"We seldom get into trouble when we speak softly. It is only when we raise our voices that the sparks fly and tiny molehills become great mountains of contention."
Recently my friend
Rachel came over to visit, and she was bearing gifts. She had
purchased two blanket “throws” and wanted to affix them
to the front of my wheelchair to keep me warm no matter what room I
was in. One of them was stylish black. The other was a festive
purple. Both of them were so soft and fuzzy that I couldn’t
stop petting them. In fact, I could fill a day that way —
petting the blankets and drooling.
Both of those blankets
were made in today’s fabric du jour — stylish polyester.
In fact, when I held the black blanket to my nose, I inhaled the
heady aroma of petroleum. It’s nice to know where your
textiles come from, and when it’s polyester in question, you
can often tell by the smell.
When I was growing up,
polyester was the fabric of choice for large-bottomed ladies. There
was a reason for this. In those days, polyester was usually
presented in a double-knit. This meant it stretched over ample rear
ends. There were no zippers or buttons. If you wore polyester
double-knit pants, they were held up with stretchy elastic.
The polyester
double-knit came in every color of the rainbow. Thus you were likely
to see a large-bottomed lady bending over in front of you whose rear
end was a screaming mango hue. Or luscious lime. Lime was a big
color back in those days — second only to a sickening olive
green.
Polyester was
advertised as being indestructible. It probably was, if
indestructible means “non-bio-degradable.” I’m
sure there are numerous orange polyester double-knit pants that are
even now polluting the landfills of America. But it certainly wasn’t
indestructible as far as clothing was concerned. It attracted
stains. Grease-based stains were particularly hard to get out, so
that polyester clothing soon looked dirty and old.
The other problem was
that the knit was susceptible to snags. If you looked at a polyester
double-knit garment, your eyelashes would snag in it. Okay, that’s
a slight exaggeration. But you could almost tell how often an item
of clothing had been worn by how many snags were there. It certainly
wasn’t a good advertisement for polyester double-knit.
Because of these
problems and others, there was a time when people turned up their
noses at the manmade fabric, loudly proclaiming their allegiance to
cotton or linen. I used to be one of those people, but I have
repented.
You see, the scientists
who work for the textile industry have not been sitting idle all
these years. They saw the indestructability of polyester and decided
to refine it. They knew there was a market for clothing that did not
wrinkle or fade, and they ran with the concept.
Fluffy and I went to
Australia in the year 2000, and the blouse I was wearing was ripped
to shreds by a piece of metal on a department store escalator in
Melbourne. The employees of the department store sent me to a blouse
emporium where I was allowed to pick any blouse in stock. There was
one caveat — every blouse in the store was made of a material
called “polyester crepe.”
I picked out a pattern
I liked, and I took the blouse off the rack. To my surprise, the
fabric wasn’t spongy the way I expected polyester to feel. It
was rugged, somewhat like a softer version of military canvas. I
knew immediately that if this blouse tackled a piece of metal in an
escalator, the escalator would lose the confrontation.
Here it is thirteen
years later, and that blouse looks like I just took it off the rack.
Not a piece of thread has come unraveled. The buttons are still
firmly in place. There are no snags or stains. The blouse looks as
though it has never been worn.
I spent years looking
in vain for more polyester crepe blouses for people my size, and
finally hit the jackpot when I discovered The Blouse House
in late November. I ordered five blouses from the company, and they
arrived two or three days before I ended up in the hospital for a
surprise three-month stay.
I did not come out of
the hospital at the same size as I went in. Blouses that fit me when
I received them in the mail now had ten or twelve inches of spare
fabric in the front or in the back (depending on where I grabbed).
No matter. These things are designed to withstand Armageddon, and
I’m going to wear them no matter how big they are.
That’s the thing
about polyester. It used to be a cheap, crummy fabric. But that
wasn’t good enough, so it evolved. Today there are polyesters
that would fool even a fashion designer into believing they were
linen or crepe or silk.
People are that way,
too. If there are things about you that you don’t like, you
don’t have to live with them. You can change. You can shave
off the rough edges and become the person you want to be, rather than
the person you are today.
Some of those changes
are hard. They may even involve repentance. But you can do hard
things. You can do almost anything, if you enlist God’s help.
Kathryn H. Kidd has been writing fiction, nonfiction, and "anything for money" longer than
most of her readers have even been alive. She has something to say on every topic, and the
possibility that her opinions may be dead wrong has never stopped her from expressing them at
every opportunity.
A native of New Orleans, Kathy grew up in Mandeville, Louisiana. She attended Brigham
Young University as a generic Protestant, having left the Episcopal Church when she was eight
because that church didn't believe what she did. She joined The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints as a BYU junior, finally overcoming her natural stubbornness because she
wanted a patriarchal blessing and couldn't get one unless she was a member of the Church. She
was baptized on a Saturday and received her patriarchal blessing two days later.
She married Clark L. Kidd, who appears in her columns as "Fluffy," more than thirty-five
years ago. They are the authors of numerous LDS-related books, the most popular of which is A
Convert's Guide to Mormon Life.
A former managing editor for Meridian Magazine, Kathy moderated a weekly column ("Circle of Sisters") for Meridian until she was derailed by illness in December of 2012. However, her biggest claim to fame is that she co-authored
Lovelock with Orson Scott Card. Lovelock has been translated into Spanish and Polish, which
would be a little more gratifying than it actually is if Kathy had been referred to by her real name
and not "Kathryn Kerr" on the cover of the Polish version.
Kathy has her own website, www.planetkathy.com, where she hopes to get back to writing a weekday blog once she recovers from being dysfunctional. Her entries recount her adventures and misadventures with Fluffy, who heroically
allows himself to be used as fodder for her columns at every possible opportunity.
Kathy spent seven years as a teacher of the Young Women in her ward, until she was recently released. She has not yet gotten used to interacting with the adults, and suspects it may take another seven years. A long-time home teacher with her husband, Clark, they have home taught the same family since 1988. The two of them have been temple workers since 1995, serving in the Washington D.C. Temple.