During my senior year of college, I took two sculpture classes. The first was to fill the studio requirement for my art history major. The second was born out of my complete unwillingness to be separated from the wood shop, welding studio, and plaster room. I took one day of early morning introductory French that term, realized the radial arm saw was a much better companion, and switched classes.
I think what I valued most about my time in the sculpture studio was how it used a completely different part of my brain from the rest of my school work. I could happily spend large chunks of time working on a single project without noticing that I hadn’t sat down or had a drink of water for several hours. It was a small class, and as a project deadline would loom closer, we would all end up in the studio at the same time at night, listening to oldies on the radio (the one station to which we could all agree). It was a parallel universe that smelled like saw dust and paint thinner: my happy place.
I never had any delusions of becoming a sculptor in the real sense; my commitment to the craft came more from enjoyment than driving passion. When it came down to it, I just loved working with my hands, and still do. I never wondered about the origins of that love until one of my own projects took me by surprise.
It wasn’t any wonder that my parallel sculpture universe was so comforting: the rest of my world had slowly yet surely started to gravitate towards graduation and job applications. My resume was suddenly important in a very real way. This wasn’t about a summer internship anymore: I was working towards a deadline of being an adult with a real job. When a sculpture didn’t turn out the way I wanted, worse came to worse I could always thwack it with a crowbar to see if that would help. That theory didn’t quite work on my job applications.
During my non-studio hours, my brain constantly ticked with what my resume skills were: what internships had I completed, what had I accomplished academically, what were my numbers? I never thought about how you can’t really put your best qualities on a resume, like loyalty and the ability to mix the perfect gin and tonic, and so in a way, I stopped appreciating my skills that I couldn’t include in a cover letter.
One night I started work on a project I had been tossing around: it would be a ladder, made of cloth and stuffing. It would be full scale, almost seven feet tall, but essentially like a stuffed animal: no structure within, just cotton. I was smug with my own pretensions, thinking this was a feminist work, commenting on the relegation of historically female creations to the “crafts” realm. The very fact I thought the words “feminist work” in relation to one of my own sculptures should have tipped me off that what I needed, in addition to several yards more fabric, was a swift kick in the ass.
Nevertheless, I began measuring my material and marking off where to cut, where to sew. Dragging a pencil across fabric, guided by the edge of a ruler, is a very specific sensation, and for me a very familiar one. My hands knew how to cut, where to draw, and how to piece. About the moment I became aware that I was following muscle memory was the moment the truth hit me like a crowbar to a misbehaving sculpture. This wasn’t a feminist work, something cold and academic.
This was about my grandmother.
My mother’s parents would visit us frequently when I was little, and the home I came back to when my grandmother was there was one of the warmest, safest places on earth. She would always have tea waiting, and she would read aloud to me, old English authors like E. Nesbit, Elizabeth Goudge, and Rudyard Kipling. When I, along with most other girls in my age group, fell into the American Girls craze, wardrobes appeared for my dolls: night gowns, ball gowns, capes, slippers, bonnets. She taught me to sew at a very early age. While she made the doll dresses on the sewing machine, quilts were different: all of her quilts were sewn by hand.
I use the gifts she gave me every day of my life, often without even realizing it. My friends in college benefitted from those gifts too: I was one of the only ones who knew how to mend a pair of blue jeans. One friend in particular developed a sixth sense for when I was cooking meatloaf in my apartment, and he would miraculously appear without fail about fifteen minutes before it would come out of the oven. I know how to hide a stitch, embroider over a stain, knead bread and scald milk. I can recite from memory “The Beginning of the Armadillo,” with all of her voice intonations, like a chant. I can trace my lineage back several generations, including anecdotes about distant ancestors.
And none of those things will ever go on a resume.
When my ladder was finished, it looked kind of like a floral stuffed octopus: a very large, soft heap on the cement floor. My professor wanted me to include some sort of internal skeleton, but I flatly refused (which I rarely, if ever, did). This wasn’t a sculpture project anymore: this was a conscious, purposeful homage to one of the most important people in my life, who now was gone. It would have been more efficient for Grandma to make her quilts on a sewing machine; it might have looked better if my sculpture had a skeleton. But that wasn’t really the point, was it?
I presented my project the Tuesday after the Sunday my grandfather followed my grandmother, and died in his sleep. He was a hard man, and the best thing he did with his life was to love her. I guess we all have skills that aren’t strictly marketable.
I miss my grandmother every day. The smell of tomato vines, the rattle of Tic Tacs, the feeling of scone dough, the smell of bergamot in Earl Gray tea, the panes on a quilt: she’s in every one of my senses. How do you construct a life? I have the suspicion that when it comes down to it, the most important things I do in my life, the things I teach my children and grandchildren, won’t be the things that went on my first resume. It seems like a misnomer to call them soft skills, because my grandmother’s “soft skills” build my insides. They’re the framework on which everything I can do and will do hangs, the marrow from which it grows.
And if I’m ever on my way to an interview and rip my suit, I can have a needle threaded and an invisible whip stitch in place in about five minutes flat.
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