Nothing has changed except my shoe size, really. Photo: Mom or Dad c. 1981.
In the newspaper office yesterday morning, Sophie asked me the best question I have ever been asked.
I was at my computer and Sophie was at her computer and she turned to me with her beautifully lipsticked red lips and her gorgeous tortoise shell glasses and she addressed me as “Miss Mary” because that is how Sophie often addresses me and I love that and she said:
“Miss Mary,” she said, “I made paleo chocolate-banana muffins last night. I have them in my knapsack. Would you like one?”
I know what you’re thinking. “That’s the best question you’ve ever been asked?? What about ‘Will you marry me?’ What about ‘What do you want for Christmas, little girl?'”
No, no, no. Sure, the proposal was great, but we know how that turned out. And Santa? Please. He’s creepy and you never really get what you want, anyway. What you want for Christmas is for peace on Earth and to be deeply, purely, supremely happy forever, which is impossible. No, a question can’t be perfect unless the answer is a) easy to give and b) certain not to ruin lives, regardless of what that answer is. Let’s look at Sophie’s question again:
“I made paleo chocolate-banana muffins last night. I have them in my knapsack. Would you like one?”
Saying yes to this is easy because Sophie’s baked goods are made of unicorns and nutrition. But even if I didn’t want to eat one of these (perfect-for-my-ruined-guts) muffins, no lives would be ruined. So, you see? A perfect question.
When I took a bite of that muffin, I broke into the biggest smile. I actually started laughing, that’s how good it was. Its consistency? Angelic. The chocolate-to-banana flavor relationship? Harmonious. My only complaint? Too small.
How I needed that muffin moment! How I needed Sophie’s unicorns and nutrition. I was coming out of my funk and this was the final, gentle push. I know, I know: It was a freakin’ muffin. But the timing. The timing, you guys.
Eating that baked good — it took three bites and then I licked the paper — I felt like a baby trying chocolate for the first time. That’s how great. And I knew about that feeling because of the picture you see above.
That’s me up there, out at the farm in Iowa, in the Yellow House. I’m pretty sure the photo is capturing my first chocolate experience, though Mom could say for sure. When I ate Sophie’s muffin yesterday, I was instantly reminded of this photo of myself — there’s actually a series of them. I emailed Mom for the picture, apologizing for the random request. But I felt the only way for me to express my gratitude to Sophie and her gift was to show her that picture, show her how she gave me more than a baked good. She gave me a memory of joy.
Mom wrote back right away:
“Hi, honey. Mark and I just arrived on Washington Island…but I have that picture on my hard drive. Tell Sophie hi. Love, Mom.”
An atlas of Missouri drawn in 1871 by R.A. Campbell. This was the best I could do; not a lot of pictures taken of farm gals like Nancy, which is very sad, no? Image: Wikipedia.
I’ve been a little maudlin lately and you’ve all been very kind about it.
My impulse is to apologize for getting boo-hooey, wingeing on about being sick, being vague, and feeling overwhelmed. But I’m one of those people who tends to apologize when someone else bumps directly into me and I’ve been told that’s bad. (Sorry.) So I won’t apologize for being in a bit of a blue, sentimental place lately. I’ll just tell you that I very, very much appreciate you patting my arm and waiting for it to pass (thanks for all the comments and emails, guys, holy cow) and I’ll tell you that I’m pretty sure this particular mini-Blue Period is done.
I owe it all to Nancy Holman.
I’m researching Log Cabin quilts right now for an Exciting Project and I would like to share with you something that I read this morning that popped me out of my funk on contact. It is a passage taken from the “work diary” of this Mrs. Holman, a Missouri homesteader in the 1860s and 1870s. At one point, she describes her chores in full. These are her chores:
“Shearing sheep and washing the wool; twisting thread; making and dyeing yarn; spinning flax and tow; weaving cloth; planting and tending the garden and preserving its produce; rendering lard and making soap and candles; watering and milking the cows; slaughtering the hogs; picking cotton; sewing carpet rags; making baskets and brooms; and, of course, maintaining the routine of cleaning and scouring floors and furniture, as well as washing, ironing, cooking, and sewing.”
If you’re like me, right now your eyes are very big and you are feeling a mixture of deep horror and wild admiration. You may be shaking your head and thinking to yourself, “None of the problems that I have would exist if I had to work that hard doing all those things every single day.”
I’m with you. Who has time to worry if her jeans look cute if she’s got a hog to slaughter and a broom to make? Penpals and stubborn head colds? Please! Get to rendering that lard and spin some flax. Get over it!
In our ways, of course, we are all as busy as Nancy. I’m serious! We’re as busy as any humans ever have been, but there’s no arguing that things we’re busy with are slightly different now and require less literal blood and sweat. We may feel this or that type of way about the things we have to do in our lives that aren’t 100% fun — those feeling are valid — but I for one am very, very grateful that I do not have to make my own soap. Some people would argue that I might find deep happiness, making my own soap. They can go ahead and argue that. I wonder if they have ever smelt lard as it renders. I have. It is not good.
Anyway, thanks, Nancy. I needed to get out of my head and you did that for me.
Chicago’s Wabash Avenue as seen from Washington Street. Photo by John Carbutt (1832-1905.) Image: Wikipedia.
Yesterday, I drove almost to the Iowa border to give a lecture for a lovely audience in Morrison, Illinois. The lecture went great, I met 116 wonderful people, and I very much enjoyed my time on the road. Driving 2.5 hours there and 2.5 back, even though it rained almost the whole way, gave me some much needed thinking time. It’s hard to multitask when you’re driving; you just have to cruise. It was nice to cruise.
The car I was driving was a rental. I’ve mentioned before, I don’t own a car, because unless you absolutely have to have one, if you can avoid owning a car in the city, you should probably avoid it. But by the time I got back downtown, the Hertz location was closed. This wasn’t a surprise: Carmen told me I’d have to return the car the next morning.
I parked my little red Ford Focus in the lot near my house and paid the overnight parking fee. My voucher would expire at 7:27 a.m., so when I went to bed last night, I set my alarm for 6:30 a.m. to give myself plenty of time to have some tea and get down to the lot to purchase either a new voucher or get the car moved to a different parking spot until it was time to take it back to Hertz. This was the plan. (See what I mean about having a car in the city? Bleh!)
But because I am behind on sleep, I hit my snooze button…multiple times. When I finally realized it was way past time to get up, I did not have time to make my tea and have a cup of it before I needed to go down and deal with Little Miss Focus. This made me very, verygrumpy. Usually when I wake, before I do anything — before I scratch my ribs or yawn or rub the sleep from the ol’ peepers — I roll out of bed, stand up, and go directly into the kitchen to put the kettle on. I don’t use the bathroom. I don’t check my phone. I don’t even look out the window to see if the world fell down while I was sleeping. My first impulse is make sure tea is on the way. Once the burner’s on, other things are possible. Barely.
Yeah, well, that wasn’t gonna happen this morning. With grunts and protestations that could put your grumpiest, orneriest Grampa to shame, I hollered and shoved my feet into my sneakers, stabbed my arms through my jacket, threw my wallet into my pocket, stuffed my keys into my pocket and went down the elevators and out the back of the building to deal with the (blinkin’) car.
I got down there and got right inside because it was raining, of course. I sat there. I took some deep breaths. I thought about how I was about to pay $12 for more of parking only to turn back around in a couple hours and take it to Hertz. I sighed and thought about how my Tea Moment was already sort of ruined. I thought, “Fons, why not just take the dang thing back right now?” And I decided, after rubbing my forehead a little while, that that is what I would do. I could get some tea at the Peet’s across the street and just be done with it. I didn’t have makeup on. I hadn’t showered. But as long as I didn’t see anyone I knew, it was the way to go.
After dropping the car off, I stepped out of the Hertz parking garage and found the rain had stopped. It was just barely 8:00 a.m. The city was so…calm. I had a nice cup of tea in my hand and — this is important — I didn’t have a purse or anything with me. My wallet was in my pocket. I had my sneakers on. It was a straight shot down State Street to my home. (Later, when I looked it up on Google’s map, I learned it was a 1.4 mile walk. Nothing, really.)
I sort of cocked my head and went, “Hm!” And I just walked home. In the morning, with nothing but my thoughts and the wwwwsssssssshhhhhhhh of the occasional street sweeper on a cross street or the trundle of the El trains crossing the river. I saw the homeless folks on State sleeping in the doorways; it was still quiet enough for them to stay in their strange nests. I saw a couple joggers. I saw some cops. It was beautiful to be there, unfettered, in my city.
When it happens that I am up and out and walking in the morning — it happens when I have, say, a rental car to return — I am reminded how much I love to walk in the morning. I did it on New Year’s Day, actually, and I swore then I’d try to do it more.
My tea ritual is so ingrained. It’s rote. I love my morning tea. It’s been my morning thing for a good ten years. Ten years! But the sweetness of early ambulation, the freedom and perspective of the walk down State Street this morning, it’s stayed with me all day.
And so, to you, I am going to make a promise: Starting tomorrow, for one week, I am going to take my tea outside in the morning. I’m going to walk, you guys. Half-hour or so. The weather is nice enough to try. Let’s see what happens.
The Post Office, by David Gilmour Blythe, c.1865. Image: Wikipedia.
I waxed on about my penpal yesterday and today, I’ll wax off. (That means I’ll wrap it up. I had to make the joke!)
The question posed on a postcard from my mystery penpal asked if there was more to life than pure biology. And I said I’d answer today. But when I sat down to write, I remembered that I don’t tackle spiritual/religious topics on the ol’ PG, as a rule — it’s just too personal a topic, I guess — so I am going to hereby back out of the question.
What I will do, however, is list ten things that I believe are pretty wonderful:
a marmalade kitten
warming your toes by a fire after coming in from a blizzard
laughter through tears
sisters
a top-shelf, perfectly made margarita (make mine up, with salt, please)
the feeling you get when you help someone
dulce de leche anything
art by kids (pretty much any art, pretty much any kid)
kissing
airplanes
I could keep going, of course. But those things, to me, cause me to believe that life is more than biology. I mean, dulce de leche? That is divinelyinspiredstuff. And marmalade kittens? And my sisters? Come on. It’s all pure good.
Maybe my next letter to my penpal will answer this question more fully; it would be good for me to write more about it and after all, he asked. When I’m done thinking on paper, I’ll send that paper through the mail — that incredible, magical system that transforms mere words into something more official, more real, more meaningful.
Thanks, [PENPAL], for your friendship and for giving me the opportunity to write letters. PaperGirls like that stuff.
I hope you don’t think I’m being unfaithful to the Fancy PaperGirl Mailbox. But I do have a kind of official (okay, really official) pen pal. I’m not going to tell you who it is. That’s for you to wonder. But I will tell you that that this person and I have many things in common.
We are both quilters. That’s how we met. We both love the American quilt: what it represents, what it can do, what it hasn’t been able to do, yet, and what it can be, if given enough time and space and attention.
We both work actively in the quilt industry (#clue) and do various things within it. I think it’s fair to say that we’ve had unusual career tracks, if you could call them “tracks” at all; we’re both trained in disciplines other than Fiber Arts, Family and Consumer Sciences, or any other quilt-related courses of study (not that there exist such courses of study, but hello, let’s make that happen.) Neither of us — however surprising in my case — learned how to make quilts at our respective mothers’ knees. We picked up quilting later in our still both young-ish lives.
We have both felt misunderstood at times, for different reasons. Really, though, they’re the same reasons. When you feel misunderstood, it doesn’t matter how you’re misunderstood; it just hurts when people say mean things.
He’s good with the phone, a better friend than I am or ever was, at least re: text message/voicemail reply time — and this is why we write letters.
He owns bow-ties.
We dash off a postcard whenever we get one from the other, picking up a conversation right where we left off. For example, I wrote to him about a big crush I have on someone that I’m not going to try and blog about/pursue, ahem. I told my penpal that the crush gave me energy, that I wasn’t going to do anything about it, but that it gave me a driving energy that felt really good. A week or so after I mailed that sentiment on a repurposed piece of hotel stationary, I got a postcard from my penpal that said only:
I understand your crush. My friend Glenn would say we are built that way. (We = the type of person you and I are.) So I say take whatever drive you can find and run with it.
Of course, just as in any good, long conversation, we frequently will introduce new ideas, new thoughts into the mix; it’s not just call-and-response. The other postcard that came with the latest batch said:
Interesting movement of dilemma. Life is either:
a) pure biology, a.k.a. you die and that’s it, or:
b) There’s more to it, a.k.a., our efforts are towards a greater good (or bad.)
Choosing one of these should dictate all future actions. Instead, I’m working on a personal legacy, which doesn’t answer either. Which one?
Indeed, [PENPAL], I think about this a lot. But I’m going to break our letter chain (for a moment, hang on) and answer you here, tomorrow.
I met with my Fiber & Material Studies professor to discuss my research project — and she loved it. My research is good enough to be entered into the Textile Resource Center’s database! I’m over the moon about that. I’m a contributor to the study of patchwork at the School of the Art Institute! How cool is that?? And yes, I’m looking into how I can post my investigation as a free download; it’s got too many moving parts to just post as a blog entry. Talk about a good feeling.
Okay, it’s event announcement time.
Guess what’s happening next month in my very own town? Why, International Spring Quilt Festival, that’s what! Yes, on April 6th, 7th, and 8th, the fine folks at Quilts, Inc. will descend upon the Windy City and bring all manner of quilt gorgeousness, classes, exhibits, vendors, and friends to the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center. The venue is out by O’Hare; it’s a nice place, the food is actually pretty decent and.. There was something else that I was going to tell you about but I just can’t rem — wait! I know what it is!
I’m going to do two book signings and two tours! Of the “Beauty In Pieces” scrap quilt exhibit that I co-curated! I knew there was something. Here’s the scoop:
On Friday, April 7th and Saturday, April 8th, I’m going to do a book-signing and meet n’ greet from 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. Then, at 1:30 (both days), I’ll lead a little tour through the “Beauty In Pieces: Scrap Quilts for the 21st Century” exhibit. The tour will run 30-45 minutes, I imagine, but as I’ve never done it before! That sounds about right.
As to where this will be, I’m pretty sure the table for the books and things will be inside the quilt show part of Festival, but I know for sure that your show program will tell you exactly (and any of the helpful show people will help you find me, too.)
Will you come see me? I’d love that. This lil’ Quilt Scout will sign a book for you, we’ll take some selfies. And load up your phone with pictures of your quilts because I love to see quilts on phones. Seeing quilts on phones is like, my favorite thing. I’m 100% serious. Quilts are perfect for modern technology.
Maybe I’ll even bring Pendennis! Woah. He’s never come with me on something like that… I’ll do it. It’s a local gig. He can handle the trip. And if a cloth monkey can get his tushie to Festival, certainly you can, too.
“A má notícia” by Belmiro de Almeida, c. 1896. Image: Wikipedia.
On and off all day, I have been crying.
I get worried when I feel physically bad for more than a day or two (I’m on Day 3) and then I have a crying symptom on top of that.
A few years ago, my surgeon looked at me sternly and told me sadness was a serious symptom to which I needed to pay attention. She didn’t mean that I was depressed and that depression was serious (though I was, at the time, mildly, and of course depression is serious); she meant that in her experience, when Mary Fons gets sick, Mary Fons doesn’t always run a fever but she oftentimes gets very sad and bursts into tears multiple times a day.
Today, I burst into tears four times. Okay, five, because I just did it again.
Do the crying jags mean I’m sick not with a cold but with something else? My guts have felt strange lately but it’s so hard to tell. I’ve changed my diet recently; is that why I feel bad? And certainly there are perfectly good, totally reasonable and seemingly unrelated reasons to cry, cry, cry:
— My aunt is very sick and the fate of my cousins is uncertain
— I feel a terrible nostalgia for my sisters and my mom and Iowa
— People in every part of the country learn how to quilt on public television and I have taught people how to quilt on public television and I learned how to read with help from public television and my president wants to kill public television and this makes me so sad I cannot bear it, I cannot
— I must admit that I feel overwhelmed by work and school
May I ask a favor?
Is it okay to come to you and just burst into tears? I strive on the ol’ PG to offer content of substance. I strive to be precise and topical and entertaining and thought-provoking and I desperately want to make you smile. But I almost didn’t write to tonight because I feel so terribly sad and then I thought, “Well, maybe that’s why you ought to write.”
There are vulnerable posts and there are vulnerable posts. This is the latter.
Sophie, me, and Justin at the Illinois College Press Association awards luncheon. Photo: Me!
This weekend was press weekend for F Newsmagazine (also referred to as “F News” or just “F”), the student-run paper at the School of the Art Institute (SAIC) where I am fortunate to serve as associate editor.
By the way, “associate editor” really just means I edit the F+ section (culture, first-person stuff, listicles, etc.) and do a few items of business that other editors don’t have to worry about. My title sounds fancier than it actually is; I don’t have seniority over anyone, for example. But a) I don’t particularly want seniority over anyone and b) I like sounding fancy, even if I’m not. So I’m keepin’ it!
Press weekend means that it’s it’s time to produce the latest print edition of F News, so the editorial staff — there are five of us — along with the designers and the two faculty advisors sit in the newspaper office at 116 S. Michigan Avenue all day Saturday and Sunday and copy edit and do layouts and spend our only free moments in the whole entire week working on the paper.
Yes, we get paid. We do not get paid much, though. The hourly pay is not commensurate to the talent and love (and hours) that everyone brings to the project so there has to be another reason why we work at the newspaper.
First:
I remember the moment I learned that SAIC had a student magazine. I was in Arizona, in a hotel room near the airport. It was late. I had just finished the gig where my quilts had been misplaced by UPS, a gig that must have been not long after the gig in Buffalo where I discovered sponge candy because I remember that I was eating sponge candy in bed and I was really tired. I was so tired but I was staying up to read the SAIC student paper because by then I knew I had been accepted to grad school at the college/museum and I had been on campus earlier that week to do some paperwork. That day, I picked up a copy of F News while I was in a waiting room. When I understood what it was, I thought, “Well, Mary Fons. I think someone needs to send an email.”
I missed making Quilty. I missed deadlines and sign-offs and editorial meetings. I emailed the paper and asked them if they were hiring. It was summer; they were. I met Paul, the faculty advisor, and Sophie, the managing editor, and I interviewed with them and before too long they said I could have a job on staff, even though I was to learn that the skills I developed as the editor of a hobby magazine were not totally transferrable to a college newspaper. Let me tell you, in case you’ve forgotten: You’re never done learning and you are never done feeling really dumb.
But I’ve learned. My writing has gotten better. My copy editing skills are way, way better. I feel like F News is this other school I get to go to.* It feels like this other class I get paid to attend.
Boy, it’s a lot of work. We all have office hours, a two-hour editorial meeting every week, press weekends like this one, and other activities, which is to say nothing about the job itself, which requires much thought and action. There are times I get frustrated because I’m working on F News stuff instead of doing my schoolwork or working on my book, but then I think to myself, “You can only work at this place while you’re in school. Don’t miss this.”
And I also think about the people. It’s the people at F News who make it worth the time and the not-money. Where to begin?
There’s arts editor Irena, the beautiful art history graduate student whose goofball tendencies are perfectly in balance with her naturally brooding temperament (a fabulous, fascinating mix!); there’s the recently-turned-21-year-old undergrad entertainment editor, Rosie, whose love for her fellow man, woman, and punk rock kid would melt the crustiest, grumpiest of hearts; there’s news editor Justin, my colleague in the Writing department, who has read All The Most Interesting Books and Articles That Have Ever Been Written and whose sartorial choices put mine to shame. And then there’s Sophie.
There are others. I could go on. I should go on. I need to. But I also need to do homework because I was at press weekend all weekend and I’m also still sick.
Thank you, F News, for teaching me better copy editing skills. Thank you for having a great color printer that we are not supposed to use for personal things but that everyone totally uses for personal things. (Thank you for being so great that everyone cares about you and therefore doesn’t abuse their printer privileges often.) Thank you for the staff of people who make you.
Thank you for doing my homework.
(Anything’s possible.)
*Yes, that’s a dangling participle and if you wrote it, I’d make you change it.
The Sick Chicken by Winslow Homer, 1874. Image: Wikipedia.
For the past hour, I have been working on a lovely post about the beauty of friendship. But I have to stop. Because I am sick. I am sick with a terrible cold. My nose hurts. My body aches. My lips are dry and cracked. I am hot. Then I am cold. Then I am sad. Then I feel sorry for myself and I say, “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Mary,” and then I say, “It’s too late!” and then I say, “Stop talking because it hurts the head.”
So I have to stop, now. I think it’s going to have to be good enough that I found a painting by Winslow Homer called, “The Sick Chicken.”
Do you remember the last time we talked about Winslow Homer? I had so much to say about this painting. Those were good times, weren’t they? I could breathe back then. I could run and jump and play. But no longer. Now, I shall perish on this couch, wads of snotty kleenex strewn all around, the remnants of my veggie burger drying out on the coffee table. Woe, woe!
At least we have the memories. Goodbye, cruel world. Hello, heating pad. Hello, pillow. Hello, darkness…
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Mary’s fine. She does have a cold but she’ll be all right. Being dramatic about having post-nasal drip helps her get better more quickly. Trust me.]
“A lunch sits on a blue tablecloth with a brown paper bag and red napkin. There are carrots, a pear, a sandwich on wheat bread with lettuce (chicken salad) and a carton of milk.” Image courtesy the National Cancer Institute, 1989, via Wikipedia.
I’m a lunch person.
If you want to win my favor, butter me up, pitch me an idea, ask me out, or ask me to do something for you that will not be fun for me or that will be very challenging but that I will consider doing because I love you, like you, want to pitch you an idea or ask you out, it would behoove you to ask me out to lunch and discuss everything there. Over a tasty meal in a pleasant, lunch-serving establishment, I am amenable to many things.
This love of lunch probably springs from my continual astonishment that I am, in fact, an adult. I’ve said it before: Whenever I do things like pay a doctor’s bill, return home from an airport, or take my seat at a lunch — to say nothing of a luncheon — I just shake my head. I don’t know when it happened, but at some point, I convinced everyone I was capable of saying things like, “The tuna for me, thank you. Rare.”
Of course, not every day is a “Mary, darling, let’s do lunch” day. That’s maybe once a week, if I’m lucky. (People in my world know the strategy, so I do get to go out to lunch with some frequency; I am, as a result, very busy.)
The majority of my lunches during the week are not foofy, though. The majority of my lunches happen at a table in the school newspaper office or between classes at a cafe in the Loop near school. I like these lunches just as well. I love a bowl of soup. I like a tasty salad. I just like to pause in my day and say, “This is the time where I must eat. Everyone just hang on.”
Breakfast is nice. It’s the first thing you eat, that breakfast, and that means the day is fresh. But the day becomes instantly not fresh if you eat something not fresh for breakfast. If you eat the last piece of spelt toast in the freezer (which you heated up in the microwave because you do not own a toaster), then how fresh can the day really be? Dinner is nice, of course, except that by the time dinner comes, unless I really plan for it, I do not want to have a large meal. Why?
Because I had a nice lunch.
*My apologies for a slow week on the ol’ PG. I turned in my project. The project nearly killed me, but but I turned it in an guess what? That. Thing. Is. Fabulous! Maybe I’ll post it! It’s 23 pages long but I’m about as proud of it as anything I’ve done in school so far. Thanks for all the well-wishes, you guys.
The Steel Makers, by Mikhail Trufanov, 1956. Image: Wikipedia.
I am at a Peet’s Coffee working on the titanic research project that is due Wednesday for my (amazing) class in the Fiber and Material Studies department. This thing needs to get done no later than tomorrow morning if I am going to retain my sanity.
But I have stopped working on my project to write this — I know, I know — because a) my brain is short-circuiting from so much information gathering and organizing and b) I presently have company.
Two Russian men came in a while ago and took a seat at the table to my right. One of them is dressed in business attire (it’s Sunday — maybe church attire?); one is in sneakers, jeans, and a puffy coat. One of the guys is wearing so much cologne, I am getting a headache. (It’s good cologne; there’s just way too much of it.)
I can for sure identify four words in their conversation, but only three actually count because one of the four words is a proper noun: Sascha. Otherwise, it’s just “iPhone,” “auto,” and “super,” but when the guys say it, it sounds like this: “zu-pear.”
What’s weird — and distracting! — is that there are other, Russian words vaguely familiar to me, not because I know what they mean but because my ex-husband was Croatian and my ex-boyfriend was Russian, and that means I’ve overheard a lot of conversations with parents, siblings and friends in Balkan and Russian tongues and the two languages share a number of similar sounds. Mostly clueless to the content of these conversations until I got the post-call or post-conversation de-brief, I still know these languages when I hear them. (Sometimes Serbian is hard to distinguish from Croatian, but don’t tell any Croatians I said that.)
Here are a few of the words I am picking up from the Russians. I’ll list the word first in Cyrillic, then give the phonetic spelling of at least one of the conjugations/versions in Russian, then a Croatian version of the word (in quotations), then the English equivalent. Don’t worry! It’s fun.
Anyone who speaks any of these languages is going to laugh and laugh at how wrong I am about the equivalencies, but you can at least see what I mean when I say there are similarities:
Добрый — Dobriy — “dobro” — good Не за что — Nyez-ashta — “Nije za ništa” — that’s all right Большой — vyelik — “velika” — too big маленький — malen’kiy — “mali” — small Помогите — Pomogite — “pomoć” — help Извините — eez-veen-eete — “oprostite” — sorry
What we have learned from this is that if I landed in Russia right now, I could possibly say “I’m sorry I am so small. Please help.” But it would sound more like Croatian. Perhaps what we have actually learned is that I am glad I am not in Russia right now — or Croatia, for that matter. I think I’d better just stay right here at this Peet’s Coffee.
By the way, this Sascha person they’re talking about is really in trouble. He did something bad. I don’t think he killed anyone (Russian Guy No. 1 and Russian Guy No. 2’s tones are not hushed in that “Sascha killed somebody way”) but they’re clearly annoyed at the guy.
Okay, it’s time for me to stop procrastinating and get back to work.
Lithograph from 1918 showing Uncle Sam turning a clock to Daylight Saving time. Image: Wikipedia.
Hello Daylight Saving Time:
It’s been months since I’ve seen you. Wait, how many? Six?? No way! Really! Six months. Hmph. Well, yeah, I guess that seems about right. You look good. You look older, but aren’t we all, Daylight Saving Time? Aren’t we all.
Daylight Saving Time — can I call you DST? Thanks. DST, I know tonight’s a big night for you; it’s one of the two biggest nights of your year and I appreciate that. You’ve got a lot going on. I mean, tonight, all the clocks displayed on the cell phones and televisions and the computers of the good people of America* will read “3:00 a.m.” at the very moment they ought to read “2 a.m.”, as though they have been meddled with by some insane supercomputer arch villain who has taken control of the world’s technology in order to make the people of Earth (or “the U.S.A.”) suffer by losing an hour of sleep.
Though you are not exactly an insane supercomputer arch villain, DST, you are close. We know this because I am a person of Earth/the U.S.A., and I will suffer as a result of your little time party. And I have decided you should know.
See, I am in St. Paul, Minnesota right now because I worked all day for the vivacious and intellectually buoyant quilters of Dakota County. Yes, after a long week of school and work, I spent my weekend doing more work. It was a great day — and it’s not your fault that I’m busier than a one-armed paper-hanger, DST — but I have just spent many hours doing homework and regular work at my Fairfield Inn & Suites and now I am tired but still have more reading to do and my flight leaves Minneapolis at 6 a.m., and that means that I have to get up at 3:45 a.m. and that is horrifying but it will be more horrifying because it will feel like 2:45 a.m. because of you.
And you also need to know that I have stared at that sentence for a long time and now I don’t even know if I’ve got this thing right, DST. All I know is that I have a wake-up call for 3:45 a.m. and I have set the alarm on my phone, as well, and that my flight leaves at 6 a.m. and because it’s Daylight Saving Time, I am going to be extra sad in a few hours.
You were a good idea, dear. World War I needed you. The farmers, they still appreciate you (at least that’s what people tend to say when they’re defending you.) But I do wonder, in this modern age, if you are doing what Congress wanted you to do, initially. If so, I can keep calm and carry on.
If not, if you’re just some outmoded law on the books that for no good reason hasn’t been nixed, yet — like some old law about not hitching your horse to your cousin’s barbershop pole — I shall exercise my right to be extremely grumpy about you for the next several days and grumpy afresh six months from now.
I am glad it’s not going to be dark by 4 p.m., now, though. But it’s barely enough!
Love,
Mary
*Except for the devices of the good people of Alaska and Hawaii, who do not observe you, Daylight Saving Time.
I love absolutely everything about this picture. It was also very, very hard to pick a single image for this post. (Screenshot from “Baby Boom”.)
Awhile back, I praised one of my film heroes: the outrageously brilliant Goldie Hawn. I wrote about my family’s fierce love for the movie Overboard, Goldie, and Goldie and Kurt Russell’s love. My love was echoed by many people in the comments and on Facebook. Lots of us love Overboard and that’s why the world is gonna be okay. (Maybe.)
Someday, I will talk about my all-time favorite movie ever, on Earth, ever, ever — which would be Tootsie — but not tonight. Tonight, I need to talk about Baby Boom.
If you haven’t seen Baby Boom, allow me to summarize the plot. No spoilers, don’t worry:
A high-powered New York City executive, J.C. Wiatt — played by the incomparable Diane Keaton and more on her in a minute — gets a call in the middle of the night. She has inherited something from a long-lost cousin who has died suddenly. When she goes to pick up her inheritance, it’s a baby. She inherited her cousin’s baby Elizabeth. (More on that baby in a minute, too.)
J.C. Wiatt is like, “Are you crazy?! I’m a high-powered executive! I can’t have a baby!” and she tries to get rid of Elizabeth but guess what? J.C. Wiatt becomes attached to the lil’ peanut and can’t bring herself to give Elizabeth back. J.C. is forced to admit that she kind of hates her hectic life and her lame boyfriend and so she gets out of the game and moves herself and Elizabeth into a dream home in rural Vermont where she meets a hot, hot, hotveterinarian, played by Sam Shepard, and I’m not waiting to talk about him. Sam Shepard (the actor/playwright/mystical creature) is so incredibly handsome and charming in this movie, you will literally stomp your foot and slap your leg and go, “Oh, comeon!!” because he is just ridiculous.
Anyway, J.C. goes stir-crazy out there in rural Vermont (she’s a high-powered executive!) and her house nearly bankrupts her because it’s a lemon. Besides, it turns out she misses the hustle n’ bustle of New York. At some point during the interminable winter, J.C. starts making homemade baby food for Elizabeth. Soon, she’s selling it in farmer’s markets and country stores around New England and before you know it, J.C. Wiatt’s got a tiger by the tail! Country Baby gourmet baby food is a hit! She’s back in the game!
Will she leave Vermont, the house, her new friends, and the hot, hot, hot veterinarian and sell Country Baby for millions? Will she move back to New York City with Elizabeth and raise her daughter in the most exciting place on the planet or stay in the slow lane? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out.
So now let me tell you something fabulous that I just discovered, unless you’re already clicking over to rent the movie on Amazon, a decision I fully support. Just come back when you’re done.
Check this out: Baby Boom was made in 1987. It was directed by Charles Shyer. It was written by Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyer. Guess what other brilliant Goldie Hawn movie my family loves as much as Overboard? Why, Private Benjamin, of course. Well, guess who wrote Private Benjamin?? Nancy Meyer and Charles Shyer!! And Shyer directed it,too! And it came out the same year as Baby Boom!
It feels great to be so consistent. It’s like, “Oh, no wonder I like this thing. It’s exactly like this other thing!” I love it when that happens.
So there are many reasons why Baby Boom is so good: comedic timing, pathos communicated without schlock, and swift pacing all come to mind. But most of all, I love that movie because of the character of J.C. Wiatt, the way Diane Keaton plays her, and — wait for it — J.C. Wiatt’s clothes.
The 1980s are not often given credit for being a fashionable decade. It’s generally understood that the 1970s were worse, which is something, I guess, but people think of the 1980s and they think of neon, shoulder pads, big hair, and acid-washed jeans. But this is so not all the 1980s were in terms of clothes!
J.C. Wiatt proves this. Her thick, cable-knit sweaters. Her luscious scarves. Her swingy, belted dresses with yes, shoulderpads. (They make a waist look smaller and shoulders broad and handsome, if you ask me.) Her handbags, her shoes, her broach. Her other broach. Her big glasses! Oh, those great big glasses. I love it all. So does my younger sister. We have been known to just randomly email each other screenshots of Diane Keaton in Baby Boom with the subject line: “FASHION GOALS.”
The clothes look great on Keaton because Keaton is gorgeous (she was 41 when she made that movie, by the way) and because J.C. Wiatt is a great character. She’s a woman who wants it all — and wanting it all is complicated. She’s got a big heart and big ambitions.She’s conflicted, but she’s trying her best. She’s smart. She’s funny. When I watch that movie, I find myself wanting to either be Diane Keaton and/or J.C. Wiatt, be best friends with Diane Keaton/J.C. Wiatt, have Diane Keaton and/or J.C. Wiatt suddenly be my other mother, and also be like Diane Keaton and/or J.C. Wiatt when I grow up. And then there’s Sam Shepard in the mix, so watching Baby Boom is an intense experience.
Tonight, Baby Boom, I salute you. You really have had a huge impact on me and my sisters. We look up to you and we appreciate you. Also, J.C. Wiatt has a quilt hanging in her dining room, so that pretty much seals the deal.
The first Quilt Scout of the month of March is up today, so I’d like to send you to the fine folks at Quilts, Inc. to check it out. I have to warn you: You will probably get sad. Why?
The Monopoly game people took the thimble out of the game.
Star of Bethlehem quilt, New Jersey, c. 1845. (It’s just for inspiration. I can’t do this kind of thing yet, either.) Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
As promised, here are some pointers for writing a nifty essay in general and specifically for this contest.
“Wait, wait. What contest?!” you cry.
Why, the PaperGirl “Leaders and Enders” Essay Contest announced the day before yesterday, of course! I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Click that link I just gave you if you missed something; don’t worry, you’ve got till the end of the month!
General Tips
This is a first-person essay. Example: “I live in Iowa and I make mostly all-pink scrap quilts. But the last quilt I made was unusual because…” and so on.
A good personal essay has a nice blend of facts and narrative. For example, tell me about the pattern you chose for your latest quilt but also why you like it. Or tell me why your favorite colors are blue and green, not just that they’re your favorite colors. Dig deeper; that’s the whole point.
Be specific. Details are what make a piece of writing come alive. Tell me about how the mean quilt policewoman who made you feel bad about your points has a big ol’ hairy mole on her chin, for example. Note that I’ve tried to help you keep things specific by asking about the last quilt you made or the one you’re making now, rather than suggesting a broader “Why I Make Quilts” essay. That would be harder, I think, and less specific.
Observe the word count. Too skimpy an essay and you’re shortchanging yourself! But if you write too much past the 500-600 word count and I will have to set your beauteous words aside for a time in my life when I have more time in my life to read them. That could take a long time. #time
Have a pal check your work for typos. I won’t be a huge stickler on this (I know there are typos in this blog every once in awhile because these things happen) but good grammar and clean copy will endear you to me at once. Just check your work, is all.
Keep in mind that this short essay is simply asking you about the last quilt you made or the one you’re making now. You don’t have to be Virginia Woolf, you don’t have to make it lyric and incredible — though of course if you are Virginia Woolf and you are alive and making quilts, please enter this contest.
But seriously: You don’t have to be a “good writer” to do this. Just talk to me — and talk to yourself. As I said the other day, there is nothing more awesome than going through a quilt history text and finding quotes from a quiltmaker’s journal or transcribed oral history where she talks about the process of quilting or (even better) her favorite quilt or a quilt she was totally sick of making by the end. It’s like meeting a sister across time. We share little tidbits about our quilts at guild meetings and maybe we write something up if we enter a quilt in a show, but most of the time, we don’t record anything about the quilts. This is a chance to do that.
So here are a few prompts to help you get started or get you unstuck. You can follow one or more of these threads (!) or none of them, but they might help:
What is the most important thing to say about this quilt? Why is that thing so important?
What did you think about while you were sewing the patchwork?
Did you quilt it yourself? Why or why not?
Are you proud of this quilt?
Any regrets?
Let’s say you love your quilt: Who else do you know who would love it? Why?
Let’s say your quilt isn’t one of your best efforts. Who would love it? Why?
What did you learn in making this one?
Happy writing, comrades. And remember, mailed entries only. Send them here by the end of the month. Much prize-ing shall commence. Oh, and I won’t post your essay unless I talk to you about it first, so don’t worry about that.
This is just the beginning. The HSTs will finish about 1 1/4”, I think. Patchwork and photo: Me.
Yesterday, as I was piecing my Bolt From the Blue quilt, I was dealing with serious regret. The regrets were small but continual: They were waste regrets.
The 2 1/2” x 4 1/2” Flying Geese units I was making (and will continue to make for this quilt) involve some not insubstantial fabric waste. I use the the flippy-corner method for my geese, which means when I trim the back of this particular unit, I cut off what could become about a 1 1/4” finished half-square triangle (HST), if I chose to sew the two trimmed parts together, press them open, and square up the now-existing unit. I apologize to my non-quilting readers for all this quilt jargon, but trust me: Turning the waste from a Flying Goose (ew!) into a mini-half-square triangle is possible. Doing this, using patchwork waste to make other patchwork is sometimes called working with “leaders and enders;” I just call it more patchwork. Either way, it’s a thing.
But I wasn’t doing the HST thing. I was just trimming that unit waste straight into the garbage. Because I just can’t deal, okay? I knew if I sewed them up and pressed them out I’d stare at those dang things for the next two years and wonder what to do with them. But the guilt was really getting to me. I mean, it felt terrible to just throw away all that ready-to-sew potential. All those wonderful little HSTs in such lovely, bright colors, destined for the incinerator, well, it just broke my lil’ patchworkin’ heart.
Then I had an idea.
As I’ve been doing my research (for both my lecture and also for my Fiber department research project) I’ve been sifting through lots of big, thick books about quilts and let me tell you what’s wonderful: It’s wonderful when historians find people writing about making their quilts — but this doesn’t happen often. When there’s a journal entry or a newspaper article with a quiltmaker talking about the process of making her quilt or how she did this or that, where she got the idea, who helped her with it, well, it’s just gold. We’ve got pictures of quilts. We’ve got (some) records of things. But there’s really not that much in the history books from the quilters, talking about making their quilts.
Then — I’m getting to the contest, hang on — I thought about the PaperGirl Retreat, how much I want to figure out what that is and then do it because I want to get people writing and quilting more. Have you ever noticed that the root word of “textile” is text? How we speak of “weaving” a tale? Yes, just like we weave cloth. Sewing and writing is really, really close in terms of like, culture and life.
I thought, “Well, how about an essay contest? It could get people writing about quilts! The winner could win my little patches and they could do something neat with them. Or not. But they’d be writing about making.” Reader, I literally took all those little triangles out of the trash and fired them through the machine. They’re ready for the next guy.
(I hope it’s obvious that I do not think my little “leaders and enders” are so amazing that people will be just clamoring to win them; this is about creativity and fun and getting you writing.)
So here’s the official deal:
Write 500-600 words about the last quilt you made (or the one you’re making now.) Mail your essay to the PaperGirl post office box.The deadline is March 31st, the end of the month, and that means you need to put it in the mail by that date. I figure I’ll have all the HSTs by then and it gives you plenty of time to really work on your essay. You can count on me throwing in some extra goodies in the prize bag, by the way, but don’t think there’s going to be an actual quilt or anything. I’m thinking some good Aurifil thread or maybe some candy.
I’m sure you have questions. Fire away, BUT: Don’t send me anything first thing in the morning. Think about this. Mull. Because tomorrow I plan to a) answer questions that may arise until then; and b) offer some advice on essay writing and give more details as to what I’m looking for. For now, just think about what you’d have to say about your quilt-making process.
This sounds fun to me. Does it sound fun to you? Even if one person enters, that will still be fun. And it’ll be one quilter writing about her (or his) quiltmaking process. Win. Win.
There was a moment today when I thought, “Fons, you’re toast. As in crispy. As in burnt. Out.”
There’s just so very, very much to do. There’s the newspaper and the writing tutoring the university pays me to do. There’s the heavy coursework I manage as a student and the lectures and classes I lead as a teacher (the latter implies travel 90% of the time, of course.) There is home maintenance to attend to and there are bills to pay. It’s tax time. Most importantly, there are relationships to care for: friends, family. Other friends. And that’s all stuff going on right now, which is to say nothing of projects and dreams in the pipeline, all of which contributes to the constant hustle, which leads you to the overwhelming question: “What comes after this?” As a freelancer, you have to constantly ask.
For the first time in many weeks, I slept in today. I awoke, to my astonishment, at 10:30 a.m. and had two emotions at once: joy, because I knew my body was thrilled; and mild panic, because the morning was already gone and I had done nothing.
I made tea like I normally do because that is Always The Very First Thing No Matter What. As the kettle heated, I stared at the wall — specifically, my design wall.
Last night, once my work was done for the day, I made a few star blocks just for fun. I have needed for a while to look at something different up on that wall and I have yards and yards of this wonderful electric blue Moda solid in my stash that has been pleading with me to use it. The block I made, a Sawtooth Star, is something I can make in my sleep at this point; I didn’t even have to look up the measurements. After I had four blocks or so, I stuck them up on the felt wall and went to bed.
After my pot of tea this morning, I tried to read. I tried to write. I couldn’t focus. It was nearly half past 11 by the time I had been tea’ed and I felt sullen and agitated — a highly unpleasant mix that I attribute to being overextended. This was my first “day off” in weeks but it didn’t mean I didn’t have a thousand things to do. All it meant was that I was home and could stay put. I didn’t have press to go to for the newspaper; I wasn’t at a conference as an attendee or a presenter; I didn’t have a date with a friend or gentleman caller. I was free, and theoretically, that should have been good but I didn’t like how shiftless I felt, how unscheduled I was. Sitting still is not easy for me and though I need some downtime, I’m so not used to having any, I was spiraling into a real funk. Before I got too jumpy about it, I went to the sewing table and picked up my stars.
There was still a good amount of staring into space that happened once I got there. But what began to happen in time was rather remarkable: A quilt that I absolutely love began to form with astonishing speed, right before my eyes. And everything felt better.
The star block, when set on point, goes a long way in making a quilt top come together quickly. When I cut setting pieces for my 8″ finished blocks I remembered how awesome it is work that way. I was making serious tracks on this sucker! The row-style I was interested in playing with zoomed into fabulousness when I did a reverse contrast thing with the navy blue next to the electric blue. When I did that, I literally clapped my hands. What can I say? I love this quilt.
I looked up the word “surprise” in the thesaurus because I really was surprised by this day and by this quilt and I wanted to find a name for it that reflected that. (Naming quilts is one of my favorite things in the world because: words + quilts.) The phrase “bolt from the blue” is listed in the entry for “surprise” and I think that’s pretty accurate, don’t you? This quilt came out of the blue — and it’s, you know, blue. And fabric comes on bolts. I probably don’t need to keep explaining.
Tomorrow, part two of this post. And a contest. Because the other thing that came out of this quilt was a dream of you. Yes, you!
Portrait of a sixteen-year-old Franz Schubert by Leopold Kupelwieser, 1812. Image: Wikipedia.
I’ve got something different for you today. I’m still unsure whether to post it or not, but as it involves no stories of wild behavior (me? never), or gossip or politics, it’s probably all right. So far, I have not regretted this kind of vulnerability on the ol’ PG.
The post you’ll see below was written in May of last year but never finished (and therefore never posted.) Thus, it stayed in the Drafts folder in WordPress, the blogging platform used to make PaperGirl.
In May of 2016, Claus was staying with me. It was the time before he left Chicago to go back to Berlin indefinitely. We knew the end was near. Our days were tender, sweet. I’m not sure why I didn’t finish this post about the pictures he showed me. I think I felt bashful and, looking over the draft of the post, I didn’t know quite how to explain my emotions. I was feeling the same vulnerability I feel now, I suppose.
And if you’re wondering why I’m writing about Claus again, well, I’m wondering that, too. These things are confusing. Let’s just say that I’m doing some spring cleaning. Or maybe that I’m finishing up a UFO.*
Here’s the post. Remember, it wasn’t quite finished when I let it be and I don’t know that I should go back and finish it. I think the fragment is the point, today. Leaving things loose like this is not something I like, but we get used to things.
I saw a picture of the most handsome young man yesterday. It was a picture from the past. I recognized the face of the boy because the person who was showing me the picture was the person in the picture. I was looking at Claus. And the picture I was looking at was of Claus at age nineteen or so. The picture was taken of him in his hometown outside Hamburg sometime in the late 1980s.
Seeing someone who left his teenage years decades ago suddenly be nineteen is weird. And fun. And funny. (That hair!) And if like me you overthink everything and refuse to just let a picture be a picture, seeing such a picture is really uncomfortable. Because it confers a kind of sad, caged-animal feeling. I’ll explain.
The young man in the picture was really, really cute. He was an objectively, aesthetically cute teenage guy, the kind of guy seventeen-year-old (give or take a few years) girls freak out over. Athletic build. Strong jaw. Dirty blonde. Great smile — which, I learned, was close-lipped because Claus had braces at the time, and this makes it more perfect because the picture was then more real. Long story short: The boy I saw in the picture was essentially made in a lab for me to be in love with at age fifteen. Swoon. City.
Like most of us, the year that I was forced to be fifteen was not great. I was not cute. I was too talkative. I was having terrible trouble with math. I had a lot on my mind at home, too, including dealing with a mom who was gone a lot (out of necessity! I don’t blame her!) and a broken relationship with my dad. And on and on. Everyone is unhappy in their own ways throughout adolescence; I wasn’t special. Like anyone that age going through whatever they go through, I would’ve given anything for a cute, nice boy to look my way. I would’ve given anything to be asked to the dance. It might’ve made all the other stuff not seem so bad. But with a couple rare exceptions, I was not asked to dances.
If you had come to me back then and showed me the picture of young Claus and said, “Hey, Fons. What do you think of this guy?” I would have pushed my big glasses up my nose and straightened my cloth headband before I took a look, almost as if he could see me from inside the photo and I could do something to look my best. Upon seeing the picture of the cutie-patootie, I would’ve smiled like a dweeb and rolled my eyes like, “Duh, he’s hot??” If you would’ve told me then that the boy was German and that the picture was taken inGermany, you would’ve had to peel me off the ceiling because what could possibly be more hot and amazing and dreamy than a cute boy who was from Germany??
And then, if you would’ve told me that the guy in the picture would care for me deeply someday, that he would kiss me most passionately, invite me to go on a journey across America with him and tell me — he, a bona fide philosopher! — that I was one of the most brilliant people he had ever met… Well, this is where the sad, caged-animal thing comes in.
Why must we live life in the straight line we’re given? Why are we forced to plod along, day, night, day, night, day, night, in this linear way? Why couldn’t my fifteen-year-old-self just get a hint that what seemed absolutely impossible (being liked by someone like that) was in the cards? It would’ve helped so much. It would’ve been so great, just a little “Chin up, kiddo, you’ve got a great family and moxie to spare — and there’s gonna be a lot of love in your life. Just… Standby.”
I guess I just
*An “unfinished object.” A “UFO” is quilter parlance for any quilt project you’ve started but not yet finished.
“A little spinner in a Georgia cotton mill.” Photo: Lewis Hine, 1874-1940. Image courtesy Library of Congress by way of Wikipedia.
The latest lecture in my menu debuted at QuiltCon on Saturday morning. It went well.
The talk, titled, “Standing On the Shoulders of Giants: A Brief History of the American Quilt,” is my best lecture yet, no question. I spent hours and hours and hours researching and making it just right — the slides themselves are artful and nice to look at because I have learned rudimentary Photoshop techniques at art school and that is exciting — and I’m stoked to take this puppy out on the road in the coming year. Am I coming to your area? Are you going to see this thing? It is very possible. If I’m not coming to an opera house, lecture hall, or quilt guild near you, why not? You should speak to Carmen.
The Quilt Scout this week examines something I had to keep in mind while giving a history lesson. I had to remember to push myself. I had to continually remind myself to ask: Whose history do I tell when I tell about history? It’s easy to see one version. There are lots of versions, though. If you’ve ever had an argument with someone who saw a situation differently than you did, you must concede this point.
Even if you’re not a quilter, I urge you to take a look at Quilt Scout today. It’ll get you mulling about responsibility, perspective, and like, the Industrial Revolution.
My first attempt at a Bethlehem Star. Block and photo: Me.
In the slam poetry world, there’s a famous saying: “The points are not the point. The point is poetry.”
This is usually said when a good poet gets beat by a bad one (something that happens with fair frequency in competitive performance poetry.) It’s kind of a “Better luck next time, buddy” thing to say, a condolence. But it’s also said because it’s true. The saying actually does get at the heart of the poetry slam. The idea behind the whole thing from the start was to get people to engage more directly and viscerally with poetry; who scored what or which poet won the night was never supposed to matter very much. (Note: When you’re the poet who won the night, it matters a lot.)
The picture up there is a process shot of my first-ever attempt at making a Bethlehem Star. The Bethlehem Star is an eight-pointed patchwork star and is notoriously tricky to pull off. For those who don’t do patchwork, it may look like I made this in the dark while drinking adult beverages, possibly blindfolded; the quilters out there will be able to see that I obviously just haven’t sewn together my eight “prongs,” yet. (Nor have I trimmed my dog-ears.) If I can get this post written in the next twenty minutes or so and still have some juice left, I’m going to try sewing it all together tonight and I might even try to cut my side pieces.
But quilters and non-quilters alike, take a look at those diamonds. The ones within one prong of the star. They’re not great. They’re not bad, but there are some jumps and some zig-zags, some places where the tips of the diamonds don’t kiss.* I may find that these eighth-of-an-inch imperfections add up to big problems by the time I go to set in my side pieces, and at that point, I’ll maybe have to un-sew things and make them fit better. I’m okay with that. I like to sew things accurately not because I’m a perfectionist or because I’m fussy, but because sewing is much more fun if you don’t have to keep fixing everything as you go along. Best practices make the process much more enjoyable overall.
However: If I find that my prongs work out and my set-ins work out, too, those not-perfect diamond points suit me fine. Because the points are not the point. The point is the quilt.
The point is the quilt.
I would rather have a quilt that I love, that is actively being made imperfectly, than a “perfect” quilt sitting in a box in my house, or a quilt that isn’t getting any love up there on the design wall. The points are not the point. My life is the point. The fabric that love, that’s the point. The quilt that I make that I will probably give to someone I love, that’s the point.
What else is there?
*Who ever said quilting wasn’t sexy? Ours is a world where diamonds kiss.
I’m feeling weird about telling that harrowing tale straight out of the gate vis a vis my report on Savannah. Let me tell you something good.
After I had seen the strange thing, a wave of exhaustion passed over me; I needed to head back to my room. This would mean that I would need to find the ferry boat again and wait around for it with all those no-see-em bugs flying into my eyeballs. This did not seem like something I could physically manage, so looked to see how much it would cost for an Uber to take me from where I stood near Bay Street to my hotel at the convention center. When I found it would be a measly 11 bucks, I punched “Confirm Pickup” on my screen.
I have never had an Uber driver collect me in actual pickup, but within a few minutes, a young man named J.M. waved to me from inside a shiny black Silverado truck across the street.
“Mary Katherine?” he called in the best southern accent you’ve ever heard, making me glad my Uber profile uses my full name. I waved back, delighted to get to ride home in the cab of a pickup. You can take the girl out of Iowa but you can’t take the love of a good pickup truck out of the Iowa girl, trust me.
I was so happy to be off my feet and J.M. was a sweetheart, affably fielding the many questions I was asking him about Savannah. As he drove down Bay Street and we chatted, I looked out the window at the vibrant nightlife, the couples and families and packs of friends walking along the elevated strip. J.M. was so knowledgeable about everything and I loved getting the facts and figures in that accent:
“Yes, ma’am. Savannah’s the fourth lah-gist export city in the You-nahted Staits.” J.M. was really getting into the good stuff, stories about 19th century trade customs, population numbers, fascinating history. As we approached the street’s terminus, I felt seriously bummed that my Savannah escapade was going to end soon. Then, I had an idea.
What if I paid J.M. to drive me back up Bay Street and cruise the loop just once, just so I could see the whole stretch of it? I had 20 bucks in my wallet — was that enough? Would it be super, super weird to ask him to do that? I didn’t have much time. Up ahead, just one red light away, I could see the entrance to the bridge that would take me over the river and home to my hotel (and out of Savannah for who knows how long?)
A thought popped into my head and forced my decision: Frankly, I want to be the kind of person who offers her Uber driver 20 bucks to drive her around town for a minute. I just want to be that girl, you know? So, apologizing in advance for any weirdness and assuring him I was not a creeper, I asked J.M. if he’d take my money.
“Well, sure,” J.M. said, seemingly not that taken aback. “I’m happy to do that, ma’am. It’s funny you ask; my other job is working a tour boat down on Riverside.”
Yep. I got the nickel tour of Savannah from an actual, off-dutry tour guide in a pickup truck for the low-low price of 20 bucks. Not bad; and all I had to do was ask. (Well, and fork over a twenty.)
The drive was great. Between my own exploration on foot and hanging out with J.M., I definitely feel like I got a taste of Savannah. J.M., I told you I would blog about our trip when I got the chance and I gave you my card so that you could find PaperGirl and read it. I hope you’re seeing this so that I can say thank you once more.
Your car smelled great, by the way. As a regular Uber user, this is something I do not take for granted, sir.
I’m ashamed to admit it was the only time I was able to do so in three days of being in that fine American city, but this was a work trip, not a vacation; I had two full-day workshops plus a new lecture to present (and reading for school on top of that.) This is the quilt teacher’s lament, you see: All dressed up, no time to sightsee.
But after my class finished yesterday, though my dogs were barkin’, I allowed myself only enough time to dip into my room to freshen up and turn right around to catch the Waving Girl ferry. The boat would take me to the Savannah riverfront and from there, I could walk downtown. When will I be back in Savannah, you know? Claus and I would like to take a trip to the American South. It could happen. But when?
When I got off the ferry, the no-see-em bugs were out for blood. They were swarming around everyone, landing in our hair and eyelashes. Batting them away was taking so much energy I was worried I had made a mistake, that I should’ve just stayed in my hotel room and promised Savannah I’d catch her on the flipside, but by the time I made my way up the steps to the city proper, there was enough breeze to blow the bugs away and my Savannah escapade* began in earnest.
Have you been to Savannah? The place is a dream. I’ve been reading about the place enough that I want to tell you all I’ve learned — but not yet. Tonight, a personal narrative, mostly because I have to get something off my chest.
By the time I hit the town, the sun was setting. I had an hour of good daylight left and this was causing me some anxiety; I was less interested in observing Savannah nightlife that I was in seeing its celebrated wedding cake houses and mossy, palm-studded squares. Luckily, I hit a few really good spots on accident right away: the Savannah College of Art and Design campus; a statue of John Wesley; and Broughton Street, which opened up to me and I walked along as the lights strung from either side of that main drag came on. The twinkle cast a lovely light and I got some good pictures you can see on my Instagram.
Because I was following my nose, I’m afraid I can’t trace for you my exact path through the city. But I can tell you that at one point I walked right past the famous Byrd Cookie. Open since 1924 and still using many of the family’s original cooky recipes, when I saw it I marched right in and bought a delicious Savannah souvenir for myself and a pal: a bag of Key Lime Coolers and Scotch Oatmeal cookys. Two-for-one. Score.
It was after that that something rather awful happened, and if I don’t tell the tale I’m afraid the memory will knock around in my head and become more vivid than it already is, here, a full day later.
I was crossing the street, munching. I had reached a paw into the bag of miniature Byrd Key Lime Coolers because I figured nothing could be more Savannah than eating those tiny, local cookys while walking through City Market. I had just reached the curb when I heard the unmistakable sound of a human body making hard contact with something it ought not to make hard contact with. The sound was a splat, a crunch; my ears witnessed a punching. The impact hung in the air for a millisecond and then I heard sharp intakes of breath and cries of alarm from nearby witnesses.
I whirled to my left and saw her. A woman lay prone on the paved street to the side of horse-drawn carriage. She had fallen while disembarking. From where she lay on the concrete, I saw how tall those carriages really are; the force of her fall was such that I had heard her hit the ground, face-first, from more than 30 feet away. A fleeting thought occurred: So many people were drinking all around me, with open containers. There was something boozy about her fall, but of course I didn’t know. All I knew is that the sight of her there, laying motionless on the hard concrete, flooded me with horror and the lemon cookie in my mouth went to paste.
I dropped the sweets from my hand. Breathless, I said, to no one,”Oh my god, oh my god,” for there was a broken face in our midst, a busted jawbone, teeth shattered, maybe a broken pelvis or slipped disc. The woman had caught her foot in the rail of the carriage and hit the ground hard. I was at least partly a witness to this terrible moment in her life and my night in Savannah was now indelibly altered from the light sightseeing trip I had envisioned. It wasn’t that I thought,”Oh, now my night is ruined.” It was that my vague, weird fears of being horribly disfigured in a freak accident were being validated, right there in Savannah, Georgia.
As I approached, all but covering my eyes with a sugary hand for fear of seeing what I knew I was about to see, the woman, miraculously, stood. I heard her say to the man who had hopped off the carriage, “I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay.” Relief flooded me to see her talking and not screaming. But how? My body was tight as a spring.
I saw the woman give the man a pat on his shoulder and tell the other passengers in the carriage she was okay; they were all as aghast as I was. I stood, dumb, there at the curb, the blinding white, powdered sugar cookys at my feet. I watched the woman stumble across to the curb near me and keep going up the street. I realized, as I began walking again — only able to think of her bloody, broken teeth — that my left hand was clutching my breast and that I was still in full wince, still shielding myself from that sound of her body hitting the road from too-high up.
The woman passed me, limping. She was in shock. Of this there can be no doubt. She was a few paces ahead of me; suddenly, she turned and went into a bar. I didn’t follow her. I didn’t know what to do. I guess I thought she was okay; an hour later, I would think, “No, she was hurt. She was in a daze. She had broken bones.” And I wished I would’ve followed her into the bar to make sure she had a friend, a helper.
So that’s all I can tell you now. There’s so much to tell about QuiltCon and the other amazing thing that happened this week, but that’s all I can say for now.
*I love a thesaurus. I thought, “There must be a better word than ‘adventure.'” An “escapade” is “an act or incident involving excitement, daring, or adventure.” That’s more like it.
Greetings from Savannah! Image: Modern Quilt Guild
Getting ready to come to beautiful Savannah, GA for the big, basically sold-out QuiltCon East 2017 has had me busier than a one-armed paper-hanger. Actually, for anyone who knows the quilt business, saying that I was busier than a person getting ready to go teach and lecture at a big quilt show is sufficient. Gah!
I’ll be teaching all day today and tomorrow; my lecture is Saturday morning and I leave a little bit after that, but I’m hoping to Instagram what I can from the show and hopefully post on the ol’ PG tonight, if I’m not too exhausted. Sometimes, I surprise myself!
If you’re here at the show, you must at least try to find me and say hi. The best thing about big quilt conferences is actually meeting people that are usually just tiny pictures attached to comments online.
Whether or not we see each other, and whether or not you’re at the show or just checking out all the social media posts that will start flooding in from all your favorite quilters/bloggers/posters, etc., about an hour — enjoy the show!
Transparent brackets on a scary, scary mold of human teeth. Photo: Wikipedia.
A few weeks ago, I had a dentist appointment.
I put a comment in the comments section that let you know the visit was pain-free and it was, mostly. My new dentist zinged me with the spinny thing a couple times, but just when I was about to cry and rip off my paper napkin he switched to the old-fashioned scraper tool and I was okay. (The scraper doesn’t bother me for some reason.) The good news was that I didn’t have any cavities, so yay me for brushing my teeth even when I’m so tired I can’t see straight. The bad news is that I need a crown, but this was not news. I have a tooth on my lower right that is 79% filling at this point and I was actually surprised that my new dentist — who has extremely hairy arms but an excellent sense of humor — let me out the door without scheduling the appointment, but he didn’t. He said I would be okay for awhile, as long as I stop eating ice.*
The reason I’m doing an official follow-up to the dentist post is because something major happened.
I asked about braces.
Oh, I had them when I was a kid. Actually, I was a tween, but advertising executives hadn’t come up with that word for 13-year-olds back in the mid-’90s, so I think of myself as a kid back then — a kid with real messed up teeth. Man, were they crooked. Jacked-up toofs run in my family. The Fons clan has deep palates and our teeth are relatively large and excited to show up to the mouth party, so there’s a lot of crowding. Besides, you know, my family members — both on the Fons and Graham side — are just so wise, most of us have had to have all four respective wisdom teeth removed. If we didn’t, you see, we would be too wise.We would like, rule the galaxy because of our wisdom We would also have even crooked-er teeth.
So yes, I had braces as a youth and as a result, my teeth became super straight. But over the next decade or so, something happened: My lower teeth started to get all crooked again. This wasn’t something I noticed while it was happening, obviously; teeth move slowly. But a couple years ago I realized my lower incisor was starting to cock a little bit. A year after that, I saw how it had moved the tooth next to it — and the tooth next to that. Needless to day, I was steamed: Not only did I have braces in junior high, I had rubber bands, too.
From that day on, I began to notice my (crooked) teeth when I viewed episodes of Quilty or Love of Quilting. I began to be self-conscious about the way my teeth looked on camera and, more immediately pressing, how they looked in the bathroom mirror when I was flossing. I know plenty of folks vainer than I, but I’m not ashamed to say that I care about my appearance and try to keep myself looking and feeling my best. Besides, I do have a job that is public in many ways. How my teeth look — and how I feel about how my teeth look — is not an entirely trivial thing.
When I asked my dentist about all this, he said, with a reassuring nonchalance, “You should talk to an orthodontist. Sure. I see that, on the bottom. I’ll give you a referral to the two best guys. Get a quote, see what they say. It wouldn’t take too much. You’d be much happier.”
And a few days ago, I had one of the appointments. It’s so much money. But it’s my face. My teeth. You know? I give to charities. I save for retirement. I pay my taxes and I try to be generous. I’m in debt for school, but I’m paying it back as I go along. I can’t really “afford” to straighten my smile but I could figure it out. And it’s really been bugging me, how my teeth have shifted and gotten all weird. The thought that keeps coming to me is hard to admit, but I can tell you anything, so here goes:
I’ll be 40 in three years. How cool would it be to have the best smile of my life when I hit 40?
What if, you know? Just what if? They would be on the inside, by the way, if I’m willing to pay extra.
I think I’d have to try and make that work.
*[EDITOR’S NOTE: I am literally eating ice right now. It’s soft ice and I’m chewing carefully. Note to self to take iron supplement every day, not just when I remember.]
Portrait of a woman, aged sixteen, previously identified as Mary Fitzalan, Duchess of Norfolk, 1565. Image: Wikipedia.
Whatever you have heard, whatever conclusions you may have drawn, I feel compelled tonight to make sure you know that I am not a grown-up.
Saying such a thing is painful for two reasons.
The first (and probably the most painful) reason is that when I say it, I sound like someone in a Disney World commercial. I say that I’m not a grown-up and suddenly I see myself in one of those commercials, smiling a real cheesy smile while wearing a Donald Duck visor and a fannypack, throwing up my hands with a shrug while I whirl around in the teacups as the voiceover plays me saying, “I guess I’m just not ready to grow up, yet, Mickey!”
I think you trust that I like fun. But I am not a fan of amusement parks.
The second reason it’s painful to admit that I am not an actual grown-up person is because everyone expects me to be and I have convinced people for long enough that I can behave like a grown-up person, to bail out now would be difficult at best.
Since 2005, I have supported myself as a freelancer. Writing, performance, and quilting gigs are how I make my living. This means that I have to deal with self-employment tax and save receipts and fill out countless 1099 forms and keep track of so, so many things. When tax time comes, I think, “I can’t do this. This is very hard.” But I do it, anyway, because I am a good citizen. I’m not a grown-up, you see, but I am at least a good citizen.
But taxes are kind of like, easier, because they only happen once a year. (I used to file quarterly but I’m not making very much money right now, so I can get by doing it once in April.) What really blows me away is that I am grown-up enough to go buy groceries when I need them.
Let me ask you: Do you ever marvel at your ability to do any of the following?
buy groceries
pay the internet/electric/gas/phone bill/condo fee/tax man
get to a place (any place!) on time, with your act together
give to a charity
get to your gate early
cook a meal
go on a date
get a job, keep a job, lose a job, get another job
complete a lot of homework
I’m telling you, sometimes I cannot believe I can do any of those things. Because I am not a grown-up. I am a kid. I am a goofy, goofy kid. I don’t know how I can feed myself, half the time. I don’t know when I learned these things. But I am surviving, somehow, and I am generally content.
I do have a good mom. But my mother is not doing my homework, you know? Sometimes, I just shake my head. Because I have no idea.
