Grandmother

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SEWING

    My earliest memory is my grandmother’s sewing machine. It wasn’t like the one I have in the closet, white and light-weight plastic, its sleek design and gizmos and gadgets that I'll never use. It was black and round and metal. It had Singer embossed on the front in gold letters. It was attached to a heavy wooden table, unlike my new sewing machine that is portable and usually sits on my dining room table the two or three times a year I pull it out (usually to make a Halloween costume or run off a seam). She was always working at the machine, my grandmother, although she had retired the year I was born.

    I remember going to her home and watching her at the machine. She had a small toy sewing machine on the window sill for me to use while she sewed on the Singer. Her machine was in a corner of the living room near the window. She liked the natural light while she was working. There the two of us would sit, she at her machine and me at mine. It was fun for me, but for my grandmother it was work. She made many of my clothes and clothes for my dolls. I thought it was a hobby. I didn’t realize at the time that it was real. She had a meager pension and an even smaller social security check, but it wasn’t enough. It was never enough even when she and my grandfather both worked. Even for the meager apartment where she and my grandfather lived in Brooklyn. It never occurred to me that my grandmother had spent most of her life as a laborer, a factory worker whose job was to sew the sleeves on women’s dresses. Piece work, it was called. It never occurred to me that we were poor.

    I remember the apartment. It was what my mother called a “tenement''. Now a word with so many negative connotations, then the place where my grandmother and I sat by the window sewing and I created good memories.


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