Constellations and Fabric

 Today I was reading about the closure of all the remaining Joann Fabrics stores nationwide. I got sad thinking about this, because I imagined how sad it would make make my late mother to hear this. Going to the "fabric store" just to look at cloth and touch it was one of the activities that still gave her joy in her final years in Fort Collins, when she was largely confined to a motorized scooter. The thought of it made her exited.

I associate my mother so strongly with fabric stores. In Ames, there was a shopping center a, an early 1970s version of a strip mall, right where Grand Avenue came down and intersected Lincoln Way. The anchor store was department store that started out as, well I can't remember, but it converted to a Target at some point when Target was largely just an upper Midwest thing. It was very common for us to go there, park in the large parking lot, and then go into Target and just look around at things. We kids would be cut loose to do whatever, and in there I marveled at all the things that world could provide.

Stretching south from Target were a line of smaller stores in the strip mall, some of which I remember. My favorite one, the one where I spent the most time was "Walt's," which was a pipe and tobacco shop that was also a book store. Before they built the Mall in the mid-1970s, it was the only book shop in town. It was mostly paperbacks on racks. It also had a huge selection of magazines. "Getting a maggie," as my dad called it, was one of his favorite activities, so we often walked down from Target along the sidewalk to Walt's together. He typically bought Popular Science-type magazines, or science fiction stories, which was his own reading passion.

My favorite sections were the comic books. I learned all the superheroes there, the way people are obsessed about now, in Hollywood movies. I don't have any adult fascination with superheroes perhaps because I did all that in my boyhood and moved on.

A bookstore like Walt's---with its magazines and paperbacks---was as close as one got to the Internet and web back then. The books conveyed all the pop trends of those eras---psychology and current events--brought to a small town in Iowa in a way that would never have been available otherwise. My young mind tried to absorb it all because I was so curious about the world, the way I peruse my X feed today to do the same thing, but at a million times the speed and volume. How simple the world was back then.

After Walt's there was a tiny shop that served as the State Liquor Store. Back then in Iowa, if wanted anything else besides beer, you had to buy it in the State Liquor Store. This drove my (maternal) grandfather nuts, having to cope with this, and was one of the many reasons he found life in a small Midwestern town so antithetical to his needs and wants. Of course the selection of wines was very limited. He was ever grumbling about the tyranny of it all. 

By the way, I doubt my paternal grandparents (the Trumps) ever set foot in there. They were teetotalling Presbyterians, although they never made a big deal of that. They just didn't drink. I remember seeing them drink liquor only once in my life, and that was using some special crystal glasses they had brought back on one of their trips to Europe, when they used to run a travel agency.

Grandpa Don and Grandma Kate always had "booze" however. When five o'clock rolled around, they were usually on their patio with a bourbon and smoking camels for their daily game of cribbage. I'm pretty sure they did this daily until the last day they spent together, which was Christmas Eve 1993 in Florida.

My grandmother would say to me, in regard to booze, "you're a little short in the pants for that." 

The last store at the end of that strip mall (we didn't use that term back then), was the fabric store. My mother would typically head there after Target to peruse the offerings, and I loved accompanying her there, because I loved doing stuff with mom when I was a kid. I remember the fabric store being full of those vertical towers of fabric. I'd follow my mom around as went through the store. If buying a "maggie" at Walt's was my dad's thing, then for my mom it was buying a new dress pattern. She had so many of them, and even in her later years, before she became immobile, one would see a pile of the manilla pattern paper in her sewing room, as she called it. My sisters both sewed as well, although not with the same passion.

Back then it was so common for women to sew. When I was cleaning out my parent's garage in 2010-2011 (more appropriately just organizing it, as I threw out almost nothing), I found many old patterns in cardboard boxes and brought them inside for my mother to look at. Look what I found in the garage! It was such a delight to do that for her.

When she died, my sister made sure to hoard all of the ones my mom had left behind, as many were now valuable for vintage and collector purposes, and of course, they were an artifact that so much the essence of our mother.

Whenever we went to the fabric store in Ames, I would always seek out my favorite fabric, which was a deep blue cloth that was a star map with constellations and their names on it. How I loved that fabric, because I loved stars and astronomy. It was as if it were made just for me. My mother knew that and would always say she would make something for me with that fabric, but she never got around to it, which is ok by me. It was my thing, that fabric, and I just wanted to go in and look at it.

Just now, writing this, I went to Google and looked up constellation fabric. I found no shortage of results, but none of them are the vintage 1970s one I remember, which had the names of the constellations. 

My parents struggled so much with many things in life, right up to the end. I found it a beautiful consolation that they got to spend their last years living in a nice house in Fort Collins that they owned, and that among other things, there was a Barnes and Noble just a few blocks away. They often drove over there, and my father would head to the magazine section to looks at maggies, as he still called them.

One day, around the time I was living with them and cleaning up their garage, I had gone over to that Barnes and Noble and was sitting in the coffee shop near the front windows, next to the magazine section. While I was there, I saw my parents walking through the parking lot. My dad came into the magazine section and was perusing the computer magazines, which had become his go-to genre. He was only a few feet away from me where I sat, but he didn't notice me. I didn't say anything. I just watched him, as if watching a scene from a memory, which has now become a memory. It was such a beautiful moment that captured so much of my life that I didn't want to disturb it. When I got home and saw them there, I didn't even tell them I saw them. Now it is so vivid in my mind as one of my favorite memories.

Seeing my parents in the nice house they had spent their life achieving, in a beautiful Colorado town with its commercial comforts that delighted them, I was cured of a lifetime of discontent about the American way of life---about suburbia and commercialism. How I had railed against the corruption of all that! After that I became a defender of the very things I had one hated. 

I just now went to Google Maps and looked for the old shopping center in Ames that had once been our destination so many times in the 1970s. Of course it has been redeveloped, but it is still a shopping complex. Walt's is long gone. Those kind of pipe-book-magazine shops have gone mostly extinct, although there was one in downtown Fort Collins until a few years ago, where my friend Thor bought his comics to add to his collection.

As far as the fabric store in Ames where I used to marvel at the constellation fabric, according to the map I just brought up, it looks to have become a Joann's, at least for now. Soon it will be gone and fabric stores will pass into history, except for specialty shops and boutiques. They will no longer be a common sight in America. Young women no longer sew, except for ones who make it a dedicated niche hobby. The culture of sewing has died out among young women. 

Seeing the notice about Joann's going bankrupt and shutting down all their stores is like seeing a part of my mother fading away from the landscape at last. I'm glad that Joann's survived here. It would have broken her heart not to be able to go look at fabric.