Letter of Recommendation: Patching Things Up

As I’ve mentioned before, I have an aversion to throwing things out. Part of the aversion is a familial and cultural inheritance, but part of it is just my personality: I tend to anthropomorphize things, and so if I’ve loved something–loved living with it and using it, loved how it looked and the way it has made my life better–the thought of it lying all dirty and crushed in the fetid darkness of a landfill makes me claustrophobic and sad.

This feeling has limits, of course: if I don’t really like a thing (I’m looking at you, Cuisinart), or if I’m really busy, or if it’s too much work to salvage, I really don’t lose sleep over chucking it. But, if it’s easy to fix–like the travel umbrella I just put a new snap on (what is it with travel umbrellas? They’re like the exploding drummers in Spinal Tap!)–or, if I like it, like the Linus panniers that have done yeoman’s work getting me around town for the last decade and change, I do my best to keep it keepin’ on.

Here’s another, deeper, reason I like repairing things: the ritual of repair deepens my relationship not only with the thing itself but also with the network of people and things it stands for–and with myself. When I patched up the worn corners on my panniers, I wasn’t sure how to do it. I had to figure out how to get the iron-on denim patches to adhere around the corners. And even though I wasn’t sure I could, I did. To reinforce the patches, I used the running stitch my mother taught me and the thimble my friend Hyunsuk gave me. I sat at the table stitching and thought about these women God put into my life to nurture and support me; I listened to the birds outside. My heartbeat slowed to the rhythm of the needle punching through the canvas. I remembered who and where I was for those 20 minutes of an otherwise typical, hectic day. I wouldn’t have gotten any of that out of clicking a couple buttons on a webpage and having some numbers fly out of my bank account. Not that there’s anything wrong with buying new things when I need them. But I don’t always need them. Sometimes, I just need to remember how much I already have.