The Lesson of the Threadbare Cords

There are so many circumstances in life where people can easily be identified as belonging to a certain group by the clothes that they wear.

I think of my earliest memories of identifying wardrobe. Until I was eight, I was a “military brat” – the daughter of a career Navy man.

I was born while he was stationed in Japan. 

Then we lived on the outskirts of Washington D.C., where he worked in the Pentagon.

I thought that everybody's daddy rode the bus to work at the Pentagon when I was little. 

And I was known to sneak out of the house when the time for his bus arrival drew near. 

I would walk up to the end of our block and sit and wait for him to step off that bus in his uniform. I am told I even crawled out to meet him before I could walk.

We next lived on the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for two years. I was still surrounded by men in uniforms. (Is that why I have a thing for them still?) 

I reveled in the sounds of the Marine Band playing. And watching the men at inspection parades thrilled me - even at that young age.

After Gitmo, my dad retired with 30 years in the Navy and wanted to stay in the Caribbean, so we moved to the Virgin Islands where I spent the rest of my childhood. 

There I met Sister Marcelina – the scariest specter from my childhood. Now there is a uniform that put dread and fear into me!

By then - the late 60s, the Black Panther movement was in full swing (we’d just gone through the Detroit Riots the summer between Gitmo and St. Croix) and in my naivete, I was surprised how many cars in the islands had pretty little black porcelain panthers on a field of shag carpet in the back windows of their cars!

There are hundreds of “uniforms” that are easily identifiable in our world. Some are attached to religion, like the nun’s habits. There are the hijabs worn by women in many Muslim countries around the world.

One of my favorite books in high school and college was “My Name Is Asher Lev” by Chaim Potok.

It's an outstanding, agonizing tale of a Jewish boy wrestling with his strict religion and his artistic ability. 

I was honored and in awe when the author spoke to our writing class in college. Chaim Potok's books introduced me to the world of Hasidic Jews in “The Promise” and “The Chosen.” A world of black clothing and long, curly earlocks.

In Corrie ten Boom’s life-changing book, “The Hiding Place,” I was introduced to the six-pointed gold stars the Jews of Denmark were forced to wear outside their coats during the German occupation of WW2 to identify them as Jewish.

Then of course, there are the sports-related symbols. The famous green jacket of the Masters Golf Tournament comes to mind. Not very attractive by my standards, but a thing of pride nonetheless. Well, maybe until Tiger Woods’ disgraceful revelations of the last month.

And in most high schools, two notable uniform-type dress ware include letterman’s jackets and cheerleaders’ outfits. Not only do they identify these groups, but elevate them in the eyes of many.

At the Seventh-day Adventist boarding school, we weren’t allowed to have inter-school athletics as competition was anathema. So we didn’t have these typical high school uniforms to separate groups from others.  But the most-identifying uniform allowed at our school was one that brought embarrassment to most who wore it.

 

Everyone who lived in the dorms had to work at one of the on-campus jobs. And like most societies, this one had its caste system. It went something like this: teacher’s aides, dorm monitors, Lorenz Industries, the broom factory, and way down at the bottom was the laundry – the largest employing entity on campus. The school had a commercial laundry that did laundry for many of the hospitals as far away as Ventura and Los Angeles.

They’d set the school up in such a way that the freshman and juniors went to school in the morning and worked in the afternoons. And sophomores and seniors had the opposite schedule.

In the years I was there, corduroys were the clothing of choice. Though the boys were allowed to wear them to school, we girls had to wear dresses or skirts – and none more than 2” above the knee. But come work time, we almost all donned corduroys. Our fashion statement, I suppose. But it was actually more a uniform.

But laundry workers – at least the girls – wore an unwanted status symbol every time the donned their cords. We could be spotted across the campus – even standing next to a worker from Lorenz who had identical top and cords!

You see, laundry workers all had a two-and-a-half-inch worn area across the thigh where the ridges had been worn off their cords. Depending on their height, it might be upper thigh, mid thigh or maybe lower thigh if they were very tall, but it would be there. A stigma. The only thing lower than wearing cords with a rubbed-flat strip across the thighs was maybe wearing jeans with the same scar.

Well, let me clarify. Not all laundry workers. Boys and most girls over the age of sixteen were exempt. But the freshman and sophomore girls who worked in the laundry almost all sported these lighter-colored stripes across their thighs.

The girls over 16 and (junior and seniors) still lowly enough to be working in the laundry, worked on the ‘mangle.’ This was a huge, blisteringly hot machine about 5’ high, 10’ wide and 12’ long made of a half dozen or so iron-hot rollers. Two girls on the front (where it was somewhat cooler) fed wet sheets into the mangle, pulling and stretching as the sheets were tugged into the voracious machine in order to feed the sheets in straight.

On the other end – the hottest job in the building – two other older teens pinched the blistering sheets between thumb and two fingers as it came out and folded it as it came. Half, quarters, eights…

Then quickly slide it across the table behind them and turn and reach for the next. There was no time to hesitate or screw up. The next sheet usually followed no more than 2” behind. These girls usually had calluses on their finger tips – once their fingers stopped blistering, and hardened over.

But the younger laundry workers were confined to the lowliest job on campus. We stood around a huge table about 8’ by 8’ and folded mountains and mountains of white towels and washcloths for four hours a day. And all around the incredible noise: horrifically loud buzzing and beeping and rumbling from the row of ten-foot-high washers and driers that could hold two hundred towels at a time.

They were so huge that they actually were built to lean forward once finished. They would teeter and spin around so that the boys could get the towels out of the machines. The monstrous, belching machines spewed out mountains of white linens into huge canvas baskets on wheels. These baskets would back up as each waited to be dumped onto the folding tables where we youngsters worked.

Grab a towel, fold in half lengthwise, then in half again, and then put it on the top of your pile…. At twenty towels you’d take them over to the tying machine (only operated by those 15 and up) and then back to your table to reach and grab and fold and fold and stack... Reach and grab and fold and fold and stack… Reach and grab and fold and fold and stack…

For four hours straight. And it was in the reaching, folding, stacking that wore the ridges off our cords in strips across our thighs as they rubbed repeatedly along the edge of that table. Our stigma.

In the summertime the temperatures in that building averaged between 110 and 120 degrees - so hot, they had to give us salt pills to keep us from dehydrating. In the winter, it was a welcome 80 degrees compared to the cold fog that swirled outside. 
 

To make the horrible heat and deplorably intrusive noise tolerable, I learned to sing as I worked. Song after song after song with each cart full of towels... after cart full of towels….

At first my fellow folders mocked me with scorn and disdain.   This quieted me for a while in the early weeks of working there.
 

But I could not be silenced. Eventually I’d start singing again. Hymns, popular Christian songs, an occasional Carpenter’s song… whatever came to mind. The others crowded ‘round the hated table would belittle me and throw towels at me.

“Carson!” they would shout as they threw hot towels at me, “Enough with the singing already! Shut up!!!”

But it soon became obvious that I could fold more towels faster. So at first they’d just push the mountain closer to my side, and I would keep on folding. Eventually I convinced them that if they too would join me in singing, they would forget to grumble and would get faster at folding.

“Maybe we can even get caught up!” I told them. Again they mocked. No shift of folders EVER got caught up with the dryers!

But in time, I wore them down and they eventually sang with me. And we eventually got fast enough as a group that we eventually COULD get caught up to the dryers!  

That meant a very brief respite during which we could hop up and sit on the table edges and talk as we dangled and swung our aching feet. Free breaks (at $1.65/hour)! It doesn’t get any better than that!

It was then that we finally decided that though this may be the lowliest form of employment on campus, we’d found a way to make it a little bit more bearable. The singing not only made us happier, it gave us time off (if brief)– with pay!

I learned that facing boring and/or overwhelming mountains of impossibility could be manageable once we let go of our resentment at being stuck there.
 

Instead we focused on the joy of singing – sometimes in rounds, eventually in harmony – and it greatly affected our quality of life during those four, otherwise interminable, unbearable hours, making time fly.

And so it is in life. Once we look away from the negative – especially those mountains over which we have no control – we can move mountains (in this case of mountains of towels, literally!) and we can smile in the face of adversity.

Because it's not all about the destination. It's about making the best of the journey.

Liz Carson Rosas

17 December 2009

“Sing joyfully to the LORD, you righteous;
it is fitting for the upright to praise him.” Psalms 33:1

“…yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.

The Sovereign LORD is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to go on the heights.” Habakkuk 3: 18, 19

“Now we ask you, brothers, to respect those who work hard among you, who are over you in the Lord and who admonish you. Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. 
                                                        1 Thessalonians 5: 12, 16-17