Loosen Up On Buttons

I bought a great fitted sweater the other day. Correction: I bought what I thought was a great fitted sweater the other day, until I wore it out in the world and made the mistake of shrugging my shoulders in it. You see, the stretch knit of which I speak, happens to be adorned with two large buttons that, when I'm at rest, sit flat and parallel to one another on my mid-section, just below my chest. However, when I lift my shoulders ever so slightly, voilà, the buttons shift upward in a flash and, suddenly, my breasts look like they have been bedazzled with shiny, black, industrial strength nipples.

I have never understood designers' fascination with buttons as fashion. I had a pair of cherry red corduroy pants as a kid that had three buttons (flower petals) on each back pocket. The designer might have thought these buttons served a great aesthetic purpose, but, honestly, the only purpose served was that of making my butt cheeks into musical instruments, as they tap tap tapped out a tune every time I sat down in my chair. Then, whenever I moved, it was like the remix. I cannot forget feeling those buttons pressing into my flesh during a mandatory assembly where I had to suffer through sitting "Indian-style" on the gymnasium floor until my rear end became a button punching bag, and my feet (for their having been sat upon for two hours) lost all sensation. At the end of that assembly, as I pulled myself along the waxed wood floors of the gymnasium with arm strength alone, I looked like a seal...in cherry red corduroy pants.

Buttons have a really undeserved sweet reputation in our culture. They seem quaint. With their perfect little holes, they look like little round faces. Of course, no one ever says that about bowling balls, and they, too, have those holey faces. Cute as a button? Yes. Cute as a bowling ball? Not so much. Buttons seem delicate. Button noses, not baton noses, are heralded as the beauty ideal. Just ask the plastic surgeons. Button your lip sounds so much daintier and so much more polite than shut your hole, or quit flapping your gums, or put a sock in it.

I can understand buttons as fasteners; that I get and mostly appreciate. It's the decorative buttons that cause me to pause and shake my head while shopping. Using buttons in place of eyes on children's clothing is just weird to me. I saw a yellow sweatshirt in the kids' department at Macy's not too long ago that proudly boasted an alligator with blue button eyes on its front. It was the ugliest thing. I felt so sorry for any child whose mother might buy it, thinking it was adorable because it happened to be in the children's department at Macy's. Why can't manufacturers just stitch on the damn eyes the same way they stitch on the rest of the damn alligator? That way when children's alligator sweatshirts lose buttons, their mothers won't have to send their children to school wearing crippled alligators across their chests. Quick, sew a toothpick onto that sucker! Your blind bastard of an alligator needs a walking stick. Using buttons as wheels on knitted trucks is equally strange to me. How is this clever? Don't kids have it tough enough nowadays? Must we also force them to wear lousy arts and crafts projects?

Listen to me closely, okay? Buttons are not as benign as they seem to be. Chip one or break one in half. Go on. I dare you. Why so reluctant? Aha! You, it seems, know what I know. Yes, you know that if you do chip a button or break one in half, you will suddenly have a rather ninja-like weapon in your possession. I don't care what you say. No broken plastic anything is as sharp and as deadly as the itsy bitsy cutesy wootsy broken button from hell. Just ask that other cute button you know and love...your belly button. Clearly the victim of button on button crime, mine still winces when I put on a pair of tight-ish pants. "No, Sandra, please," my belly button's muffled cries seem to say. "Elastic waistband! Elastic waistband!"

Anyway, this is where I press the POWER button OFF and leave you with my musings. My scissors, after all, have a date with the threads that bind my shiny, black button nipples to my otherwise great fitted sweater.

If He Had a Hammer

Would you like to be reminded of your elementary school days? Then, please, by all means, make it a point to visit any neighborhood drugstore (CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid), or Staples between the dates of September 5th and September 12th of any given year. However, if you are an adult child of immigrants, you want to take this trip down memory lane around the Fort Lee, NJ area. You see, this is the best area around back to school time because this is the new immigration hub, where many new immigrants and their families seem to put down roots for a few years. This is where they choose to sorta kinda assimilate because of the area's close proximity to the city, and the school systems that are nowhere near those of the city in terms of shear administrative incompetence.

Anyway, the truth is, there is nothing that brings an adult child of immigrants back to his/her childhood like listening to a brand new crop of parents with accents. As they argue with their children in the crowded aisles over all the frivolous and flighty requests the teachers have put on their school supplies lists, you'll feel like a kid again. WHAT YOU'LL NEED FOR CLASS is emblazoned on many a ditto being clasped in the hands of none too thrilled mothers. "I tink," growls one heavily accented Russian mother in Staples, as she runs down the list with her bubblegum nail, "vat yous need for cless is a meeeellionaire moder to pay for all this tings."

I can remember getting into an argument with my own mother over the Glue Stick that was on my brother's school supplies list when he was in the second or third grade. "All glue sticks, Jesus Christ. What the hell is the difference?" she'd asked, annoyed, as I dug the old school Elmer's glue out of the red CVS basket she was carrying, and replaced it with the required Glue Stick. "Troppa comodità with you kids; that's the problem in this country." In case you're wondering, that basically translates as, too much comfort. According to my mother, America was and is going down the proverbial tubes because, God forbid kids should do a little extra work and spend a little less money in the process.

Surely, there are more problems than that one in this country, yes. But, my mother is what I call an absolutist. For her, there is one solution to all your problems, and if you really stopped to think for a minute, Jesus Christ, you'd see that there is only one real problem in your imagined collection of problems. What is your problem? Laziness. And what is the solution? Go to work.

When I tell my own students (who, incidentally, pretty much all have parents from foreign lands) stories about how I grew up with immigrants for parents, they immediately relate and, subsequently, relax. They need not worry if they get a different kind of notebook for class, or if their parents fill the forms out incorrectly. I get it. I was there. In many respects, I'm still there. Growing up American is a different experience when your parents no speak the English no so good. It is especially different when the old world culture and traditions are not immediately checked at the gate. For example, most of my students still get hit by their parents when they do something wrong. There are no "time outs" for them...yet. We swap stories about the injustices we've suffered in homes where a smack is not viewed as a criminal offense, and, honestly, we mostly laugh at the ignorance our parents have displayed from time to time in the discipline arena. We all know the hitting thing doesn't dissuade bad behavior. We all know that getting hit sometimes hurts and often humiliates, and that, when we have our own kids, we won't continue the cycle. In some cases, nearly twenty-five years apart, our stories are strikingly similar. Thus, we understand each other, the adult child of immigrants and the children children of immigrants. We can appreciate and laugh at each other's stories because they are the same stories...just with different accents attached.

That said, when I tell my properly American friends a story of being chased around the house by my father with a hammer when I was a kid, they are aghast. They are too horrified to even think of laughing. They shake their heads and give me that look. That look that says, Oh my God! Poor you, Sandra. You sad sad clown. Then, within seconds, I find myself recanting, because they didn't get it. They don't get it. How could they, really? And I don't want them to pity me, or, for that matter, think ill of how I was raised and the people who raised me. They don't see the humor. So, I start again. Only this time I sound like a rattling train of excuses.

Um, well, you know, he didn't actually USE the hammer. And, um, you know, it wasn't a GIANT hammer or anything like that. It wasn't like a SLEDGEHAMMER. You know what? Now that I think about it, it wasn't a hammer at all, actually. It was, you know, one of those hammer thingy things that you, um, use to play a plastic rainbow xylophone. A toy. You know, a mallet. And it wasn't even hard plastic or anything like that. No, it was like, you know, a stuffed animal mallet, so it was soft, you know. It was really really soft. Oh my God. What the hell am I talking about? It wasn't a mallet at all. You know what it was? It was a teddy bear. Yeah. I don't know how I mixed that up. It was a soft, fluffy teddy bear with a red, satin ribbon tied around its neck. And, oh yeah, I remember now. He wasn't chasing me with it because he wanted to hit me with it. He was chasing me with it because it was a gift he had surprised me with. Because he loved me that much. He was always doing stuff like that. Chasing me around with teddy bear presents after I tried to push my brother down the stairs. But, honestly, even if he had been chasing me around with a hammer, which, of course, he wasn't, I would have deserved to have been chased with a hammer because, you know what my problem is? Laziness. And you know what I need to do? I need to go to work.