Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.
Ephesians 4:2-3 (NIV)
Keeping What Is Already There
The costume store sits in the basement of a building the theater doesn’t own, a long run of rolling rack under a low ceiling, and it smells like cedar and old wool and a dry-cleaning fluid nobody has used since the nineties. She cut for a living before she came down here, and she’s run the basement since. She goes down the rack without reading tags and comes back with what she went for.
The rentals land in August, a truckload of bags, and the contract lets her take them in at the waist and let them out and nothing else, and every piece goes back the way it came. She’s been on the intake list since Monday. One of the bodices has a boning channel split and the steel pushed through the lining, and she finds it before anybody puts it on and photographs it against the ruler taped to her table. The most interesting object she will touch this week is a zipper.
Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. Humility and gentleness and patience come first, and then the keeping, and bearing with one another in love is done toward somebody in particular.
One body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. Paul says all seven in one breath, and the every effort he asks for is aimed at peace with the people already standing there.
Saturday the kid who comes in to steam works his way down the rack, and at the end of it he stops at her table and asks whether she’d show him a hand buttonhole in the fall, when the racks go slack. She tells him to bring his own needle and not to expect to enjoy the first four hundred.
A Prayer to Remember
Take the word patience away from me for a while, Father, until I can tell it apart from keeping my distance. I’ve made your command easy on myself by shrinking the room until there was nobody left in it to bear with. Put me back among the people I’ve been bearing with at arm’s length.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
