Sewing Machine

When he was seventeen years old, geek wasn’t even a word. Nerd may not have been a word either. I entered the small store front. He checked me out by glaring over the top of his glasses. Short tuffs of gray hair stood on his head like prairie cactus after a summer rain storm. He didn’t budge, but suggested I put the thirty pound machine on the floor. It was accidentally hooked on my front jean pocket. I tried to free my pants from the weight. My hesitation resulted in an impatient bark, “Put it down on the floor.” I obliged. So much for customer relations.

“I called early about my machine.” I announced.

Without moving from behind his desk, he identified the model. Singer 201. I had not bothered to note the model number. I figured you either knew how to fix something this old or you didn’t.

Mom and Dad bought the machine housed in an art deco cabinet when they lived in Saranac Lake, sixty years ago. The machine cost a fortune. $300. Over the years, Mom made clothes for five kids…baby clothes, jump suits, shirts, dresses and became a fine seamstress.

Mom didn’t use the machine much in the last few years before she died. As far as I know I had been the last one to use it to hem a pair of jeans about a month before she died. The tension on the thread had not been right. “You’ll need to get a scrap of cloth and make the adjustment”, she instructed after I explained the stitch didn’t look right. I hemmed up the jeans with a stitch that was less than perfect.

Geez, I hated sewing and to fool around with machine adjustments were too much. The aggravation of thread slipping out of the needle, the patience needed to guide the cloth beneath the foot in a straight line, with gentle care smoothing out the material. The truth of the matter was the perfect standard Mom set was nothing I wanted to strive for or anything I thought I could achieve.

Now I stood in the cluttered repair shop seeking help on what was a small matter of some disconnected wires. I might not like sewing but the idea that the machine didn't work was upsetting. I wanted to fix Mom's machine. And not coming out from behind his desk, he told me how to fix it. The arrogant old fool. He hasn’t even looked at it.

“You hook one wire to number one and the other to number two. You can do it because if I do it, you won’t be able to put it back into the cabinet.” His words of “you can do it,” seemed more like “don’t bother me with such trivial repairs” more than a vote of confidence or encouragement. I didn’t explain that last night I tried to reconnect the wires to number one and number three. “Idiot,” I admonished myself for being subjected to his arrogance.

I became frustrated. The night before I discovered the loose wire, but the three pronged plug confused me and I have a fear of electricity every since I was three and put my finger in a socket. I knew the problem. If he fixed the electrical problem by reattaching the wire, I wouldn’t be able to put the wire through the cabinet hole without taking what he fixed apart. Therefore, he instructed me to do it now that I knew where the wires went.

If the black cast iron machine didn’t weight so blasted much I would have picked it up and stormed out of the shop. But nothing will stop drama short like thirty pounds and a car parked half a block away.

“I have a simpler solution,” he offered after I suggested splicing the wire to accommodate a plug that could allow the wire to be threaded though the cabinet hole. He disappeared into the darker recess of the store and returned with a new power cord. “Attach this end to the foot pedal after you thread it through the cabinet. Simply remove the corner screws on the pedal. You can do that.” Again, I felt admonished, not encouraged.

“That’s $15.95.” I never counted my change from the twenty.

Back home I took the pedal apart, attached the new cord and listened to the motor hum as I lightly pressed the foot pedal. Good.

Age turned the pages of the instruction booklet brittle. Not a single word was in Spanish. It read that the machine should be oiled daily if used continuously. I had no idea when Mom oiled it last, but it was well over two years. With the detailed instructions I located the tiny holes and gave each orifice a drop of Singer sewing machine oil. The manual suggested that the motor be greased annually. I couldn’t find any grease in Mom's supplies, so I called the shop to see if they had any in stock.

After identifying myself as “the lady with the old Singer who had been in the store earlier” to the shop clerk, a plain woman whom I assumed was “Bob’s” wife, I asked if they had the special grease.

“Oh no, don’t grease it.” She warned.

“But the manual…”

“Don’t do anything with the grease.” She repeated. I heard her confirm this with Bob. In the background I heard him say don’t grease it.

“Why?” I asked.

“He said not to.”

“But why?”

“Because he said not to.” It wasn’t a good enough answer for me, but that was the only explanation I got. She instructed me to run it after I finished oiling it. “Run it hard. You can’t kill it.” Well that was encouraging.

I explained what I had learned to Dad. He wanted to know why the guy wouldn’t make a house call.

“Dad,” I explained, “the guy won’t even come to the phone.”

As I went through the manual I read that if I needed any instructions on how to operate the sewing machine I could ask any Singer Shop dealer. Not on your life am I going to ask Bob.

When I began to thread a bobbin, the motor began to smoke. I stared at my cell phone and thought of Bob sitting behind his desk surrounded by late model sewing machines. “Who sews anything any more?” I wondered. “How much business could he have?” I called the shop and Bob answered. I took little time reintroducing myself. “Hi Bob. This is Valerie”, as if we were old friends. "The motor is smoking and I’m a little over my head."

“It has been sitting for a while.” It was a statement, not a question and a second later I understood this as a diagnostic assessment, but I answered yes.

“Well run it. It will dissipate.”

Dad, I am sorry I burned the house down, but he said it would dissipate.

“I’m not going to wreck the motor?” Thinking of Mom’s beloved machine ruined.

“It would be wrecked by now and if it is, I can’t help you. So just run it.”

Well, I do know what an electric fire smells like and honestly it didn’t smell that suspicious, so I ran it. The smoke dissipated. Guess that old geek-nerd knew what he was talking about.

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Mom took great pride in maintaining the machine, its attachments, her scissors (which we could never use to cut paper) and all the sewing supplies – pins and needles, bric-a-brac and even scraps of material (kind of like reused Christmas paper). As a little kid I was fascinated with the attachments—buttonholers, binders, zigzag makers and lace feeders—all looked like medieval torture equipment. Though tempted I knew better than to play with these thing.

Her machine was just that. A machine. A tool. To be respected, and used for its proper purpose. She learned that from her father.

Mom would laugh if she knew what I did today. I don’t think she would have ever imagined, but she would have appreciated me fixing the machine. Nor would I have imagined that there would be a day that I would sit in front of the machine and cry. Not out of frustration over a broken needle or jammed cluster of thread in the bobbin cradle, but out appreciation. For the art my mother loved. And out of love for my Mom.