The Sewing Room: Uncommon Reflections on Life, Love and Work - Softcover

Crafton, Barbara Cawthorne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0819217239 ISBN 13: 9780819217233

Publisher: Morehouse Publishing, 1997

Synopsis

In these insightful essays, Barbara Cawthorne Crafton reflects on a broad range of experiences ministering among merchant seafarers, the homeless, the bereaved, AIDS patients, and others in need of personal and spiritual help. She shares honestly her own emotions as she grapples with the harsh realities of the world, while delighting in the humor and joy found in everyday living.

Crafton compassionately recounts the unique stories of the men, women, and children she worked with during her service as a port chaplain in New York and New Jersey and as a minister at Trinity Church on Wall Street. In doing so, she weaves together threads of the mundane and the traumatic, the lovely and the ugly, and the down to earth and the holy, creating an original tapestry of the richness of life.

About this title

About the Author

BARBARA CAWTHORNE CRAFTON is a popular preacher, retreat leader, and writer who teaches at Marble Collegiate Church and at the General Theological Seminary in New York City. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, Reader's Digest, Episcopal Life, and many other publications. She is the author of many books, including Called, The Courage to Grow Old, The Sewing Room, Living Lent, and many others. She lives in Metuchen, New Jersey.

From the Back Cover

Barbara Cawthorne Crafton is among the first women ordained to the Episcopal priesthood, in which capacity she has ministered in both the richest and poorest sections of New York City. She is also a sensitive writer who addresses the human condition with plainspoken eloquence and bracing moral common sense. Cynthia Ozick writes, "The Reverend Crafton's purity of insight and pellucid voice suggest transparencies - one sees straight through them into the unshielded light of the plainest human truths. A shelf is dusted, a grandmother's sewing machine is recalled, mothers and fathers are praised and appraised, a lost child is mourned - and the weave of our lives is movingly unwound, ribbon by ribbon, until our hands are filled with rosiness and rue. Upon small moments large mercies are shed. Barbara Crafton's essays are everyone's heirlooms". These rich, moving essays will be read again and again.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE SEWING ROOM

By Barbara Cawthorne Crafton

Church Publishing Incorporated

Copyright © 1997 Barbara Cawthorne Crafton
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8192-1723-3

Contents

Introduction
1 The Sewing Room
2 The Quick and the Dead
3 Snakes of Three Generations
4 Eggs
5 Original Sin
6 Working the Waterfront
7 My Mother and I Have Gotten Along Really Well Since She Died
8 The New Math
9 Ada Goes Home
10 To Be or Not to Be
11 If I Should Die Before I Wake
12 The Saint of Lost Things
13 The Things Kids Say
14 The Quiet Hour Club
15 Our Lady
16 The Second Time Around
17 Closing Down Home
18 The Back Stairs
19 Never Tell a Kid She's Tired
20 The Girls
21 Father's Day
22 Up to Whitby
23 A Kind and Gentle Man
24 I Brag to My Friend about Baking My Own Bread
25 Men Are Very Delicate
26 Showing Off
27 The Tombs of the Medici
28 Le Hameau
29 The Pearl
30 Trouble Love
31 Some of Us Are Not Allowed to Die
32 Rachel and Her Mother
33 Feet of Clay
34 Ted Who Has AIDS
35 Lies in the City
36 You Look Terrific
37 Before the Last War
38 Love Me Tender, Aura Lee
Afterword

CHAPTER 1

THE SEWING ROOM

I have taken over a basement room in which someone who lived here before left aPing-Pong table. It is now my sewing room. The table is just the right heightfor me, and I can spread out the fabric on its expanse of dark green when I cutthings out. It's cool there in the summer, and quiet. I listen to the radio andwork away, and a flat piece of cloth takes on shape as I work, grows breast-shaped curves and hips, gathers itself into a waistband, to which I have addedan inch because I am fatter than I wish I were.

This activity uses resources seldom called upon in the rest of my life. Beyondbasic decisions about color, style, and fabric, there is little thought involvedin sewing. Clothing construction follows the same rules whatever the garment.You sew a seam and finish the edges. Right sides go together unless it saysotherwise. You press seams open, and darts toward the center or down. You do notargue with the seams about the degree of their openness, nor do you seek a dartconsensus about which way they want to be pressed. There are virtually no moralambiguities in sewing.

The outcome of a sewing project is never uncertain. I know in advance exactlywhat I will get, and I control all phases of production. When I finish, I canpoint to what I have made. In fact, I can wear what I have made, or put it on mygranddaughter and watch her parade in it. I can imagine my image of myself, orof her, and then I can make it real.

None of this bears much resemblance to the way I earn my living, which is byhaving meetings and deciding about things and evaluating things. Andcompromising about things, acting in situations in which I know in advance Iwon't get all I want. And talking to people on the phone. And listeningpatiently as people tell me things I already know.

After a week of this, I am ready for a change. I go down the basement stairs,feeling the earthen coolness coming up to meet me as I descend. And there in thesewing room is my brand-new machine, gleaming white in the dark. Hello. Toughweek? Never mind—let's make something, shall we?

I learned to sew on an ancestor of this sleek white beauty. She was blackenameled steel. She had beautiful gold filigree decorations, and an iron treadleattached to her balance wheel, which you ran with alternating feet instead ofwith a motor. She sewed forward and backward, period. She lived in a mahoganycabinet built just for her, and she was anything but portable.

The sewing machine was upstairs in my grandmother's sewing room, one of theattic rooms in the gable-crazed house we lived in when I was a girl. Bits offabric, rickrack, short pieces of lace, and spools of thread were everywhere.The linoleum was gray with yellow and pink flowers; here and there, a droppedstraight pin gleamed against it. Here my grandmother sat and made beautifulthings. And she taught me.

Back and forth I would sew, struggling to get the rhythm of the pedals right sothe wheel would turn smoothly. Learning to pivot. Learning to sew a curved line.Learning to make a dart. Learning to insert a zipper—two ways. Making mistakesand showing them to her. Ripping them out and redoing the work. And getting itright. My grandmother's eyes, with their crinkle at the sides. Her smile at myintentness, a smile whose dimple was still beguiling even though she was old.And her stories, while we worked, about the Swedish people in Minnesota where wecame from, about her brothers and sisters. About my mother when she was little.The attic room must have been hot in those pre-air-conditioned days, but I don'tremember it so. I remember it as a place of beauty and peace.

After my grandmother died and we moved, my parents bought me a sewing machine ofmy very own. She was electric. Though her body was also steel, it was not blackwith filigree but tan. Where her forerunner had feminine curves, she wasstreamlined, like the cars of her era. She sewed forward and backward, ofcourse, but she also made zigzags, large ones or small ones, fine enough tofinish a buttonhole. She could blind hem, catching up just a thread of a skirtand keeping the visible work on the underside where nobody could see. She wasportable if one were young and strong.

In the new house we had no sewing room. I sat in my bedroom and made rebelliousclothes. Bell-bottom trousers with plate-size flowers in red, white, and blue.Hip-hugger miniskirts with wide belts. Granny dresses, with high waists andnecks, in which I hoped to look like I was from London. No more summer storiesabout Scandinavian people in the Midwest: now the needle thump-thumped to theBeatles, to the Rolling Stones, to the Supremes, to the Beach Boys. Yeah.

But I didn't just sew for myself. I also sewed for my mother. It skips ageneration, my grandmother used to say, and in our family that was true. Whenshe grew too old to sew for my mother, I was old enough to start. My mothernever learned. And so the bell-bottoms and granny dresses were interspersed withother things: a bottle-green silk suit with lime-green lapels and a blouse tomatch. A pink silk nightgown with lace trim, which she left in a hotel once andmourned as long as she lived. A gray shirtdress with silver buttons. A whitecape with gold ones. And later my daughters joined the sorority: a christeningdress with twenty yards of embroidered ruffles. A green corduroy jumper withmushroom appliqués. A lavender gingham sundress with embroidered butterflies. Avelvet Christmas dress with red cherry trim. Corduroy overalls with giantrickrack around the neck and waist, the inner legs closed with snaps for quickdiaper changes.

But gradually my production slowed to a trickle, and then stopped. The pursuitof professional competence and my desire to succeed left many gentlenourishments in the dust. Marriage was one. Sewing was another. The tanstreamlined beauty whose hum had accompanied so many parts of my life lay,unoiled and unused, on the closet floor. I didn't have time. And I didn't wantto have time. My feminist politics seemed to put her in a new and unflatteringlight. She seemed to abet the embroidering of unnecessary tasks that were betterbought than performed. I was a thinker, a leader, and a doer. I unconsciouslybilled myself by the hour for everything I did, computing the "real" cost ofeverything. I was too busy to cook—we ate out a lot. We moved to a condominium,where someone else would do the maintenance while I did my important work. It nolonger seemed a wise use of my time to sew. And so one day I put my friend outwith the trash.

How could I have done that to the partner of my youth? I was busy. I was tired.I was full of the demand that I do well in a career that had been, for a longtime, a men-only one. I was able, in the energetic and rewarding pursuit of myprofession, to avoid my disappointment at my own failures. And so I didn't wantto be around my old friend. She knew too much.

But years pass again, and life changes. Love comes again. Marriage. My youngestchild is almost grown, and I am astonished at how brief this era, almost past,has been. How brief my life has been. I am aware that the decades left to mewill seem even briefer, so they had better be sweet. If I do not capture andcelebrate what art I have, it will die. If I do not nourish myself, I will yearnfor nourishment. If I do not connect myself with my own past in the things I donow, I will remain adrift from it. Those whom I have loved in the past cannotcatch hold of me, for they are dead. It is I who must catch them.

My love works in the garden, pulling up maple saplings and planting roses. Hecomes inside, smelling like dirt and sweat and seeds, and he is all smiles fromhis digging in the earth. Coming down into the cool darkness of the basement, hefinds me at my new machine. She has a free arm for cuffs and collars, a self-windingbobbin, fourteen different kinds of stitches, and a built-inbuttonholer. She can sew with two needles at the same time. She is high-techwhite, and most of her is plastic, the kind they use to make telephones. I canlift her with one hand.

I am working on a madras sundress for my granddaughter. I have cut it long soshe can grow into it. I have a length of cotton for a dress for myself that I'llcut out when I finish Rosie's dress. One daughter sits on a heap of pillows inthe corner, and we are talking quietly about nothing much. I come to the end ofa seam, raise the needle, and automatically reach around to the back, where thepresser bar lifter was on my grandmother's machine. I stop for a moment, missingher.

CHAPTER 2

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

We are at a conference at a hotel in Philadelphia. As we register, we get thetraditional welcome kit for conference participants: little odds and ends bywhich to remember the city. A key ring. A pen from Elverson National Bank. Awhere-to-eat-in-Philadelphia map. And a packet of Kleenex. At this annualconference, there are always facial tissues in the welcome kit. The participantsall cry a lot.

It is the annual conference of The Compassionate Friends, an organization ofpeople whose children have died. There are two thousand people here: mothers andfathers, brothers and sisters, grandparents. A sprinkling of clergy and othersin the helping professions. I fit several of these categories. I am a priest. Iam a mother of a dead child and the stepmother of another. I never knew theyoung man my husband misses so mightily. It wasn't until after he died that Imet his dad. But I have dreamed of him. My own dead child never saw my face; hewas too small to see, too small to cry, too small to live. But I saw him.Sixteen years later, I see him still. And in a dozen years of ordained ministry,I have watched at the bedsides and prayed at the gravesides of many youngpeople. Too many. But then, even one would have been too many.

Outside the meeting room are the photo boards. I remember them from last time:six or eight free-standing bulletin boards, upon which people have thumbtackedtheir treasured photographs. Most are mounted on paper, and most have anaccompanying written message.

Our Doug,Always remembered, Always loved, Always missed.All our love,Mom, Dad, Betsy

The photographs and their legends are a magnet to us. As the conferenceproceeds, we return to them again and again. We stand before them, looking atthe young faces looking back at us with their hopeful eyes. Unlined faces, eachfull of a future that was not to be. Girls in cheerleading outfits and balletcostumes, boys in soccer uniforms, couples in prom clothes, babies in sweatersand bonnets. Big grins. Shy little smiles.

A lovely little girl smiles from two pictures on a cardboard mat. In one shewaves tentatively from a carousel horse. In the other, she poses more formally,wearing a special dress and a bracelet and a ring. The message reads:

Our precious little girl died of leukemia. She tried very bravely to live. Wecontinue to try and live without her.

We search the young faces, we who once attended PTA meetings and basketballgames. We read the brief attempts of other parents to sum up the unthinkable:

Matthew

Born July 24, 1964, in Knoxville, Tennessee

Died July 6, 1987, in Richmond, Virginia

Killed by a drunken driver

College student, United States Marine, musician

Pilot, kind and loving human being

She was pursuing a career in nursing because she wanted to help people. Shewould have been excellent.

He was impossible. He was delightful.

Matt committed suicide.

or just

Kevin17 years old1968-1985

A mother points out her child's picture to another who stands beside her.Quietly, for the thousandth time, she recounts the story of the hospitalizationsand the surgeries, using technical medical terms as she describes the cancerthat savaged her only child. As her story breaks off in a sob, the other womantakes her hand without a word. They stand quietly for a long time, holding on toeach other. Quiet tears trace familiar paths down their cheeks.

The discussion groups at the conference are breathtaking in the anguish theyreveal. "Suicide." "Multiple Losses at Different Times." "Murder." "OnlyChildren or All Children." "AIDS." Something for everyone in this buffet of painand loss. But there is more: workshops aimed at finding meaning in the livesthat remain after death has claimed a beloved child. "Dealing with Family.""What Can I Say to You?" "Telling the World How I Really Feel." Help in makinglife possible again. Although the two thousand people who have come here livewith pain every day, the purpose of their fellowship is not simply to experiencetheir pain. It is to support one another by sharing it, to find hope in themidst of suffering that seems unendurable but which must be endured.

At dinner we sit with a couple who lost their eighteen-year-old son less than ayear ago. The wife is a tightly coiled spring of rage. The boy driving the car,she says, walked away without a scratch. He has never even said he was sorry. Ifshe had a gun, she would kill him with great pleasure. She looks at me defiantlyas she says this, as if daring me to temporize with her. Anger arcs from herlike an electrical current. Her husband looks apologetically at my husband andchanges the subject. How long has it been since your son died, he asks. Fiveyears. The man looks at my husband and tries to imagine himself surviving fiveyears of this. He can't. He asks if it gets any easier. It gets different, myhusband answers. Not exactly easier. It's hard to explain.

I remember my own behavior when my third child was born too early to survive.How I paced the floor in the hospital late that night, as if I were looking forsomething. How I cried at home in my own bed the next night, and then nevercried about it again. How proud I was of myself for getting back to normal soquickly, and of my husband of those days for doing the same. Does he remember, Iwonder. I suppose he does. The marriage did not endure. Odd that it has notoccurred to me until now that this loss and our stoic approach to it might havehad something to do with that. An undeclared little life. An undeclared littledeath.

A waiter carries a tray of coffee cups down the hallway where the photographsare. He stops for a minute and studies them, moving from face to face, readingthe messages of love and longing. I know that he is thinking what everyone hereonce thought: I could not survive if this happened to my child.

I think of the toy iron I saw in the Catacomb of Saint Callistus outside Rome.It was plastered between the stones in a catacomb wall, marking the tomb of asmall girl. Her parents were too poor to afford an incised stone marking hertomb, and they placed the little iron there so they would be able to find her.They visited again and again, feeling along the cold stones until their fingersfound the handle, and then they stood in the silent dark, touching the slabbehind which their child lay. They remembered her, bustling along behind hermother, ironing with her little iron as the big iron glided back and forth inher mother's practiced hand. And then, one day ... what? Something terriblehappened. The toy iron, two thousand years old now, speaks silently of what herlife and her death meant to the two people who loved her beyond all else. Iremember the little iron as I stare at the pictures on the board. It is inlittle things that we know what it is to love a child, and so it is in littlethings that we feel what it is to lose one.

The facial tissues from my souvenir packet are all used up. I have used them todry my own tears and the tears of other people here. I think I have even driedthe two-thousand-year-old tears of the couple in the catacomb, coming from myown eyes. I don't begrudge a single one of those tears, my own or anyone else's.They are precious. They mark the spot, the important spot, a child held andstill holds in our hearts, whether he was full of strength and wit like myhusband's son or tiny and still like my own. We want to mark the spot where theylie. They deserve to be remembered by the world they left too soon.

A young man is pictured receiving a college diploma. Both he and the collegepresident are beaming with happiness. He walks with two crutches, and has thebarrel chest of someone who's been doing that all his life.

Born with spina bifida. He never gave up!

We are proud of his accomplishments.

I'll bet. I'm proud of him, and I didn't even know him. I walk and look, and Imarvel at how brave ordinary people can be. Incredibly brave, both the dead andthe living. To embrace a life that has ended too soon is brave. To experiencethe hurt through which such a life must be seen is brave. To be honest aboutloss and sorrow and terrible anger is brave. But through that bravery thechildren in the photographs live still. And always will.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE SEWING ROOM by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton. Copyright © 1997 Barbara Cawthorne Crafton. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0819217239
• ISBN 13: 9780819217233
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 270