Sewing with duct tape, sharing the road with pedestrians
By Kathryn Ross
Well, I just spent the last hour in a futile attempt to find a column I wrote earlier in the week. I couldn’t find it. It was a good one too because it talked about me being a good driver or trying to be in my old age. At least I can still see over my steering wheel.
My biggest mistake was yesterday when for some unknown reason I got the urge to clean house. I’m thinking that in my rapture I must have mistakenly thrown the column out. I was in a cleaning frenzy. Thankfully that doesn’t happen too often and usually the mood quickly passes. I try to control it.
I failed Housekeeping 101. Specifically, I flunked Home Ec. with Miss Baumunk. I’m sure I misspelled her name and I’m also sure that others will remember the spelling, especially those who went to high school with me.
I remember one of the most absolutely stupidest things we did was to sew a sampler. It was the kind of thing girls did in the 1860s, not the 1960s, but we did it. Heaven knows I can’t remember any of those stitches now and it’s not because of my age. I didn’t remember them right after I finished the sampler. To tell you how bad I am at sewing, and this is revealing a lot about myself. I have a favorite blouse that has an L-shaped rip on the side. I wanted to wear it but knew that with my lack of skill with a needle and thread, it would look terrible. So, to sew or not to sew, that was the question. So, I repaired it with a nice, handy, piece of duct tape.
Funny thing is I was telling that story to some other women recently and when I got to the point where I asked, “So you know how I repaired it?” In one voice they all answered, “With tape.”
I guess I’m not the only one who failed home economics.
I’ve been discovering lately that I’m not as unique as I always thought I was. I don’t mean that in a boastful way. I think much of my uniqueness is failure and a lack of discipline. I’ve learned to live with it, but I’ve also learned that many of my peers share my character flaws. A lot of them are also the result of getting older.
I’m far from being the only one who sits on the edge of the bed taking an inventory of my aches and pains before getting up and moving around in the morning. I’m a surfer in the morning and I’m not catching a wave. As I move from my bed and stand and move through the living room etcetera. I make sure that I have a steady hand on the bureau or the back of a chair. I surf from steady object to steady object keeping my balance. Others, I’ve learned do that too. Eventually I can stand upright, kind of like those charts of the evolution of mankind.
I’ve been trying to remember what I wrote about in the lost column because I did have an important message. I remember why I got the inspiration to write it. I was driving on Main Street and was stopped at a traffic signal when I remembered I could go right on red. I checked right, then left. and right again, an was just ready to accelerate when a runner dashed off the right-hand curb right into my path. My foot was still on the brake, but I was getting ready to hit the accelerator. I hadn’t seen him because he was in the blind spot between the passenger side window and the windshield. He didn’t stop running and just came off the curb in front of me. It startled me.
Had I accelerated and hit him, it would have been my fault. That isn’t the point. He would have been hurt whether it was my fault or not.
What I wanted to do with the lost column is remind people that with the nice weather more walkers, sometimes with dogs, are out there, along with bicycle riders and runners and joggers and people on scooters, so it is very important that as drivers we take better care and look out for pedestrians. Hopefully pedestrians will take care too, because we’re all a little distracted these days and no one wants to get hurt.
Kathryn Ross is a lifelong Wellsville resident, writer, journalist, community activist, and weekly columnist for the Wellsville Sun. You can reach her anytime, kathr_2002@yahoo.com
