For fun, I pulled out my creative writing journal from college to have a good laugh at my past. I treated myself to several delightful memories: “Never be the fastest Philistine,” “This isn’t ‘Heart of Darkness’; this is ‘Heart of Extremely Gray Tones,’” and “Let’s take advantage of the dead people.” Naturally, each of those has an accompanying story.
Then I stumbled on one of my favorite lines from my English professor: “When you’re smart, people ask you to fix their lawnmower. Then you say you can’t, and they say, “I thought you were smart.” I adapted the spirit of that idea into the opening of every beginning sewing class I teach. “Don’t let people know that you are learning to sew,” I warn my students. “Once they know you sew, they will ask you to sew for them.” At least one student in every class confesses that they already had orders from friends as soon as they announced they were taking a sewing class. (People really think that a two-hour sewing class is enough to know how to make a dress.) Friends, family, even complete strangers in the store have asked me to make all sorts of things for them. And I compulsively say yes. That’s how I ended up making cows. Yes, not one cow. Two cows. (Yes, I made a lot of “having a cow” jokes that month.) Perhaps you are imagining a cow costume resembling children’s pajamas that allows the “cow” to run around on hind legs. I refused to put my creative name on that. Nor did I want my cow crawling on her knees. I wanted the cow to look like a cow. Four sheets of poster board, two paper towel tubes, and several yards of white fleece later, I had my first draft of a cow costume, which fit the little girl wonderfully. Well, it fit wonderfully except that her hind legs floated six inches off the floor. Somehow, in spite of partially levitating cows, I still have people ask me to make things. So I end up at midnight sewing a t-shirt quilt (I had never quilted before), upholstering a chair (it had been on my list of projects I would never agree to), creating washable slip covers for hamster-ramps (I kid you not), and altering bridal gowns (also on my list of untouchable projects). I have been called out of class to rescue girls stuck in the bathroom because of malfunctioning zippers. I have athletes bring me their frayed captain bands for soccer. And every time, I say yes. Save yourselves: Don’t tell people you can sew.
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To justify himself, the man asked the Teacher, “Who is my neighbor?” Naturally, if he did not know who his neighbor is, he could not love his neighbor as himself.
But lately, the question that has been running through my mind is “Who is my enemy?” After all, how can I fight effectively if I don’t know who the enemy is? One of my favorite American novels is A Separate Peace. In it the main character begins to doubt his best friend, believing that his friend is really his rival. After months of mental turmoil, he finally realizes, too late, that his growing animosity towards his friend was ill-founded because “wars were made by some ignorance in the human heart” (193). Perhaps that is part of the truth, but lately is seems that everyone is in a free-for-all. And the more everyone lashes out at those who disagree with them, the more the other side feels like the enemy and retaliates. A colleague verbally attacked me last week with a hall full of students watching. And I wanted (still want) to turn her into the enemy. But, who is my enemy? Is it the fellow teacher who is muddling through the same overwhelming load of work? Is it the fellow Christian who snaps under the pressure of a trial and says something she eventually will regret? Is it the petty seventy-year-old customer who ridiculously behaves like a five-year-old because she can’t have a product that we do not sell? The enemy is not supposed to be our neighbors, our family, our fellow soldiers, but that is how we tend to treat each other. We are supposed to fight the Enemy—the Father of Lies—instead of each other. How he must sit back at chortle at all of the friendly fire on our side that keeps us so distracted we don’t see that we are believing the Enemy’s lie. How easily we get filled with what we think is righteous anger, denouncing the person, not the actions. “She hurt me,” we cry. “She’s pyscho,” we say. “How can she stand before her congregation and lead them knowing what she did to me?” we wonder. But she’s thinking the same thing. “She wouldn’t listen to me. I must protect others from her unkindness,” she thinks. And she stands before her congregation seeking support from them, oblivious of the friendly fire she sent at the soldier in the foxhole over. And so, instead of fighting the Enemy with the full, focused strength of the unified Army, we fight in our own puny strength, weakened because we will not trust our own troops to not shoot us when we are most discouraged. And we’re too busy complaining to the Commander about the soldiers He assigned to our unit. I used to think that necessity fosters creativity, but when I got home from work a couple nights ago, I learned a valuable lesson about the true cause of creativity. Even though I had eaten dinner before work, naturally I was hungry six hours later and decided to have a small sandwich. I sliced a potato roll almost in half and popped it into the toaster. While I inhaled the scent of freshly toasting bread, I gather some pastrami and a Laughing Cow cheese wedge, wishing I had a dill pickle to complete my midnight (okay, fine 10:15) snack. On my next inhale, I realized that the delectable aroma was closer to partially burnt toast and pushed the lever to rescue my roll (of course, it was last one, too). And it was stuck. Now, I could have unplugged the toaster and used tongs in the drawer two steps away. Or turned the toaster upside and let gravity help me. But no, I grabbed the wooden chopsticks from the drainer in the sink and had flashbacks to playing Operation as I coaxed my half-burned/half-smooshed potato roll from the clutches of the toaster’s wire frame.
For those of you not in my head (most of you), you probably missed the point of that anecdote. As I smooshed the Laughing Cow cheese onto the potato roll using a slice of pastrami as a spatula (because the knives were in a drawer two steps in the other direction and I didn’t want to wash one), I realize that necessity is not the mother of invention. Laziness is. Case-in-point: I cannot count how many times I have used non-spoons as spoons. Really, soup does taste the same when eaten with a fork, but melon-ballers work slightly better. Tablespoons are a little awkward because of the depth of the bowl. And the foil lid on yogurt can be reshaped to scoop yogurt out. (Admittedly foil does change the flavor a smidge.) Now, if necessity were the mother of invention, you could assume that either I was a poor college student with no silverware or that eccentric burglars had broken into my home and stolen the spoons, leaving the forks and knives. (Once a burglar did steal my pennies, but left the quarters, so it’s not that unlikely.) But no. In each of these cases, a full dozen spoons stood at attention in the dishwasher; I just did not feel like washing one by hand. Similar laziness compounded with forgetfulness has prompted a repeated use of plastic drinking straws as chopsticks. (FYI: They work better with pasta than with rice.) Paper towels also double quite nicely as coffee filters. In fact, one of the best cups of coffee I’ve ever made was with a paper towel filter. Hoping to make more amazing coffee, I've used paper towel again, even though I had a brand new package of filters in my coffee cupboard. It didn’t taste as good the second time. As I sit here pondering my use of CD cases as wind-shield scrapers and Wal-mart bags as packaging peanuts, I wonder whether we could substantiate the claim that most of our modern conveniences find their parentage, not in true need, but in laziness. I doubt anyone could form a cogent argument on the dire necessity that prompted the invention of the television remote control. |
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