Repair

"I alone can(not) fix it"

I’m a summer baby, a July birthday, raspberry girl (since they always ripen around now and find their way to the top of my cakes), and more specifically celebrating this week.

I’m at the age now where I can stop counting, or have lost track. Far enough past the milestone year of 50 to discover that I’ve dropped into old-crone obscurity on the dating apps. Gone are the days only two years ago when I could snap up a 40-something; now it’s more like the weird 31-year-old who must be fake or with fetish, or a 65-year-old many states away. Men in my normal age bracket/nearby are often looking to dip their paws into younger jars, and they often admit they are still open to spawning new children with such ladies, which certainly rules me out.

It seems everyone left standing is partially broken. Including me.

We all require some repair—this week’s theme interspersed with lines from CK Williams’ Pulitzer prize winning (2000) poetry collection, Repair.

I believe how you looked was supposed to mean, something graver,
more substantial: I’d gaze at my poor face and think, “It’s still not
there.” Apparently I still do. What isn’t there? Beauty? Not likely.
Wisdom? Less. Is how we live or try to live supposed to embellish us? All
I see is the residue of my other, failed faces.
But maybe what we’re after is just a less abrasive regard: not “It’s still
not there,” but something like “Come in, be still.”

Repair, as defined by Oxford, is to: “fix or mend (a thing suffering from damage or a fault)”, or, as a noun: “the action of fixing or mending something (example: something is ‘beyond repair’)

Suffering from damage or a fault. Beyond repair. Those are strong words. We don’t want to assume flaws or damage necessarily entail pain, or that anything can be beyond redemption, but of course that happens more than it should.

Repair is the word that repeats in my head this birthweek, and in general is the theme of my summers. I love the heat. I languish here. It melts me into a slower state, which is what I need imposed on me via weather seasonally when my innate tendency is to always do too much. I can soften here in the stifling air, relax, rest, regroup. I’m still producing, but with more pleasure. Without the stressors of school and related Chromebook crap, my kids and I get along better. Yes, there’s still work for me most days, but it’s looser, quieter. People are on vacation rotation. I can finally clean my desk drawers.

At home, in the weeks leading up to my birthday, I have been bingeing on new old clothes shopping. I rarely buy anything new since I prefer thrifting (both for economic/environmental reasons as well as finding the fashions way more interesting). But second-hand is random; you can’t go in with an agenda. Whereas I have an image in mind that I want to fulfill of this edgier/artsy/more chic lady of a certain age (who perhaps doesn’t dress her age? when will someone tell her?), wearing only four colors from select indie/sustainable brands, everything excessively versatile and comfortable but with notable unique details. And so I had a Poshmark spree inviting a long series of individual packages to my house, which I’m not sure saved me any money—I received one item “New With Tags” whose original price I was surprised to find out was less than what I just paid—but no matter, I saved the earth, right? Well, sure, while UPS in their big brown box trucks forged all kinds of loony zigzags across the US to get my parcels to my porch.

One of the items arrived with a little tear in the seam. A simple black dress by AllSaints with a “raw” hem and a leg slit that I guess went rogue, since it seems like the slit ripped further than intended. I won’t return this; I will mend. Because I’m a person who reduces/reuses/recycles and most importantly, repairs, and if I can’t do it, there’s so many people within arm’s length who can.

I am addicted to the Repair Cafés that happen regularly now in Sleepy Hollow and nearby villages and towns. Local offshoots of an amazing international movement of fixing things rather than throwing them into the landfills, and at these roving community events earnest volunteers are positioned at stations full of tools like “electronics,” “textiles,” “bikes,” and manned by people such as the guy they call the “glue guy.” Together they can fix—or at least advise how to fix—almost anything you drag in. Lucky me, I live around the corner from the Senior Center where they host this on occasion. I have a pile I’ve been accruing since the last Repair Café of the neglected things in need of TLC. A sole that requires Shoe-Goo, a copper lamp with a hole that should be soldered, a jacket shredded from decades of overuse, a chair leg that requires I don’t know what.

When I was growing up, there was my dad. Elmer could fix anything. As a mechanical engineer by trade, he was smart and versatilely handy, but I think the secret sauce was that he was a hoarder. He wouldn’t call himself that—it was my mom who was pegged as the hoarder parent. This was loaded with gender stereotypes. His hoard was practical and manly and necessary, because he was the important one who harbored every tool. Unlimited items you could rifle through for repair. All the possible ingredients to make or fix almost anything I imagined or brought down to the large unsorted man cave basement. But my mom: she was in charge of the nooks and crannies of the main floors, there overstuffing closets and drawers with the excessive accumulation of clothes and breadties and plastic bags and yogurt containers. Her abundance fell on your head when you opened a kitchen cabinet to find peanut butter. He had the big car-grease items; she had the little frivolous food-stained. She was the one with the problem.

But it is true—you can do anything with the right tools. I could totally fix that shoe if I happened to have the Goo. I don’t want to buy that though because it would dry out before I used it a second time. Instead, here is this roomful of Elmers. Kind, talented folks (not all men) like Bill, who couldn’t help me on the first go with my watering can but generously said he had the right glue (soldering glue, who knew!) at home and could do my can there. It came out perfectly and even polished.

Here’s the real trick: no one person has to hoard all these repair supplies or know how to fix everything when we can come together as a collective to pool the skills and mechanicals. It’s a beautiful gesture of an event that makes everyone happy (helpers and helped), so much so that award-winning journalist Jennifer B. Wallace came to one Sleepy Hollow Repair Café to interview both guests and volunteers for the book she was writing on mattering. Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose, may or may not include some quotes from me and Bill, while he wrangled my little watering can, when it’s released in 2026. From her website, Mattering is

a landmark book that introduces a transformative new framework to confront the loneliness, burnout, and lack of purpose so many of us face today… Wallace makes an urgent case: mattering—the feeling that we are valued and have an opportunity to add value—is a core human need, as essential to our well-being as food and water. And yet, in today’s world, that fundamental need is going unmet, with perilous consequences. As mental and social health crises surge, we often blame social media, the pace of modern life, and polarizing politics. But beneath these issues lies a deeper crisis, what Wallace calls “an erosion of mattering.”

So much so that the book will segue into an Institute (her website says “launching soon” and a Movement.

Back to CK Williams:

“Lost Wax”

My love gives me some wax,
so for once instead of words
I work at something real;
I knead until I see emerge
a person, a protagonist;
but I must overwork my wax,
it loses its resiliency,
comes apart in crumbs.

I take another block;
this work, I think, will be a self;
I can feel it forming, brow
and brain; perhaps it will be me,
perhaps, if I can create myself,
I'll be able to amend myself;
my wax, though, freezes
this time, fissures, splits.

Words or wax, no end
to our self-shaping, our forlorn
awareness at the end of which
is only more awareness.
Was ever truth so malleable?
Arid, inadhesive bits of matter.
What might heal you? Love.
What might make you whole? Love. My love.

Contributing to the collective happiness is how we can all feel better. Not through my Poshmark purchases (which are thrilling if only temporarily) but helping. We all need help, we all have healing to do, we all have something to share in this haphazard journey lined with damaged people and our frail possessions.

For my dear friend’s 50th, a fellow Cancer crab, I drove south for once to land near Philly for a retreat with her girlfriends in a Russian/Turkish bathhouse. Five of us in robes skipping and tittering between scalding and icy rooms, tubs, and showers while Russian men swatted themselves with eucalyptus branches in the steam, some bits of leaves flying and sticking to me. We took a break to eat dumplings, potatoes, and smoked fish on brown bread from the odd menu poolside, getting to know each other instantly and deeply as you do under such weird circumstances. Skin pink, faces glowing with health and the invigorating shock of holy-crap-that’s-cold water.

Each of these moms had some difficult story of something they were navigating of late—a husband, a cheating boyfriend, a divorce, a surly teenager, a job on top of these jobs. And yet here we are in the prime of our lives where we’re wiser and stronger, together.

I feel fine at this point in my life (better than ever!) but I’d like to widen my repair net beyond my own suburban house or rural property with their endless physical concerns (currently: water damage in the RV, drainage ditches to clear for the private road) to nurture relationships. To find the time to issue more kind gestures. Offer that olive branch to those across the divide—or if I’m going to follow the spa routine, I can bundle the branches into what they call a venik they can slap themselves with to improve circulation, exfoliate, enjoy some aromatherapy, and stimulate ever more well-being.

This never-ending pile of things needing repair: some items go to the Café, some I can fix myself if I charge the batteries of the Ryobi set. Some matters go to the therapist, some should be journaled, some shared here. Then there are those things that can just be loved as they are—like the cat down the road we care for sometimes who has no eyes. The sweetest furball who will simply thrive playing if you crinkle the toy in front of him.