People Under 30 Don't Know What This Is

Back before Wal-Mart, kids, if you wanted cheaps**t clothes you had to make them yourself. This is a sewing box. (A what box?) In this plastic box I bought at a Tupperware party in college I keep my sewing tools and notions: spools, bobbins, presser feet, pinking shears, seam rippers, tailor's chalk,stray buttons (in the metal Curad bandage can -- band-aids used to come in metal cans, y'all) and even a couple of patterns for simple skirts and pants.

Home Ec class taught me so well how to sew that today it's all muscle memory. On my mom's machine I sewed short-shorts, miniskirts, hip-huggers, halter tops and prom dresses--all the stylish things she wouldn't buy me. Because cheaps**t imported clothing was invented soon after I got my own machine [pictured below] it has been used mostly to make curtains and pillowcases and for mending.

This solid-state cast-iron finely-engineered Kenmore with a 25-year guarantee which ran out in 2002, with me oiling it now and then, is good as new. At college graduation--I didn't have a job lined up yet; them was hard times--I thanked my parents for this college-graduation gift, saying, "I might go hungry. But I'll never go naked." Along with this ultramodern zig-zag-capable machine that made its own buttonholes -- a marvel that women gathered round to see, they really did! -- came lessons in how to use it, at the Sears store in midtown Milwaukee on 35th Street. I walked there from 13th Street. Thought nothing of it. Not only did we SEW back then. We walked. An' it was uphill both ways.