Now, before you think that my work life revolves entirely around two days of renting ax-murderer flicks to goggly-eyed teenagers in sun-bleached feed-and-seed baseball caps from the front counter, and nookie films to their faintly red-in-the-face fathers from the back counter (just between you and me, I don't think many them have yet to get over the fact that a woman knows they've rented Towers of Titties eight times. I try to look apathetic.) I'll also have you know that I'm still Assistant Floss Retailer and All-American Needlecraft Super Whiz at A Stitch In Time.
Fame and fortune it isn't, but it still is the most steady employment available.
From the time each of us started high school, we kids -- that is Aunt Trixie's daughters Garnet and Crystal, and Tom and myself -- got roped into helping out whether we were suited to it or not.
Much to his credit, Tom did a fantastic job of working a yarn shop for all that he was teased at school. The big joke being that we wore home-made clothing: Tom only leaving his dresses at home because they were so hideously ugly. The biggest joke, however, was that most of the kids who teased us had moms who were our customers.
I mention this about Tom because, of course, none of our fathers ever worked a day in the shop. It was under their manly dignity to work somewhere were 99% of the customers were women.
"Ha," Aunt Ellen would say as she sat flipping through the crocheting catalog, "wanna bet they'd say the same thing about working the bra counter in a Ladies Lingerie department?"
No, our dads sat at home watching TV, reading the paper and re-heating wife-prepared leftovers for lunch.
The most my dad could ever be convinced of was to rinse off the dinner dishes and put them in the dishwasher.
After about five years of pressure, Uncle Chester finally caved and learned how to dust and run a vacuum cleaner – although he stubbornly refused to learn how the washing machine worked.
To this day, Uncle Merle has successfully avoided all attempts to shimmy him into doing even the faintest bit of housework – but around 1978 he did succumb to Aunt Trixie's admonishments that if he was just going to sit around on his be-hind all day, he could at least make himself useful by learning how to knit sweaters.
After the mandatory preliminary grumbling about it being girly and soft, Uncle Merle found to his great surprise that he actually really liked knitting. Soon he was nattering away at Dad and Chester that knitting had undiscovered worlds to it.
"It's not any of that sissy old lady nonsense you'd think it was," Merle enthused, waving his favorite pattern books around in the air like he was swatting at horseflies. "It's like...like...building a machine from the ground up! Mathematical. Wanna see some of my books? Here, this one's good. Take it. Go on, take it! Don't be a wuss, Chester."
But his excitement failed to spark either of his brother-in-laws into action.
Once he got the hang of it, Uncle Merle started producing some fine, delicate pieces of work you never would have thought would have come from the hands of a man who used to sell bull semen.
No, really. Uncle Merle's efforts were fine enough to be slipped onto wooden dowels and suspended from the ceiling around the shop as "models" meant to quietly assist the unimaginative customer into a more costly shell out than they might have gone for normally.
His truly best efforts, however, were arranged artfully in the front window or were used to lovingly clothe Betty, the mannequin Aunt Ellen found sticking out of a dumpster around the back of McIvern's one evening and declared good enough to grace our front window with.
On occasion someone – always a tourist – would jut their head in the door and ask if the window display models were for sale. If they hadn't been before, they were now, and an individual sweater à la Merle normally raked in between $60 and $150, not a penny of which he ever saw. Aunt Trixie claimed it all in "grief tax" for having to put up with him.
After Merle's successes, our moms got the idea that maybe an extra untapped market lurked in people who didn't have the patience or interest to do the work themselves, but who would pay more money than it was worth to get it.
"Serves them right," Mom would say, holding up another of Merle's new creations to the light to check for imperfections through her horn-rimmed glasses. "If they don't want to spend the time, they can spend the money."
For years, we kids were set on knitting up noppy sweaters and scarves, winter wooly hats, crocheting knee-blankets and cross-stitching pictures of dancing cows and Praying Hands. ( I can remember whole winters and even Christmases when Tom and I sat in the living room keeping Dad company for hours on end. Us knitting away like little elves as we watched TV, and Dad dozing peacefully in the soft, yellow glow of the table lamp. )
But they were right, our moms. There actually were people who weren't from anywhere near here interested in knee-blankets and cross-stitched dancing cows. Each time one of our pieces sold out of the front window we got 50% -- which was almost unheard of generosity and a damn sight better than Uncle Merle was getting – so we kept our mouths shut and got back to stitching.
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Silver Oak Welcomes You!
Humor(incomplete novella) Welcome to Silver Oak: The Camelot of the Midwest! Meet Holly Anderson, the daughter of the three owners of "A Stitch in Time", a needlecraft shop in the shopping Mecca of Silver Oak. Everything is going swimmingly, until the ma...
