felt progressively better as I made my way down the hall past the other industrial-arts classrooms. First was cooking, where Mrs. Kofoid attempted to teach kids the ways of the kitchen. I resented being subjected to cooking almost as much as I did sewing, the saving grace being that I could eat what I made in class.
Next to cooking was Mr. Williamson’s drafting class, a magical space full of T-squares and triangles, blueprint paper and oversized desks that slanted at whatever angle we chose. There was light everywhere, and laid out before us were blank slates waiting to collect and record the buildings of our dreams. It was a fun class, but it had a whiff of school to it: There was math involved, and pencils. And it wasn’t just some willy-nilly art class, where everything had merit and beauty of its own. There were rights and wrongs, and rights and lefts that had to be in their proper places.
Last in the row was the mother of all tech classes: wood shop. I would have taken it every period of every day had it been up to me. Mr. Duncan was in charge, which is to say he was concerned with our physical well-being and not much more. He made sure everyone knew about safety, and he always pointed it out when we were getting lax, which we always were. Otherwise, we were free to cut, saw, drill, sand and varnish any piece of wood we could find. Yelling and punching, two of the great pastimes of junior high boys, were fully sanctioned at all times.
Catholic high school followed my last tour in wood shop, bringing the vocational-education phase of my life to a halt. I haven’t made anything of wood since. The only drafting I’ve done is riding behind another person on a bicycle, and while I cook now and then, I usually prefer to leave that job to professionals.
But when my kitchen was in the throes of remodeling at the hands of a skilled and generous friend, I got to thinking: If only I knew how to do the work myself or had the patience to learn, then I could go ahead at my own pace instead of waiting for my friend to find time in his schedule or hire sub-contractors for the jobs he couldn’t do. I wasn’t ungrateful, just helpless and frustrated. I got slowly more paralyzed as the project chugged along, having the wherewithal to do little more than stand by and offer cool drinks to my friend. I was lost in my own home.
Then one day, the button on my pants popped off. I remembered where I had stowed a tiny sewing kit, in a mug on top of my refrigerator, and with the afternoon sun streaking through the window, I slid a needle out of its cardboard sleeve and un-spooled two feet of black thread. I stuck the thread in my mouth, pursed my lips and pulled it out, running it through the eye of the needle on the first try. Next, instinct–or was it training?–told me to twirl the needle and pull the thread through the loop it made, forming a knot, which miraculously held. I pushed the needle up one hole in the button, down another, up a third and back down the fourth. Over and over I went, picking up speed at every pass.
I snipped a straggling piece of thread, stood up and buttoned my pants, realizing that I had just taken something broken and fixed it–something I hadn’t been able to do with my bomb-blast of an apartment for months. We count our little victories, forget our losses.
Mrs. Cady must have known that feeling every day. She notched little victories amid the chaos of junior high in a class at least half full of kids who would not have chosen to be there.
I thought of sewing as being beneath me, as a girly thing I could never admit to liking, even when Mrs. Cady let me make a football pillow. Later, when I started noticing the difference between cheap and well-made clothing, I realized that sewing wasn’t so much beneath me as it was beyond me. But I can obviously still tackle a button, thanks to Mrs. Cady and the good old Joliet public schools.
In people like me she was putting knowledge–no matter how small–where there had been ignorance. You could say that is true of all teachers, but understanding algebra cannot put a button back onto your pants.
