To Thread a Sewing Machine

I don’t remember how old I was, but I know I was old enough to drive so let’s say around 16. I was at our house in Maine puttering around doing something when the phone rang. This is back in the old days when the phone hung on the wall. No one ever called so the opportunity to pick up the phone was an exciting event not to be missed. It was my grandmother, she needed me to come over right away. Now you have to understand, my grandmother talked very fast and always had LOTS to say. I couldn’t really understand what she was saying… something about her eyes? Grammy had notoriously poor eyesight and it seemed she was always recovering from one eye operation or another, so with my parents not being home, I rushed right over. We didn’t have 911 in our town back then so I figured, whatever the emergency, Grammy was small, I could hoist her into the car and be off to the local hospital in jiff.

When I got there, I found out the situation was much different than what I had imagined. Grammy’s eyes were fine, or should I say, the same as usual. The real emergency was much more dire – she could not thread her sewing machine. She tired and tried, but due to her “darn eyes” she just couldn’t see well enough to do it. For a minute, I stood there sort of in disbelief, thinking: “You called me over here in an emergency… to thread your sewing machine?”. Luckily, smart-mouthed 16-year-old-me for once knew better than to say anything. I simply threaded the machine and asked, “Is there anything else I can do?”. Delighted that her machine was back in order, Grammy chirped “No! I’m all set!”.

I paused for a minute. “What if you need to change colors? Should I hang around?”

“No”, she said. “I’ll just stick with white. It’s not like I can see it anyway!”. Fair enough.

For years and years, I used to tell the story of how my grandmother once called me to her house under the auspices of an emergency to thread her sewing machine. For some reason I thought this was hilarious… until I was about 40. These days, it’s considerably less funny. My eyesight is so bad now that I have to use a special pair of glasses to thread the machine, a different pair for running it and a third pair still for cutting fabric. Every time I thread my machine now, I always think of Grammy. I feel bad for making light of her predicament but at the same time, I feel close to her. She loved sewing and continued to do it when she could literally not see a thing. I can only hope that I’m around as long as she was to keep on appreciating all the joy that sewing brings.

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