Cut to the chase. What you don’t know can hurt you—or at least hurt the sweater.

Book learning (facts, figures, concepts) is a wonderful thing. But learning from books lacks the punch of real-world learning. Not knowing or understanding how things work can cause small and inconsequential damage. Or the damage may be drastic and irreparable.

Today I will relate a story about a sweater. A sweater is inconsequential. But in a world where our culture celebrates stupidity, the story does illustrate how not knowing “stuff” puts us in a dangerous position.

Long ago, I found myself ringing in New Year 1982 in the Swiss Alps, luxuriating in a chalet-style guest house surrounded by clouds of dazzling snow, razor-sharp fresh air, and the drama of pine boughs and Christmas lights draped everywhere. It was hard to believe I was on the same landmass as the city of Leningrad where I’d spent the previous five months living in what then was the ludicrously grimy dorm of the Leningrad Conservatory.

How could an airplane ride for a mandated holiday break sweep away so many difficult realities and land me in a spot where beauty, efficiency, and charm characterized everything? Not to mention I was doggone tired and hungry too: reliable food resources are never a feature of a Communist society, plus battling through layers of the obscure, mean-spirited Communist bureaucracy had worn me out.

In the basement of this Swiss chalet stood washing machines for the guests’ use. High-tech front-loaders, they were different and far fancier than anything I had seen on the American market. Next to them was a clothesline, as Europeans do not like to eat up super-expensive electricity doing something that the air will do for free.

So, down I trotted to the Keller (cellar), laundry bag in hand, wondering how any stairwell, much less a basement stairwell, could be so pristine. The dials of the washer puzzled me, used as I was to agitator washers with one twist knob marked “hot/warm/cold,” I found multiple dials, including one with unfamiliar symbols and another with numbers stretching from 0 to 90.

What were these numbers, I wondered? They couldn’t indicate temperature: who would wash something at below freezing? Instead of asking, I decided this dial regulated some kind of washing-intensity on a scale from 1 to 90. And, of course, I chose 90. I wanted my clothes clean, clean, clean.

In went my clothes—mostly utilitarian things, but at the last minute I added three sweaters, including the cutest sweater I had ever owned in my life. I appreciated this sweater so much because on some days, it was the only cheery thing I saw during those first months of research in Leningrad.

Of course, you know what happened. Each sweater shrank, but my cute sweater shrank in the oddest way: the arms stretched long, while the body (filled with cotton threads embroidering the rows of little sweaters) shriveled up drastically. You could say I fried it. Or at least boiled it.

Yes, I had learned the Celsius system from books. In fact, my generation was probably the last group of school kids to be told that the US’s shift to the Metric System was “just around the corner.”

But I had no idea how the metric system for temperature really worked. Kilos I did figure out trying to shop in the unpleasant Soviet stores whose absurdities are inconceivable to anyone not experiencing them. But the only Celsius temperatures I grasped were the single-digit plus and minus numbers broadcast on my dorm-room radio that translated from cold to colder.

And it’s not like we had a washing machine back in the conservatory dorm. Oh no! We washed our clothes in buckets. Guys in the dorm (remember, these were musicians) would boil their white tux shirts in metal soup pots on top of the rickety gas stoves placed at either end of the long halls. These stoves stood in what were loosely described as kitchens (you don’t want to know). Plus, this “shirt-boiling” would happen late at night, after concert performances, so it was not unusual for the shirts’ owners to fall asleep (perhaps aided by vodka) and forget all about the boiling shirts. Yes, the water boiled out, the pans scorched, and a burning smell filled the halls, filtering under our peculiarly solid room doors (I suspect the whole building had been turned into dismal communal apartments after the Bolshevik Revolution). Fortunately, someone always smelled the burning in time and raced down to cut off the gas (more than once that was me).

But back to my high-tech washing machine in Switzerland. I took the clothes out, and my face fell. All of the sweaters had shrunk, but my darling sweater looked like clothing for a circus clown. I stretched it and stretched it, hanging it up on the line in a futile hope that it might normalize as it dried.

Then (here’s where the story gets embarrassing), I stomped up to the lovely parlor that doubled as a front desk for the chalet. “Your machine messed up my sweater,” I ha-rumped loudly. Well, my German at that point was lousy, so I have no idea what I said. I suspect it was not terribly polite and I remember crying.

You know, I wasn’t crying about the sweater. Ok, I was crying because I loved that sweater. And I cried probably because I sensed it had been my fault. But mostly, I was crying over the cruel contrast in living standards between the good people I was coming to know in Russia who survived solely by gaming the Soviet system in ways unimaginable to their American counterparts, and the people living in that picturesque Swiss village where even the basement stairwells sparked.

The manager bluntly explained that I must have set the water too hot. I did not want to accept the blame: it had to have been the machine. So I stomped back down, wrenched the sweater off the line, brought it to the parlor, and held it up as Exhibit A. “See!” I barked. “Could water temperature make this happen?” Sehr wahrscheinlich, he said (very probably).

By the next morning my ignorance about washing clothes in the Celsius system had been widely explained to me by American guests staying there. Chastened, I tossed the sweater into the rubbish bin. Recently, I rediscovered this photo and was surprised by the full force of emotions it evoked.

Being ignorant of basic things is unpleasant and risky. Living as we do in a world where so many people fail at mental math and lack knowledge of traffic rules (or simply ignore them), ignorance is dangerous. Few people read at any depth and many seem content living in a screen-induced fog. Alas, the potential for ignorance to dismantle the classic values on which our civilization is built magnifies with each passing year.

So, what is the moral of this sweater story? First, hand wash that which is special. And that admonition applies to far more than sweaters. Hand wash special keepsakes. Hand wash special friendships. Hand wash opportunities that you have been blessed to receive. Give these things considerate care and do what you can to keep them safe and whole.

Beyond that, fight back against the cloud of ignorance around us. Find out how things you use in daily life really work (and maybe even the history of how they came to be). When possible, learn how to fix them. (Maestro YouTube, in one of his better manifestations, is ready to show you!). Try to supplement book learning with as many logistically involved and instructive experiences as possible.

And teach kids to do real things. If they are old enough, get them to chop the garlic and carrots rather than buy pre chopped veggies in packages. Teach them to clean an oven. Let them figure out how to make simple repairs on the toilet, like restoring a broken chain. Kids are curious.

Plus, and this is a message that I am directing at myself, believe me, if something goes wrong, yea it is possible that we ourselves are at fault. We may have double-booked the reservation; we may have put the item in the bottom rack of the dishwasher, despite the warning. Our own ignorance, oversight, or distractibility could have caused the problem, rather than the anonymous people or forces we are so quick to blame.

So that is my sweater story. Bitter then, bittersweet now, like most of life’s bumps. But like most stories from our past, still offering lessons today.