Friendship is timeless.
When you meet someone you might feel like they’ve always meant to be your friend. Maybe you don’t know that yet, but you feel understood by them and you know how rare that can be. Sometimes friendships surprise you because of a difference in age or circumstance, so let me tell you a sweet story of the Bernina friends.
She was 12 years old and wanted to make a dress based on the Botanical Gardens of New York City for her sewing store’s competition. It was her first dress she ever made.
Ambitious, the 59 year old sewing teacher thought. But Ms. G always respected the girl’s vision.
The girl liked her teacher. She was so elegant the way she moved the fabric with a powerful tenderness, the way she lit up when she came up with an idea to adjust a sleeve, and the way she spoke as if she were Samantha Stevens from Bewitched. Through their hours pinning and pressing and contemplating and seamripping and sewing under the Bernina sewing machine, Ms. G understood the girl and the girl felt understood. It continued like this year after year, when the girl grew and was a Flamenco, put on some weight and was Sophia Loren, and then graduated as a modern-day Cinderella – at least according to the competitions’ themes.
But sometimes you don’t realize that someone was more than an xyz dynamic you had labeled them as. Sometimes you don’t realize that someone is really a friend until you look back or have the fortune of meeting them again.
So when Ms. G was at her local YMCA and she saw the girl, she had to say hello! Ms. G had been swimming to help her regain her strength, physically, mentally, and emotionally from the stroke she had had two years before. She didn’t know that the girl was stationed at the leg press for those very same motives – albeit due to a different cause. They hugged like two magnets.
The girl was no longer really a girl, but a woman now. At 23 years old, she had withdrawn from grad school, experienced heartbreak first with her grandfather’s death and then with a boy. She found herself craving the creative pleasures of her childhood. Ms. G, 70 years old, had withdrawn from sewing, experienced heartbreak several times over, and carefully listened over the cups of coffee they were sharing.
While they didn’t feel necessarily hopeful for themselves, they felt this hopeful for one another. So when the girl mentioned she had been wanting to recreate her great aunt’s 1960s dress and proposed recruiting her sewing teacher’s help, her sewing teacher couldn’t help but agree.
They still didn’t know they were friends, by the way. They should have known because only friends would entertain discomfort for the benefit of another friend. Isn’t that the way it goes?
A week later, they measured and traced and cut the mock dress. Laughed about it when it didn’t look so right.
I can’t believe I’m sewing again! Ms. G would say, and the girl would repeat the same for herself. I’m sorry if I’m slow! Ms. G would say, and the girl would say slow is just the right speed for me. But Ms. G was actually fast and had a lot of stamina, the girl thought! The girl loved visiting Ms. G’s house to sew and watching Ms. G remember herself. Throughout the hours of pinning and pressing and contemplating and seamripping and sewing under the Bernina sewing machine, they learned that they were actually friends and really good ones at that.
Ms. G showed the girl to let the fabric guide her. You can try so hard to manipulate the fabric when all it wants is to show you what it is meant to be. As they were constructing the dress, they were also learning what they were meant to be, together. That by some odd turn of events that were quite different but oddly similar, they were here healing one another.
They were more than the dress. They were lunches of toast and butter. They were talks of brothers avoiding wars and strategies for flirting with a guy at church. When Ms. G said the most important characteristic in a potential partner is sexual attraction, the girl burst out into laughter.
Who would have thought, that despite all the years and fabrics, that they would be here? Just two girls who loved sewing and were always meant to be friends.