Hemming Pants

When Sister Mary Ruth assigned T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, I was puzzled by the lines, “I grow old…I grow old…/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” At sixteen, I could understand why Prufrock wondered if he should part his hair behind—I had seen many bald guys with combovers—but why would he want to roll the bottoms of his trousers? Now I know all too well what Eliot meant. As gravity and the decades pull my spouse and me ever closer to the earth from which we came, I am having to make some wardrobe adjustments.

So when two pairs of my husband’s L.L. Bean khakis started to show wear at the bottom, it was time to do something about it. Pushing the needle makes my right hand hurt these days, and making tiny stitches tires my eyes, but I knew that, as with the reluctance to write, the best thing is to just dive in and get the job done. I picked up the pants and my sewing basket and headed to my desk, where the light is brightest.  I reviewed the contents of my basket. There were ancient spools of thread from when I used to make my clothes; two boxes of needles with impossibly small eyes; a porcelain thimble with a tiny Dutch landscape painted on it; and a velvet pin cushion, in the shape of a giant strawberry, that my husband’s grandmother made for me in 1967.

I had four pant legs to hem. I turned the first one inside out and pinned the new hem in place. Then, selecting a needle with a reasonably user-friendly eye and a thread that approximated the color of the fabric, I started hemming. Immediately, the ghosts of my mother and her sisters reared up around me. “What!” they said, “you’re not basting? You’re always supposed to baste before sewing!” Typical. The minute I start to sew, there they are, the three of them, voicing the eternal laws of good sewing:

–Pin first, then baste, then sew.

–Don’t cut long lengths of thread, because they slow you down.

–Make small stitches, evenly spaced.

–Don’t knot the end of your thread.

–Sit up straight while you sew, or you’ll turn into a hunchback.

–Don’t hold the fabric close to your eyes, or you’ll go blind.

— Whatever you do, don’t rush!

While I was transgressing against each of these laws, I remembered that my ghostly supervisors would be appalled that I had simply folded over the bottom of the pants, instead of cutting off the old hem and then starting the new one. But sitting there, pushing the needle with my middle finger and periodically nudging the cat Telemann off my lap, it occurred to me that I should once and for all accept myself as a sloppy seamstress, and just get on with the task.

I have never enjoyed sewing, but I have always thought I should. Viewed from outside, sewing strikes me as a Zen kind of activity, calming to the mind and relaxing to the body. But for me it’s anything but. I start out with lovely, tiny, even stitches that my mother and my aunts would be proud of. But before long those stitches get bigger and less even and I catch myself checking how far I have gone and how far I still have to go. I am not enjoying the process—all I want is to reach my goal. Sewing fills me with physical impatience, and I want to fling down the fabric, send the thimble flying, and run outside. It reminds me of how I used to feel as a tiny child having to sit quietly through some endless symphony by Brahms.

But, like the child who survived all four movements of the symphony, I survived hemming those four pant legs. I turned each one right side out and—ta-dah!—hung the pants in the closet, feeling righteous and trad, having saved my spouse from walking around looking like J. Alfred Prufrock.