On Pins and Hopes

When I began this blog, I had no idea what it was about, but the phrase On Pins and Hopes just jumped onto the blank page. I like that title or, something about that title anyway. It reminds me of my mother’s old pincushion. Red ball with a little strawberry attached. Was the big red ball supposed to be a tomato because it always looked like one to me, but then why on earth was there a strawberry attached? Strange, porcupine pincushion.

When I was young, my mother sewed a great deal of beautiful clothing for my sister and me. Matching dresses, pants with tiny oxford shirts, pinafores and ball gowns – she could do it all. I can sew curtains. Not fancy curtains. Long, straight, uncomplicated drapes. That’s about the summation of my skills. Impressive? Maybe not, but, I do know what a bobbin is and how to thread it, so suck it Martha Stewart.

So when I was younger, I’d watch my mother sew and mess about with the pincushion. All the red topped pins on one side. All the blue ones go over here. Never the two shall meet. Should have known I’d have some organization issues then. And I took great satisfaction in jabbing those pins in the meat of the cushion. Take that you stupid tomato! And that! Simple pleasures.

Then, times advanced and the old tomato pincushion was done away with. New fangled technology in pin corralling – the magnet. Now there was no effort to shoving the pins in the cushion. There was no cushion, just a big blue super magnet that could pick up stray pins in a flash. Sometimes you could even get them to stand on end in a strange little leaning Eiffel Tower. I remember asking about the switch and my mom shrugging and saying, “But this is much faster. The other one slowed me down.” Which is probably true because my mother sews like a Ferrari drives.

I’m not sure which method is actually better. I own a big blue magnet. Fast, efficient and reminiscent of my summer in France. My daughter got a little sewing kit for her birthday last year. It contained the classic tomato/strawberry pincushion. Not so quick, but still exhilarating to jam those pins in there in color-coded order. Both methods of keeping pins wrangled have their pros and cons. In the end, they both get the job done.

Life is ever evolving. Some of the changes are just plain good, like the invention of birthday cake ice cream. God bless birthday cake ice cream. Some new forms of life seem to run parallel to their originals. Consider the flat iron. Its inception has not done away with the need for an actual iron, yet that is where it originated. Bet my aunt wishes they’d had one back when she was a girl. She was forced to ask my mom to literally iron her waist length hair with the clothes iron on the ironing board. Imagine giving your little sister that kind of weaponry on a bad day. Then there are the new technologies that slowly choke the life out of their counterparts. Remember the Beta versus VHS debate. VHS won, but is now waning in the light of DVDs, which will become obsolete as well. Progress.

There is raging debate in publishing over ebooks and their impact on traditional paper books. Ebooks are fast, efficient, eco-friendly and very hip. At first the idea of someone reading the words I toil over on a screen was distasteful, to say the least. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it didn’t matter to me, the writer, how people read my work. What matters is that they read. But what scares me, what enters my dreams at night and turns small flowers growing in the periphery of my dreams into man-eating monsters is what the ebook might mean to a real book, that is a book with pages and ink and printing that you can touch and own, really own the words, not just some binary code that translates on certain machines into words. I’d hate to see the real book (and the very real book store with very real employees) go the way of the Beta. I’d like to think the two could live together in this world like the pin wranglers of past and present. Both useful, both likeable, both having their die-hard fans. The choice is still there – tomato-type thingy or super blue magnet. Side by side in the store.

Or, like the ice cream. Book mediums like ice cream. Chocolate for some people. Cookie dough for others. Birthday cake for me. We’re all happy and we’re all eating ice cream.

And if it comes down to it, I’ll forgo my birthday cake ice cream, in order to keep my real books (and book stores). Lucky for me, no one’s asking for that sacrifice – yet. So, I think I’ll pop out to the ice cream shop to get my fill while I still can.