{"id":1050,"date":"2009-05-27T18:17:48","date_gmt":"2009-05-27T18:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/theirbadmother\/2009\/05\/something-old.html"},"modified":"2009-05-27T18:17:48","modified_gmt":"2009-05-27T18:17:48","slug":"something-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2009\/05\/something-old.html","title":{"rendered":"Something Old"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"grandma-wedding.jpg\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

I’ve always loved old clothes. Old things in general, really. When I
\nwas very small, and for a very long time after, when I was no longer
\nquite so small, I would spend hours in an attic room in my
\ngrandparents’ house, a room that used to be my mother’s, but which came
\nto serve as a repository of all my grandmother’s more glittery
\ntreasures: endless boxes of costume jewelry and hats and old dresses
\nand robes and the occasional stray piece of hard candy, invariably
\nscooped up by my little sister for exploratory sucking. My grandmother
\nherself was, to my mind, dazzlingly fashionable, in her red lipstick
\nand her turbans and her wide-cut trousers. She looked like every
\nheroine on every old black-and-white movie that we watched on her
\nancient television on Sunday afternoons, right down to the
\nscotch-on-the-rocks rattling in the glass in her hand. She loved
\nglamor, my grandmother, and I loved it with her.<\/p>\n

When I became to old to play around in her attic of treasures –
\nwhen, indeed, she died and my grandfather sold the house and got rid of
\nher things, to my eternal dismay – I began assembling my own
\ncollection. Goodwill, Salvation Army, Value Village – these became my
\nattics, to be rummaged through for treasure, and rummage I did. By the
\ntime I was in my early twenties I had a vast collection of vintage
\nclothing and accessories – snakeskin stilettos from the fifties, an
\nYves Saint Laurent pea coat from the sixties, ultrasuede Halston from
\nthe seventies, polka-dotted Versace from the eighties, and all variety
\nof treasures from across the decades (the perfect faded Flintstones
\npajama top featuring Pebbles and Bam-Bam: timeless) – that I delighted
\nin and
\nwhich I dedicated, in secret, to my grandmother.<\/p>\n

Treasures from that collection have come and gone – to the moths, to
\ncareless movers, to the hazards of a hard night drinking Jagermeister
\nat somebody’s wedding – but I still have most of those clothes, tucked
\naway in storage, preserved for…? What? My daughter, perhaps, if such
\nthings become of interest to her. Or perhaps just for the sake of
\ncollection. I’m a magpie when it comes to clothes and other vintage
\narcana – I collect and I keep, never ever discarding – both because I
\nlove those things for their beauty and because I fear (a hangover from
\nthe loss of my grandmother’s treasures, no doubt) missing out on or
\nlosing something that should be treasured. <\/p>\n

Something like my grandmother’s wedding dress, which was kept in
\nthat attic and which I was never allowed to play with, for obvious
\nreasons. My grandmother didn’t have a happy marriage, but she was
\nfiercely proud of that dress, which was silk, her first real dress, her
\nfirst grown-up dress, a grown-up dress for a bride of eighteen. And so
\nit, unlike her other dresses, her furs, her jewelry, was off-limits for
\nplay. It was kept, sealed, in a musty old box that she never dared
\nopen; I could only imagine it, as I trailed my candy-sticky fingers
\nover the edges of that box, wishing that I could touch it, just once.
\nMy imagination was fueled by the one picture that she kept from her
\nwedding – a picture of her, alone, standing the garden of the house
\nthat she and her husband, my grandfather, would raise their family in.
\nWearing that dress, a vision in ivory silk, a starlet for one day.<\/p>\n

I miss that dress, even though I never once touched its hem. And I
\nthink that, perhaps, all of my rummaging habits can be traced back to
\nthat dress – that elusive garment that embodied, for my grandmother, a 
\nmoment of glamor in an otherwise pedestrian life and that came to
\nrepresent, for me, the power of a swath of fabric (and, indeed, the
\npower of a little bit of rhinestone\/Bakelite\/vintage anything) to
\ntransport. Magic.<\/p>\n

It would have been her 84th birthday today. I no longer have my grandma, but I have that picture of her in that dress, and that is no small thing.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Revised and adapted from an essay originally posted here<\/a>. Copyright Catherine Connors.<\/i><\/font><\/p>\n

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