Tuesday, June 24, 2008
By BONNIE WILLIAMS
There were once tinkers and tailors and candlestick makers, tradesmen who sharpened kitchen knives and repaired the baby’s shoes. The lady of the house — or her housekeeper, if she was of means — darned the mister’s socks and no one would have even thought to buy a new dress if the older sister’s could be cut down for the younger.
As time passed, some of those disappeared into history. But we still had shoe repairmen and others who repaired televisions and toasters. Emmett the Fix-It man was a fixture in Mayberry, and probably even Barney could repair a lawn mower, if he wore his lucky salt-and-pepper suit.
No mother would buy a new pair of sneakers (not running shoes, not cross-trainers, but sneakers) just because the Keds had a hole worn in the toe. They would be relegated to play shoes, going along with the play clothes, because children changed from their “Sunday best” to play outside.
Not all about the good old days was good, but our tendency to “use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without” was something that was.
I was reminded of those days by Anderson (S.C.) Independent-Mail reporter Charmaine Smith-Miles, who wrote recently of Audie and Mitch Carthern. The column could have been written 30 or even 40 years ago, an account of the brothers who were carrying on a family tradition. Yet then, what the brothers do would have been so ordinary, it likely wouldn’t have made it to the story file.
They repair things. They take things that are broken — lawn mowers and weed-eaters and chainsaws and other small engines — and they fix them.
Imagine that.
Instead of throwing something away and going to buy another one, you actually get something repaired. In an ideal world, landfills have no curling irons and hair dryers and lawn mowers and TVs. They have been tinkered with and will live to serve another day.
This is not an ideal world, although I’ll be the first to state it’s a pretty good one. Buying a new television may be cheaper than repairing the old one. A new hair dryer can be had for under $20. Why not just upgrade instead of fixing what ran out of steam? And never mind having shoes resoled. Go buy a new pair.
Throwaway society
We are a throwaway society. We’re spoiled by our good fortune and forget that along the way, while we were discarding things, they weren’t magically disappearing to enrich the soil.
There are still shoe repair shops, a few of them, and as Smith-Miles reported, there are still men who labor on a summer’s day (in the shade, of course) to fix the lawn mower so we can keep the yard tidy. There are a few tinkerers who can replace a lamp wire.
But most of the time, people don’t bother. And it’s a shame that these craftsmen (for anyone who can fix something broken is a craftsman) will one day fade away. There will no longer be anyone who knows how to sharpen a mower blade or hammer tiny heels to my favorite comfortable high-heeled shoes.
And we will all be the poorer for it.
X Williams is editorial page editor of the Independent-Mail. Distributed by Scripps Howard.