A pox, a pox on Emily Post!
… Is what I would say if I were an illiterate cowdog from Texas in the 1980s. “I’ll never be Miss Emily’s host,” but I do care, all the same.
When my elderly Great Grandma Jones moved to Montana years ago, I found a faded blue edition of Etiquette by Emily Post in a box of her books. My great grandma waved it away and said she didn’t care about it, send it to a thrift store.
But I had heard this book derided in Hank the Cowdog songs and various nonfiction books, so I saved the copy and read it all the way through with fascination.
The edition I read was published in 1944: mid-WWII. In a section with rules for throwing parties, a footnote informed me that due to wartime rationing, I was not advised to unfurl a red carpet down my front sidewalk to the curb where my guests would arrive driven by their chauffeurs.
Emily Post said when in doubt, wear your gray wool suit-dress instead of your evening wear. I think about that to this day.
It reminds me of a passage in Noel Streatfield’s Ballet Shoes about a resourceful found-family of three young sisters and their guardian Sylvia, her old nanny, Nana, and their boarders, trying to make a living in 1930s London.
Sylvia asks, “Do they look smart, Nana?”
Nana replies, “No, but they look neat.”
These past two weeks I’ve spent many hours sitting on the floor watching a show while I mend items of clothing.
A dog tore a cuff of my thrift store wool coat: the spot is now darned inside and out. Socks darned. A sweater darned. A skirt mended. A dress patched. A pair of corduroy pants patched. Almost all of these were acquired secondhand.
It can feel cozy to wear clothes with visibly mended areas. Or it can feel like you’re a hippie-dippie-homesteading-homeschooling-folk-music-listening-mother-of-many-grubby-children = not really youthful.
I like to wear mended clothing because it is congruent with my ideals.
But sometimes wearing mended clothing feels shabby.
Economically shabby.
Lately, I think maybe that’s a good exercise for my character. Biblical economic modesty. Repairing items when they’re affected by entropy and tending to them until they’re stronger, more durable, more colorful, more shabby, more resilient, more respected. They’re not smart, but they are neat.
After I read the book my impression of Emily Post was of a middle-aged woman who feels safest when all of life’s events are carried out in careful order with precision and dogma. A woman who looks back at the formal world of her childhood and is overwhelmed and frightened by the shifting and evolving world of her present.
I want to give Emily Post a hug.
“They sculpt the rock with the respect of one who cares for an aged parent; I’ve long wanted to see them work.”
“I had no idea you admired them so.”
“I admire all who can see into the mystery of things, who can divine from the plainness of what is—the beauty of what could be.”
—Celebrimbor and Elrond, Rings of Power S. 1 Ep. 2
I found this treasure last week when researching how to wash wool sweaters. At the end of it, I realized I’d been smiling for the whole fifteen-minute video.
He’s like Emily Post meets Mr. Rogers.
More life skills:
This quote encapsulates why I love to frequent my local antique malls:
“Sometimes when you’re doing this, you come across things that you might not necessarily buy, but that are just so exciting to see. Almost like being at a museum, where the things in the museum are actually for sale … it’s a thrill to just see them and to look at them, and if you wanted to you could pick them up and hold them, which you couldn’t do at a museum.”
—Rajiv Surendra in this video
In the past week, the enjoyment of daily life has walked alongside death, love, grief, friendship, numbness, hope, happiness, boredom, joy.
Feel all your feelings.
A Quote:
"It was all very well to be ambitious, but ambition should not kill the nice qualities in you."
— Noel Streatfeild, Ballet Shoes