When Mongo and I lived in Texas, back in 1959, or was it 1960? I forget. After all it’s been

nigh unto 60 years (I just like saying “nigh unto”… pay no attention-).

Anyway, when Mongo was serving his country as a young Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, back then, I decided I wanted to learn something practical while he was off on maneuvers or whatever young lieutenants did.

I decided to learn how to sew properly even though I had learned how pretty well back in my high school’s (required) home ec course.
I don’t mean buttons or quilts or stuff like that; no, I wanted a sewing machine to sew anything proper that needed, well, sewing.

I well recall kind of learning how to sew on a sewing machine in the sewing part of the home ec, and to make white sauce in the cooking part of the home ec. It was done back then, and to be honest, my sewing was OK-ish; my white sauce a bit wanting-ish.

Thus, with all this home ecky stuff in my brain, I obviously thought it was time I got a real sewing machine of my very own, so Mongo and I decided to go to downtown San Antonio one Saturday to a store that sells them, where we met with a very nice lady who talked us into buying a used Singer machine, who taught me to use it properly, and we toted it back to our apartment.

I decided to start my sewing incarnation by making a jacket for Mongo. A nice dressy double-breasted blazer with a lining and multiple pockets, button holes, lapels, brass buttons and everything. I bought a pattern and what I thought was terrific dark blue blazer material and began to work.

What was I thinking? Well, I wasn’t.

Why didn’t I begin with a nice simple pot holder? No. I had to start with an impossibly complicated man’s blazer. It became such a hopeless snarl I tried to palm the hideous knotted, tangled and crooked blazer mess off on a real seamstress, begging her to fix it and to please make it wearable.

She held the thing up, and truly it looked like something that had been in a vicious fight between two packs of raging jackals. She was kind and tried to tell me I should perhaps have considered something a little less complicated, like say maybe a pillow case, and then work my way up.

I honestly don’t know what happened to that poor shredded jacket. Mongo blessedly never asked.

I didn’t blame Mr. Singer. He was Isaac Merritt Singer and was born in Pittstown, New York, in 1811, who at age 12 ran off with a troupe of traveling street performers. And then in 1850, good old Fate stepped in because Isaac went into a machine shop in Boston where a guy named Orson Phelps was trying to manufacture sewing machines.
Singer looked over Phelps’s designs, made some good suggestions, and then it appears Singer made his own machines, patented them in 1851, hawked them at fairs and church socials, and the orders began to roll in.

Things began to get complicated just about then with other men in the mix, all making demands on the sewing machine manufacturing business, but eventually a smart New York lawyer got it all straightened out and everyone got rich. Quite soon Singer Sewing Machines were in millions of homes.

Today, I have one, too. Apart from getting it cleaned every decade or so, whether or not it needs it, it has served me well, but designing and making clothes? No way.

I learned my lesson. My old Singer earns its keep by just doing repairs; hems, tears, things like that. I use it a lot. Recently, I brought a few ancient towels back to life by running a zigzag stitch around their thready, worn edges. I sewed up a hole in a pocket of my favorite jeans. I patched a hole in our king-sized sheet and if we’re careful we won’t roll over onto it because it’s kind of thick and lumpy, and yeah, painful.

So you see, my being forced to take home ec way back whenever, was not for naught. There are lots of things around our house that are still useable because of my trusty old Singer in the basement. It does fairly well by me.
My white sauce? Still. Not so much.