Don’t pin your hopes for good day on jewelry
By Alicia Blaisdell-bannon
January 13, 2008
Cape Cod Times, MA
You know how I can tell when it’s going to be a particularly rough day?
My jewelry tells me so.
On good days, putting on necklaces, bracelets, watches and pins is an afterthought. On days that are likely to go downhill in some way, it’s like starting the day by dropping an anvil on your foot.
How long do you figure it should take, on average, to pin a sparkly scottie-dog brooch to your sweater? Thirty seconds? A minute? Two, tops? That’s my guess: Two minutes, tops. And that’s allowing for the time it takes to remove the pin because it’s too far out toward your sleeve.
It’s such a mindless little task.
And yet, every couple of weeks, it seems to me to require the concentration of a heart surgeon easing gently out of your artery after placing a shunt.
Except, if I were your heart surgeon, you’d be, well, dead.
Because, every couple of weeks, a pin gets the best of me. As I write this on Tuesday night, I am recalling the idiotic scene early this morning as I tried to pin first a silver rosebud brooch and then, after I had set that complicated piece of jewelry aside (resisting the impulse to hurl it against the wall), the aforementioned scottie-dog onto the right side of my plain cotton cardigan.
It’s important that I mention the plain-cotton factor because I don’t want you to get sidetracked imagining me attempting to insert a pin through heavy-wale corduroy or some complicated multilayered, woolen sweater knit by my Aunt Maeve in County Cork.
No, this could not have been simpler: Just me, in a fairly well-lit bedroom in front of
a reasonably clean mirror, trying to achieve closure with a decently sized dog pin.
Well, first it seemed to be on the wrong side. (Should the dog be looking out at the world or in at you? In at me seemed kind of mocking at that moment.) Then it wasn’t straight. Then it was too far out. Then too far in. Finally, when the placement problem was taken care of, I found I was simply unable to get the actual pin part in the latch. I had had the same problem with the rosebud. And let me just say this: Why don’t they make these things universal? I mean, a pin latch should always be open on one side and closed on the other. Is that too much to ask in a world where we can store the Library of Congress on a disk the size of a nickel?
After I finally conquered the pin, there was the matter of the bracelet that was tangled up with the silver chain in the jewelry box. I gave it two or three minutes, then gave up. I reached for my plain brown watch — dead battery. By 7:45 a.m., if you added together the bracelet, the rose pin, the dog pin, the silver chain and the watch, my jewelry was definitely winning.
But what does it want? Me to leave it alone so it can party when I’m gone? Me to slow down and focus? (No, wait, that’s my mother.) I’ll never know. It’s too impossible to pin down.
Alicia Blaisdell-Bannon can be reached at 508-862-1192 or at ablaisdell-bannon@capecodonline.com. In the Mid-Cape area, watch “Homefront,” a half-hour conversation about all things domestic, Mondays at 9:30 a.m. and Tuesdays at 7:30 p.m. on Channel 17.
