post it: 6 degrees
wonderwall
I was seventeen, a high school senior, when I received my first real paycheck. Minimum wage at GapKids was less than I made babysitting those wearing BabyGap onesies, but babysitting paid cash and a paycheck was official. Plus it gave me a 50% discount at all Gap stores.
Retail work can be hard. This wasn’t. Customers who are children are far easier to deal with than adult customers who act like children. Plus, two of my best friends worked there, too.
Being a teenager can be hard. Sometimes it was. And in some sartorial version of The Karate Kid, I learned the art and inner calm that came with a perfectly styled Denim Wall. Outside the store life was filled with anxiety. College applications and the admissions waiting game, arguments with my parents or my boyfriend, all the drama of adolescence. Inside, folding (and refolding) jeans into their cubbies, I was at ease.
The Wall was a ginormous floor to ceiling version of an IKEA Expedit, holding denim for everyone from toddlers to preteens. It was the mid-nineties. A simpler time for denim. The Wall held just two washes and only a few styles. But it was a house of cards. A house of copper-riveted freaking cards.
It was virtually impossible to pull one pair from any section and not bring a dozen more with it. (A really fun game to many a bored toddler.) We always offered to assist people, knowing how to remove a pair like a piece in a Jenga puzzle. But GapKids isn’t a museum. You’re allowed to touch things. Someone would pull out a pair of boy’s size 6 and ten more would come tumbling down. They’d apologize. I’d assure them, It’s the Wall, not you.
Eventually, the Sisyphean task of tidying the stacks became meditative - folding with precise, three-step symmetry, silently and rhythmically, to whatever was playing on loop in that month’s in-store soundtrack.
The same songs my friends and I would hear Ryan Seacrest DJ-ing on STAR98.7 as we went to work after school, driving down the boulevard with drinks from Coffee Bean, smoking Marlboro Lights, ready to take on the world.
At the store, in floral dresses and denim jackets, black capris and cardigans, in overalls, I’d fold, fold, fold and stack.
You grew up way too fast
And now there’s nothing to believe
And reruns all become our history…
Fold, fold, fold, stack.
I don’t want to take advice from fools
I’ll just figure everything is cool
Until I hear it from you…
Fold, fold, fold, stack.
In April, after six months at the store, a film of my father’s took us out of the country. I’d work with a tutor and come back for prom and graduation, but had to say goodbye to the paycheck, the discount, the Wall.
But I held on to what it had taught me.
There was time for reflection as you folded that heap of mangled denim, a feeling of accomplishment when you stepped back and saw that the work was done. Sometimes it looked perfect. But perfect doesn’t last. Someone’s bound to help themselves to a pair, or seven, and leave you with a perfect mess. But that’s OK. They’re only jeans.
Sometimes in order to figure things out you need to sort through the messes. Find some quiet. Find order in the chaos.
Fold, fold, fold, stack.
This post is part of the REDwritingHOOD series. This week’s assignment: write about jeans.
five great things someone else said, vol 24
They don’t teach cursive anymore. The time I first heard that, my heart sank. I didn’t believe my young cousin - maybe she was wrong? Perhaps the LAUSD and the Santa Monica/Malibu school districts were different. No such luck.
Globalization was putting an end to cursive, which was fine and well. Except it wasn’t. I am a writer. Both as an art and a craft. Storyteller and calligrapher. How were people going to translate documents fifty, one hundred years from now when no one could write in modern ancient script?
It just felt like a massive leap from one age to the next, only I was standing here, straddling the lines between then and now. Between ink on page and stylus on screen. I like a mix of the two worlds but can’t fathom merely the latter. I wondered how many kids would never keep diaries, for I never found printing could keep up with my thoughts the way cursive could. Can. Who journals in print? Who takes class notes in print? (Who takes notes in notebooks anymore, Alex?) I love technology but there is something awesome in seeing the handwritten notes, letters, journals of your gr-gr-gr-grandfather. Or the speech of a great thinker. The notes of a poet.
Helvetica and Times New Roman just don’t cut it.
I once found some papers from the 1920s, signed by my great-grandfather. An uncle of mine marveled at how closely they signed their names. A particular curl here, a flourish there. They never knew each other in life, but here they connected. In ink on vellum.
Garamond is a lovely font but it just won’t suffice.
There is magic in handwriting. There is beauty in the written word. Be it a diary kept on the front during WWI or a recipe box filled with handwritten recipes, the more beloved dishes easily identified by the papers stained by boiling sauces and dustings of flour, the tattered edges of the 3.5×5 card stock.
I know the world is flat now, I see that Arial is far more useful than the Art of Handwriting, but who can forget the day they mastered the tricky uppercase Q or the lowercase Z? Small victories made by little hands using chunky navy blue pencils. It was a rite of passage, the day upon which we were allowed to begin doing our assignments in handwriting. It was exciting and fancy and made me practically a teenager. I would practice and practice. In pencil, ballpoint and chalk. In fountain ink and paintbrushes. My perfect cursive signature.
My mark. Left on the world. xo a.
Five great things someone else said about handwriting:
The only think most people do better than anyone else is read their own handwriting. - John Adams
She always used the same method, faking the rigid t’s and b’s of her mother’s signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L’s reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x. - Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
Her handwriting was curious — small sharp little letters with no capitals (who did she think she was, e. e. cummings?). - Erich Segal, Love Story
Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
When I’d checked into the bathroom with Seymour’s diary under my arm, and had carefully secured the door behind me, I spotted a message almost immediately. It was not, however, in Seymour’s handwriting but, unmistakably, in my sister Boo Boo’s. With or without soap, her handwriting was always almost indecipherably minute, and she had easily managed to post the following message up on the mirror; ‘Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. - J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
a new leaf
Summer makes me drowsy. Autumn makes me sing. Winter’s pretty lousy, but I hate Spring. - Dorothy Parker
One of the best things about writing is when something old is new again. When you pull a file for a story or script idea from the cabinet, sometimes years after you first began, and realize the story is ready to be told. Or maybe that you’re ready to tell it. (The two are rarely the same.) That if you’d written it sooner there would be something missing – that letting it sit allowed something to ferment, to grow, to become richer than it could have been. Be it a novel, a screenplay, a memoir – time can be a gift. Granted, ninety-nine percent of the time it will not feel like a gift until the moment you dust off those pages and delve back in. But a gift nonetheless.
With fall approaching, I find myself going back to an old project, and I look forward to immersing myself in the process. Writing is solitary work. I have no problem with that. (I kind of adore it actually.) But by nature, I am a social creature. Nothing makes me happier than a group of friends, good food, great conversation. But sometimes, I get quite wrapped up in my work and don’t realize how much I get from time with friends. From travel. From getting away from my desk.
I took Labor Day weekend off with the plan to shut my office door and relax. Instead I spent it with a lousy cold that messed up plans, but I did actually stay out of my office. I don’t do that often. Ever. I just work when I work and often long, late hours. But I’m rethinking the idea of closing the door more often. This staycation, Kleenex and all, was a good start. xo a.
