Pajama musings

 

I was ironing my pajamas this morning. Yes! I do iron pajamas, sometimes, but only two pairs of pjs need ironing. They come out of the wash with uncomfortable wrinkles.

It started when we transferred from our home in Southern France to our home in Geneva, Switzerland. I forgotten my pjs.

My daughter, who was visiting, and I were on the main shopping street in downtown Geneva. I almost never shop there. Prices are ridiculous. A brand name of jeans can go for 100 CHF up to several hundred CHF. If I buy them at the French marché the cost would be 10 to 20% of that. 

I'll admit to being frugal. Some might say cheap, but I want the best bang for my franc or euro.

Llara and I passed a store that had pjs in the window. 

I should also explain, I despise shopping. Every minute in a store is stolen from my life.

A lovely sales girl, whom I later learned was from Morocco, was not the least pushy. 

Usually, when forced to shop, if I can't find something in minutes (seconds are better), I'm out of the store.This was different. I needed to look. The pjs were beautiful in color, design, material. Within five minutes, I found three pairs: a striped blue, a beige and a green that could double as a sweatsuit.

I took them to the cashier, when I realized that I hadn't checked price. It took control not to faint when the sales clerk said 1,012 CHF. That's 1,112US$. As a writer, who works mainly from home mainly in jeans, that's my wardrobe budget for years.

My first reaction was to cancel. My second was to pretend that this type of purchase was an every day thing. My debit card was approved. My husband was amazed when I told him. My usual reaction to his "we need to buy" is "we don't really need it."

However, two pairs needed ironing, which was what I did this morning. As I ran the iron over the cloth, I admired the workmanship. Even the buttons were so tightly sewed on that I was sure that it would take a jackhammer to remove them.

I couldn't help but wonder who made them. Was it some woman in a sweatshop being paid pennies or the equivalent in whatever currency of the country where she lived? Did she have kids to feed? Did she make enough to eat herself? What kind of place did she live in? 

I wished that I could meet the woman. Since everything I'd seen on sweatshops it was women who did the work, I was sure it was a woman.

As a person in a first world country, there's little I can do to change those women's lives. Since I buy as little as possible because I need and want for almost nothing, boycotting doesn't help.

Tonight, I will put on my ironed pjs, go to bed, perhaps read a bit, perhaps chat or cuddle with my husband, perhaps try and convince our dog he really needs to give us more room. The woman, who made my pjs, will probably be on her way to work, if she is not already there. I doubt if she has time and/or energy to wonder about people who will buy what she has made. I am sure she can't imagine what the buyer of her pj's life is like.

If we meet, I could tell her, it as an accident of birth that I live in the comfort I do, that my writing, my work, gives my life meaning and each day is not a struggle to survive. It is an accident of birth that she is where she is living as she is. 

As a writer, I think of so many potential novels and short stories, but time reality, limits what I can write. Side-by-side stories of a first and third world woman will never come through my laptop pushing out my other projects. Still, somewhere on the other side of the planet, is a woman who sits at a sewing machine making pjs that women like me will wear without ever recognizing the seamstress.