Meg's Commonplace Book

Lucy Rabinowitz Chris Singler English 11-6 2/23/09 #scarves

Scarves When I was ten years old, my mother went on a trip that took her around the

world in a month. She started in San Francisco, and from there flew to Tokyo, Bangkok, Rome and finally ended up in Positano. She left me and my brothers in the care of my father for the first two weeks, but during the second half of her trip, we were passed around among family members and friends. When she left, she knew it would be hard on my brothers, ages 3 and 7, and me, so she set up all these little things that might comfort us when we missed her during the month. She recorded a tape of her singing our bedtime songs, wrote us notes and tried to call us as frequently as she could. These little reminders of her usually just made me more sad and made me long for her even more. Instead of finding tenderness and comfort in her voice heard through a tape, the grainy quality and impossibly consistent repetition just evoked the painful reality of the absence of her physical form. The place where I sought my comfort when I became unbearably sad, was the window sill next to my mom’s bed. The window sill had a mountain of scarves piled on it and I would plunge into the mountain. I would dig my hands down into the scarves until I was up to my neck in silk, cashmere and assorted hand-woven materials. Then, I would bury my face in these soft fabrics and inhale deeply, letting my mother’s scent become the air I breathed. Her smell stayed strong the entire month; these scarves became my refuge and my ticket to wherever on earth my mother was at the time. This mysterious connection I made between these scarves and the essence of my mother is still in tact to this day.

As well as the scent that the scarves held, they were symbols of fashion and style. Sometimes I took them off of the window sill and played with them, my attempt to unlock all of the glamour and sophistication that they held. I tied a pink silk scarf with printed designs in a knot around my neck, puffed up my lips and talked “like zis dahling.” I wrapped a pashmina1 around my head and shoulders and concealed my face up to my eyes and wiggled my pre-pubescent hips. I draped a colorful knit Italian scarf around the front of my neck and let the ends hang down my back to the floor to pretend I was at a high-class ball in my evening gown.

Perhaps our perception of style is hereditary because the first woman I saw wear a scarf with immeasurable amounts of grace was my great- grandmother. She was the epitome of wealth to me, and along with that wealth came high fashion. Nana lived in an apartment on Rittenhouse Square. The apartment was furnished with old, fragile, expensive things, translated to me and my brothers as things we could not touch, breathe on, look at. The best way to describe everything in that apartment is “put together.” My Nana would be dressed to the nines regardless of what the activity for the day was. She could just sit inside all day and be done up in a beige St. John Sport2 suit, chunky sparkling jewelry, heavy make-up and, what literally and figuratively tied the outfit together, an Hermés3 scarf. My grandmother and mother have developed slightly less expensive tastes in scarves, but keep their style similar to that of my great-grandmother.

I remember when I first started to wear scarves, in a moment of discovering my own worldliness about a year after my mother’s excursion. I was on vacation in Paris with my mother and grandmother and something in the air must have stirred the chic inside of me. We spent our days walking along the Rue de Rivoli and visiting museums in somewhat chilly weather. One day I asked my mother if I could borrow her striped scarf4 because I was cold. She gladly handed it over; she must have sensed the curiosity in my eye about what the source of the hype about scarves in our family was. In that one day, I experimented with probably every way you could wear a scarf. I wrapped it once around my neck, I tossed it over my shoulder, I let it hang down in front of me, I tied it, I knotted it, I twisted it. I was enraptured with how French I felt, and thus, how classy I felt.

When I returned to the Unites States, I found all of my delusions of French grandeur had vanished behind me with the Eiffel tower, but the chic sophistication of scarves on the streets of America was no longer invisible to me.

In my middle school career, I experimented with different scarves in order to develop my own taste. I found a gray Gap Kids scarf with snowflakes on it, a red handkerchief with blue roses on it that had been one of two gifts my great-grandmother had ever given me, and a dark blue fleece ski scarf that my dad bought for me on the slopes the previous year when I had complained about the cold. I dismissed all of these scarves as too childish and went straight for where any tweenage5 girl goes to look older: my mother’s closet. My friends all borrow their mother’s clothes, shoes, socks. My mother and I don’t share a shoe size or a shirt size, but I have always been able to borrow her scarves. I started by wearing all of her solid colored, classic, traditional scarves, playing it safe in public. In the private of her bedroom I still danced with signores Missoni and Pucci.

From my mother’s collection also came a large portion of my JAP6 education. I learned about labels and what they meant. My mother does not spend much on any one item of clothing, she doesn’t splurge often on dresses or nice jeans. Instead, she will indulge in colorful patterns and soft textiles. Why spend $200 on a suit that can be worn to one special occasion a year when you can spend just as much on a scarf with a color palette that fits 50% of your wardrobe? I learned about the social significance of a Burberry scarf and what any tiny piece of that tan plaid can do for outward appearance.