The Tree of Life quilt block, currently up on my design wall.
Here was my day:
I woke up. I wrote for a few hours. I drank tea during those hours, tea with probably too much cream and honey. I don’t want to live in a world without pots of tea with cream and honey, so there you have it.
Errands were run. Dry cleaning. Grocery store, because I needed cream and honey. I didn’t get to the post office and I feel bad about that. I didn’t go on a walk to no place at all and I feel bad about that, too. I took a brief nap.
I did work. Emails, proposals, thinking-cap sorts of things. Correspondence. Invoicing. I called a friend of mine, I tidied the kitchen, I received a UPS box. It contained a quilt that has finally come home after a year of being out for editorial, or a show, or because it just needed to go find itself.
And at the end of all this, at the end of myself, what did I want?
I wanted to sew. I wanted to touch fabric. I wanted to turn on my iron to the hottest setting she’s got. I wanted to slice and dice the selected fabric and stitch it back together again, paired now with other fabrics, paired now with other patchwork in order to create a more perfect union. After looking at quilts, talking about them, reading about them, being steeped in the whole thing most of the day — more than anything in the world, I wanted to try a quilt block because I have wanted to try “Tree of Life” for about a year.
Isn’t it marvelous? Making quilts?
The hum of the machine as it sews is something close to maternal. The snip of thread scissors does something important in the brain. The steam that rises from the iron, if I may be a little woo-woo, is purifying. And the thing about the process of making patchwork is that it’s fun and engaging and satisfying, but at the end of your efforts, you have a quilt. You don’t have a puzzle that needs to be scooped up and put back in the box. You don’t have a model airplane, the function of which is now to collect dust on the top of a bookshelf in grandpa’s office. A quilt wraps around a body. A quilt is functional art. A quilt is for you, and for me, and forever.
To those on the fence or those who are stumped; to those who are searching for something that will make it all better — or increase the joy factor in an already wildly fun existence — I strongly recommend making a quilt. It works for me.
Me at the Mill, but years ago. I gotta get a new picture next Sunday.
Hi, Chicago peeps and anyone who wants to make a pilgrimage for poems and possibly Scotch.
I’m honored to be the feature poet at the legendary Green Mill Cocktail Lounge for the perhaps more legendary Uptown Poetry Slam on May 3rd. That’s a Sunday night. The open mic starts at 7pm, then I do a half-hour of my classics (!), plus new poems and a couple covers, too. If I had more time, I’d absolutely love to do Prufrock, but that would be downright indulgent. After my set it’s time for the slam.
If you’ve never been to the Green Mill for the slam, you have not lived. Oh, I mean it. That’s not hyperbole. There is nothing like the show at the Mill, a blend of poetry, bloodsport, make-you-cry beauty, and possibly Scotch. It’s hilarious. It’s not too long (7pm-10pm, tops), and the Green Mill itself is gorgeous and historical. If it was good enough for Al Capone, it’s good enough for us, right? You could make a night of it and stay for the jazz trio that comes in after the show. And hey, I know many people have dreamed of reading a poem at a microphone. This is your chance.
So come over. Get there early for a seat. I’d like to see lots of friends, of course, old and new. It’s a powerful, humbling thing to have a half-hour at the Mill microphone and I intend to kill it.
Cheesecake with berries, because you do not want me to use a picture of a gallbladder or a gallstone. Trust me. Photo: Wikipedia
I must confess a strange sense of embarrassment when I the surgeon told me he saw a small gallstone on my CT scan. Aren’t gallstones what obese men in their late fifties get when they eat cheeseburgers all day, watch SportsCenter and smoke Pall Malls? My brain also connected “gallstone” with “kidney stone” and boy, I’ve heard some horrific stories about those things. Really, any time a doctor says the word “stone” in conjunction with the words “inside” and “your,” you’ve got some thinking to do.
When I got home and stopped barfing, I read up on gallbladders and what can go wrong with them. A person can get gallbladder cancer, but this is extremely rare. (There’s a terrible, terrible joke here, barely: Q: What did the gallbladder say to cancer? A: “What am I, chopped liver?”) No, it’s mainly just gallstones that afflict our gallbladders. But why and how? First, we have to understand what the gallbladder is for: it does stuff with bile. That’s it, that’s all I can tell you. It’s not important. Well, it isn’t! You can have your gallbladder removed, so how important can it be? Your honor, I rest my case.
Still, you don’t want things going awry in there, and then things do. Gallstones are hardened deposits of digestive fluid. Considering that my guts are made of cotton candy and popsicle sticks, that I would have a digestive fluid problem isn’t a huge leap. Many people have gallstones; most people don’t know they do and don’t have to know because most gallstones are small and harmless. They form for various reasons and yes, one of the reasons is having high cholesterol due to many, many cheeseburgers and no exercise, Pall Malls, etc. But some gallstones form because…well, why shouldn’t they? Don’t judge a gallstone for wanting to live. Gallstones are just like you and me.
My friend told me this morning that he had a terrible time with his gallbladder and nearly had to have it removed; he avoided this in the eleventh hour thanks to medicine and fluids. He did say the pain he experienced was the worst of his life. He passed out and he’s no fainting goat.
I have zero symptoms, though. I think I’m one of the people who will never have to deal with my stone (I like to refer to it as my little “gallpebble,” thank you.) If they have to take it out, though, I ain’t scurred. Actually, it would be kind of exciting. Taking out my gallbladder would increase the number of organs I’ve had excised from three to four. If you count tonsils and four wisdom teeth, now I’m getting to be a real conversation piece. Oh, and there were a couple suspicious moles removed a few years back. Hm. Parts of my body are just flying off into space, aren’t they?
Tomorrow we examine (in words, in words!) my cyst. What nerve! What gall!
I spent the majority of the day in the hospital yesterday, dagnabbit.
Sometimes it seems that I get sick or have something go wrong and when I recover, it’s time to set my stopwatch and wait for the 00:00 to hit and then it’s back to the nurses and doctors. My 00:00 came the other night and yesterday, I could wait no longer to take my watch to the ER.
Starting last week taping TV, I felt this a strange, new pain. (It’s always exciting to experience a symptom for the first time! It’s like making a new friend.) There was intense pain and a strange gripping, clenching, internal dripping (??) feeling around my old ostomy site. I’ve got a fabulous scar to the right of my bellybutton and all around it, tenderness and a disturbing hardness had arrived. And did I detect streaks? Under the skin? Oh, dear. Oh, boy. It was worse when I bent over to pick up my house keys, which happens all the time for some reason.
My new friend Elle (a quilter, no surprise) told me when I got to DC that if I ever needed medical care, to call her immediately. “I know from ER trips,” she said, having taken various members of her family on a regular basis. “I’ll be your advocate. I know about that, too.”
I really, really hate calling in favors, but I did. Elle and baby Miles took me to Sibley and I’m happy to say I received excellent care. Surgeons poked at me, internal medicine doctors prodded me, CT scans were ordered, and pain medicine was blessedly dispensed. I barfed a lot, too. We were there for eight hours and Miles was an angel. He also was useful: when Elle would go out of my room to ask for something, the staff was like, “Oh!! Adorable baby!! Yes, how can we help you? Adorable baby!!”
Results were inconclusive. The surgeon thinks it’s sutures working themselves out, maybe adhesions shifting around. But I got bonus diagnoses: I have a small gallstone and a 2” ovarian cyst on my right side. Wow! And I just came in for what I thought was a piece of my intestine ready to quit on me. I told my surgeon about my lipoma, too. He said it was no big deal and laughed when I told him how I found it.
All you have to do is get out of bed in the morning. Things will happen to you. Experiences will arrive. What will happen today? Time to wake up.
A couple months ago, I was profoundly annoyed with myself. Oh, I’ve been annoyed with myself plenty since then, but this was a big one.
For a long time, I’ve had this stock comment that I share in the course of small talk about extreme weather. Say it’s blisteringly hot or dangerously cold and I’m in a taxicab and the driver and I are lamenting about how very, very bad it is outside. I frequently would share that I worried about the elderly in extreme weather like this.
I was 100% sincere. When it’s in the upper nineties or higher, when it’s negative anything, I am genuinely concerned about the eldest among us because they are vulnerable in temperatures like those. They’re often shut into their homes for long stretches because of weather that bad. Cupboards and fridges go bare; medication runs out. And if the heating or cooling system breaks, old folks can die in their homes from the weather. In America.
But what exactly, Ms. Fons, is the use of making your concern and your feelings known to a cabdriver? This, I realized with a cosmic smack, is worse than pointless. I decided that if I made that comment one more time in my life without doing something about it, I couldn’t live with myself. And I meant it.
I’ve signed up to volunteer with an organization in DC called “We Are Family.” They visit seniors, take groceries to them, check in on them in inclement weather; stuff like that. My first volunteer experience with them will be next Saturday for a grocery delivery; the Saturday after that, I’ll go on some visits. I am profoundly glad I’m going to be home for awhile so I can do this. I’ve been excited to get started but of course haven’t been home.
Old people used to terrify me. While in the process of ruining his life, my father worked at a particularly depressing, shabby nursing home in Winterset and made us visit his “friends” at that terrible place. Going to a nursing home is traumatic for any person I’ve ever met who went to one as a kid. They’re startling, confusing places for children. When Alzheimers patients scream babble to no one — or to the child directly — they’re pure nightmare.
But I’m over it. We’re all temporarily young. And I’ma say it: our culture seems to be awfully good at putting our elderly out to pasture. I’m finding it increasingly untenable that this is the case. How have I only now realized that there is a universe of solid advice and great stories via people who have so been there? I just have to ask. And can you imagine being old and lonesome, just watching TV all day while that advice and those stories get dustier and dustier, utterly unused? Nightmare, indeed.
Yo, Fons! Less blithe, passing commentary; more fix.
Yesterday was not a good day. It finished well, but it got off to a terrible start.
The terrible day began the night before, which seems unfair. I can share the following detail because a) I cannot remember the last time I did what I did and b) it’s pertinent to my tale of woe:
I was extremely hungover when I woke up. Why was I hungover? Because I was on a painfully lousy date the night before and it was so very, very lousy, I had two Sidecars and then basically chugged a snifter of armagnac. I also attribute my wild behavior to needing some kind of release after taping 40 shows in nine days: 27 Quilty, 13 Love of Quilting. Whatever the reasons, that is far, far too much liquor for me and probably anyone except Frank Sinatra. And in case you’re not aware, armagnac — which for our purposes here it’s essentially cognac — is not to be swilled. It’s a beautiful thing, a strong treat after dinner that is best shared (slowly) with another person over dessert. Part of the pleasantness of cognac or armagnac is that it’s served in a snifter, a footed glass with a wide bowl so that your hands warm the liquor as you take small sips. Did I warm my armagnac? No. Did I share it? No. This was foolish, but sometimes a girl just is and that’s that.
When I woke up, I woke up at four in the morning. I drink rarely because I can’t sleep for poop when I do. It’s not worth it. But my eyes blinked open and I felt wide awake and super grody. When was the last time I was hungover? For the life of me, I can’t remember.
Then, I looked at my bank balance. Not so great. Then I made blueberry paleo bread and it tasted amazing but was so raw in the middle, it was soup. Then I realized I forgot to pay rent this month because I have not been home in two weeks. Then I felt disturbed and scared about a pain that has developed in my abdomen around my ostomy scars. Then I did something that will make all the quilters in the audience gasp and possibly cry. I know I did both.
I washed my favorite quilt, “Whisper,” which is all-white. I neglected to take the hanging sleeve off the back. The hanging sleeve was attached by someone at a show where the quilt was on display and it was made with a multi-colored marbled fabric. The sleeve was not at all colorfast. And my beautiful quilt is now pink.
I know.
Not all of it. The top fourth. I wept. I crossed my arms, dropped my head, and cried. Pardon my French, but goddamnit. I travel this country and advise quilters about how to properly wash quilts. As the former editor of a quilt magazine and the host of several how-to quilting shows, I know, should know, how to properly wash a quilt, and I do. But I overlooked the sleeve. And now “Whisper” is kinda sorta ruined. The good news is that it’s immortalized in my book and will still keep a person warm. Maybe I’ll offer it for sale, on sale.*
We all make mistakes. We all have depressing dinners. We all take too much punch from time to time. And we take punches. I am well aware that my bad day could’ve been far, far worse (e.g., receiving a shattering diagnosis, receiving a life-altering phone call, etc.) but when I saw those pink patches and my head was throbbing, I didn’t feel wise. I felt like the dog’s breakfast.
Slackers!! Four Muses, by Francois Lemoyne, 18th cent.)
Poetry has been kind to me lately. Actually, it’s more than that: poetry has been texting me, taking me out to dinner, and smooching me at my front door. I’m pretty sure this means we’re dating. Whee!
The muse is a beautiful concept. Here’s the scoop: In Greek and Roman mythology, the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (I can’t pronounce it, either) presided over the arts and sciences, giving inspiration to those who were making the stuff. Just perusing the muses’ names and occupations, as it were, is poetic: Clio was muse to history keepers; Polyhymnia took care of hymn writers; Terpsichore handled choral dancing and song, and so on.
I owe Erato and Thalia because they inspire lyric poetry. I guess that’s what I write, though it sounds pretty fancy. I’d thank Calliope because she was a poetry muse, too, but Calliope visited the poets who wrote epics. So far, epic poetry is not my jam.
But it’s been incredible being visited by the muse(s) over these months. I always love poetry, but it’s not always so…close. I’m reading it, memorizing long pieces from Longfellow to Smith, grabbing Shakespeare bits here and there. And I’m copying all these poems down longhand. You know how painting students will copy a Picasso or a Cezanne to more fully understand the method and the genius of the artist? It’s just the same for poetry: copying a James Dickey, a Larkin, a Tennyson — other than memorization and recitation, copying a poem on paper is the best way to get your head around the beauty of it.
I’m not just studying, though. I’m writing, too. I’m in the zone, man! Naturally, a fair chunk of what I first put down is absolute garbage but there’s some stuff that I’m rather proud of. I’m so thankful that I’m in whatever phase I’m in; the muses are known to slip away as they come.
My heart was gripped with fear the other day when I woke up with a scratchy throat and a sniffle. As of tomorrow, I will have been gone from my home for two full weeks — impossible, all the things that I have done since leaving* — and to falter in the homestretch with a cold (or something worse) is not an option.
But then I sneezed nine times in a row and I realized with a rueful look to no one at all: allergies.
I don’t have seasonal allergies anymore, for the most part. I have lived a city since 2001 and in a city, the beauty of nature is stamped out and destroyed by the fumes of cars, the steam that rises from the subway, and the crushed glass of millions of shattered dreams that carpets the cold, hard cement. Pollen doesn’t stand a chance and that’s been fine by me for years.
Because when my sisters and I were kids, good grief did we suffer. Ragweed is Iowa’s kudzu: stand still for a moment and you will be covered in microscopic beads of death. The wretched stuff — which doesn’t even have the class to originate in a lovely flower but in a weed — would snake its way into our mucous membranes and ruin us and this always happened when school started for the year. My nerdy sisters and I would be so excited for school and then we’d remember that we were social pariahs who had to carry a box of Kleenex with us at all times. Really, we all had boxes of Kleenex that we carried with us to all our classes or put in our desks.
Itchy. Runny. Sneezy. You could’ve called us by those names and we would’ve answered you. My sister Rebecca actually wadded up little wicks of Kleenex to stick up her nostrils. She didn’t do that at school but the moment she got home, up the nose they went to staunch the flow. (She still uses that method when she has a runny nose for whatever reason.) We were miserable. And I try to ignore the nagging resentment I have that no one thought to take us girls to a freaking allergist or at least try some weird home remedy that might relieve our pain. I can still remember the raw, stinging feeling when I’d blow my nose for the 10,000th time, tissue on red, raw skin and then, insultingly, a sneeze attack.
Allergies, you can flirt with me. Go ahead. I’m heading home tomorrow and I’ll return to Washington where ragweed ain’t even a thing. I’m not allergic to cherry blossoms, neither. Take that.
*Filmed 27 episodes of Quilty, performed poetry in front of lots of people, filmed 13 episodes of Love of Quilting, saw Yuri. Went on a date. Wrote things. Played rope toy with Mom’s dog, Scrabble.
I’ve decided to sell a few quilts from my large and ever-growing collection.
I make a lot of quilts. Many of them are for publication in magazines or books; many others are given to loved ones. There are certain quilts that are particularly important to me that I will keep for myself, but there is a growing number that I think might give other people happiness — and hey man, I gotta earn a living. So over the next few weeks/months, I’m going to offer a few quilts for sale.
This quilt is the first up on offer. It’s called “Hey, Blue” and it was pieced entirely by me in downtown Chicago in 2014. The block used (which measures 11 1/2”) is called “Butterfly at the Crossroads” and there are twenty of these blocks in total. The quilt is throw-size, measuring 66 x 75 1/2”.
The blocks are all made from scrappy blues; the background a consistent, real sweet modern shirting print. The back features a big swath of a Provencal white-and-blue floral, paired with a swath of a cheery orange and white modern floral print from Michael Miller, a lovely contrast when a bit peeks out from behind the top. The quilting was done on a longarm by professional longarmer LuAnn Downs and was featured in Quilty magazine in the Sep/Oct ’14 issue.
The price of the quilt is $1300 + the cost of insured shipping via FedEx. If you’re interested in purchasing this quilt, email me at mary (at) maryfons (dot) com. The first person to pipe up gets the sale. You can mail a check or we can do it via PayPal, then I’ll send along your new blankie.
If you’re interested in purchasing a quilt but miss this one, just keep reading. I have a lot of (rather lovely, I’d like to think) quilts and plan to cull the numbers until I can more freely move around my apartment.
Chaiwa-Tewa girl with butterfly hair arrangement. Photo: Northwestern University Library, Edward S. Curtis’s ‘The North American Indian’: Photographic Images, 2001.
In 2005, I went to a sweat in a sweat lodge in the desert of New Mexico. The ritual was lead by a Native American from the Tewa tribe* and it was, as you can imagine, really hot in there.
Going to a real sweat lodge for a purification ceremony sounds like something a person would seek out and pay handsomely for in the name of spiritual enlightenment or woo-woo. But my sweat happened by pure chance and that made it more remarkable (and more woo-woo, I suppose.) Here’s what happened:
I was in Albuquerque for the 2005 National Poetry Slam. I was slamming on the Green Mill team that year; I can’t remember how our team did, but just being at Nationals was good enough for me — Nationals is the biggest competition of the year and a huge party. Plus, I was excited to be in Albuquerque; I had never been there before and was taken with the adobe, the baked streets, the tumbleweed, the dust. At that time in my life, I was what you’d call “straight-edge.” That meant that I didn’t drink alcohol or take drugs, ever, not even a little bit. That might not seem impressive, but it sorta was because I was twenty-four and hung out with poets and writers. Poets and writers are not known for temperance, I don’t know if you heard. My position on such things made me an odd man out; I had to look hard for my kinsmen.
I found some on that trip. Over the few days I was there, I fell in with a group of people who also strictly abstained from all mind- and mood-altering substances. We hung out in the downtown area after the slam competitions wrapped and watched poets from Portland and L.A. and Asheville get absolutely wasted as they went from bar to bar. We felt self-righteous and enlightened, I’m sure, and we were probably as insufferable in our own ways as the hard-partying poets were in theirs.
On the morning of the last day, while everyone else was nursing hangovers (or still out from the night before) one of my new friends asked us if any of us wanted to do a “sweat.” He was a 6’10 Native American man of indeterminate age. He wasn’t a poet at the competition but a friend of a friend and I had spent enough time around him by that point that I could make the call about his skeeviness or lack thereof: no skeeve detected. I’ll do it, I said, as long as we could be back by lunchtime to head to the airport. No problem, our friend said, so several of us — including two women and I wouldn’t have gone if I was the only female — hopped into the back of his pickup and we headed out into the desert.
The sweat lodge was a homemade hut in back of the man’s clapboard home. It looked like an igloo wrapped in blankets and furs with a hole up at the top where the smoke could escape. Before we went in, our friend told us what to expect. He told us to remember to breathe, breathe, breathe, and to not freak out when we felt like freaking out. He also said that if we felt like we were dying, we needed to say something. He told us this as we stood around this enormous fire pit — the stones needed for the ceremony were deep in the bottom of the fire pit, for this is how they would get hot enough to use. We threw all this wood in and stood back from the wall of heat that rose up. It was bizarre to be at a roaring fire in the morning in the desert. It added to the strangeness of the entire experience but I didn’t feel uncomfortable in the least, didn’t feel like I was in the wrong place.
We were instructed to head into the lodge. We ducked down and took our seats around the circle. Our host had a helper who arrived at some point and they went about transferring the searing hot rocks to the middle of the circle. Every time they brought in a rock the lodge got about 30-degrees hotter. Sweat was already rolling down my back, dripping into my eyes. Then the two men came in and I saw both carried a large cistern of water. The flap on the lodge closed and we were all plunged into darkness.
My friend intoned Native American music and words and his assistant beat a drum. A loud “Ssssssss!” cracked through the music when water was poured onto the hot stones and steam would blow us all back; this happened again and again until it was hard to tell where my body ended and the steam and heat began. I remembered to breathe. Once I let myself relax into such a bizarre, exciting, we-ain’t-in-Kansas-anymore experience, I felt some kind of peace or joy, I suppose; maybe it was even a little transcendent. I’m not a woo-woo gal in the least, but I suppose if you go to an authentic sweat given by an actual Native American at his desert home and don’t feel something, you are too cynical.
Did I have visions? No. Did I find my spirit animal? No. Did my skin look amazing when I left? You bet your kokopelli. I have kept in touch with no one from that group, but I remember some of their faces. I can’t remember names of people I meet — like, I forget them the moment I learn them — but I never forget a face.
Me and a little dude with a tail, Chicago Botanical Garden, 2015. Photo: Yuri
Yuri was in Chicago over the weekend, also.
We spent time together on Monday. After work tasks were complete, he took me to the Chicago Botanical Garden to walk, to talk, and remember each other for awhile.
The Chicago Botanical Garden is a world-class joint. Hordes descend upon the place in warmer months but somehow milling among thousands of people doesn’t feel bad at the Botanical Gardens; it feels communal. English gardens, Japanese gardens, fields of field flowers, a glassy pond, sculptures big and small — if it’s green and cultivated you want, green and cultivated you shall have and there’s a great cafe for when you’re exhausted from walking and have pollen all over your shirt. It’s also free to get in.
Yuri and I walked through the grounds arm in arm. We did this because we care about each other a great deal but we were also freezing cold. Nothing has bloomed, yet; there were a few brave shoots poking up here and there, but not many. All the plants are waiting, checking final items off the pre-production list before the big launch.The greenhouses were thriving — greenhouses do that — so when we were almost too cold to be having fun, we found a greenhouse and slipped in to warm up. Tip: if you’re feeling disconnected from nature, pop yourself into a balmy, breathing greenhouse. You’ll get fixed right up.
We had fun together. We got soup and a glass of wine at the cafe. We argued. I cried. We laughed. Walking on the main promenade under the cold, grey sky, Yuri picked me up and spun me around and I hollered, “No! Don’t! Yuri, stop!” but it was okay. New York, we have both decided, seems like a dream. It’s a trite thing to say, but damned if I know how else to describe it. The East Village? Really? Manhattan? But when? I know why — passion, risk, love, adventure — but as to the how, I couldn’t tell you if you put a Rhododendron ferrugineum to my neck.
Yuri and I aren’t together, but we’ll always be together because of New York, because of Chicago, because of that day in the garden, I guess. When do you stop being connected to a soul?
That picture up top is one of a series Yuri took of me being a mom to a hunk of bronze.
Seeing Bert and Ernie chopped in half and placed under glass is making my inner child hysterical and traumatized, but at least they’re the real mccoy. Photo: Wikipedia
There are ribbons tied to my fingers; some go from there to this keyboard and some flutter out and lay in the pages of my journal. This is clearly annoying and counter-productive if I’m doing anything but sitting at my laptop or writing in my journal.
It’s TV taping time. Yesterday, I filmed three fantastic shows with Mom. I feel okay saying that the shows are getting better every time we do this. It’s not a new job anymore. I got this. And I like it, too.
On the set, doing this job, the ribbons have to be tucked away. Frankly, it’s kind of a relief. It’s good to be around the crew that I love, good to have those hot lights on me, good to meet the guests and do the job, which I see as simple: make the other person look good. That’s it. And so I can take all the focus off me and shift it to the other person. No brooding, no decisions to be made outside of what patchwork unit we need to teach next.
And there’s a Bert and Ernie in the lobby of the Iowa Public Television! This is the best place to be today.
Sunrise over Israel, but it looks like rural Iowa to me. Photo: Wikipedia.
I would not wish the feeling I have this morning on any man or beast under the sun.
I’m sitting in the window of a beautiful hotel in Chicago. Out the glass is the fairest city of them all; I’m on Chicago Avenue no less, and there is the wide street, there is the church and there is the steeple and open the shade and see all the people. My last Quilty shoot taped this weekend, but it’s not the bittersweetness of that that is making my heart ache in my chest. It feels like a brick is sitting on me.
What will I do? Whatever will I do and what have I done, leaving this place?
I’ve fallen for Washington. I’m having a love affair with that city and I’m pulled there. When I came to Chicago I was a lump of un-molded clay. I was a child, twenty-one years old and afraid. In fourteen years here the city formed me into a person I’m more or less proud of, though I did plenty to be ashamed of. I became a poet here, going to the Green Mill slam week after week, year after year; it was poetry school, I majored, I might have even graduated. I made (and witnessed) some of the best art of my life with the Neo-Futurists for five years after that. I was married and divorced here. I moved from the north to the south and in the south, found a me I loved to live with. Quilty was born here, too; born and ended, at least for me.
When I moved to Washington by way of New York, I arrived in that city with my shape. The safety of that, the relief, not being a lump of clay, it makes me want to stay there. It’s easier than when I arrived in this town. But I went to the Mill last night and did poems; I slammed and won. And at the end of the show — that magnificent, enduring, eternal show — I had the honor of closing it with Marc and Baz, blending in a Larkin poem with Baz on piano and Marc bookending. It was nothing short of sublime. This morning, I feel insane to think I would not come back here, to that show and so much more, in June. My heart is a terrible, wretched thing. You do not want to be me, I assure you.
All of these words, more or less, were written in my journal before I began this post and perhaps they should’ve stayed there. Too close the bone, maybe; maybe maudlin, even. But someone wrote to me and thanked me for being vulnerable and if you like that or appreciate that, my friend, this is for you. It doesn’t get more vulnerable than this. I’m vulnerable here at the window, two cities pulling at me, two paths in the woods and no clue, no clue.
I leave in a matter of hours for Iowa to tape the TV show for a week and a half. Perhaps going to yet another place — to my birthplace — will soothe this pain and perhaps on those landlocked shores I can decide. It’s nearing time to decide, indeed, and I’m looking up at the sky. That, at least, is the same over us all, no matter where we are in the world, wherever we are in America.
This is a silk brocade from France, made just after the start of the 19th century, when Tennyson was born. He wasn’t French but it seems appropriate here. Photo: Wikipedia
Today, a poetry lesson. I promise you will like it and when you are done reading this, you will be smarter and as you roll the poem around in your head, you might even cry the tears you cry when great art pokes you in the eye. I get misty every time I recite this poem at hand; I can’t be the only one.
Here is our text, which is a stand-alone part of a much larger poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson. I hesitate to give you the title because it’s terrifying, but here you go:
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 27
I envy not in any moods The captive void of noble rage, The linnet born within the cage That never knew the summer woods:
I envy not the beast that takes His license in the field of time; Unfetter’d by the sense of crime, To whom a conscience never wakes;
Nor, what may count itself as blest, The heart that never plighted troth But stagnates in the weeds of sloth; Nor any want-begotten rest.
I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; ‘Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.
By the end there, you surely smiled and thought, “Ah, yes!” or “That’s where that comes from, then!”
Okay, now let’s take a look at this thing. This is my personal analysis, born of reading and re-reading this for the past month as I worked on memorizing it.
In the first stanza, Ten-Ten ask us to consider the prisoner who doesn’t care he’s in prison, or the bird (linnet = bird) who is in a birdcage but doesn’t really mind because she’s never been outside. The man and the bird are like, “Whatever, this is fine.” Tennyson says he’d rather be a captive psychotically enraged that he’s in jail because he misses his wife or his family; he’d rather be a bird devastated that she’s been trapped, aching for the beauty she knew outside.
In the next stanza, the poet tells us he’d rather be a psycho axe-murderer who has a conscience. To be a psychopath axe-murderer who has no sense of his crimes would be somehow more horrible. As a criminal, it would be far more painful to understand all the horrible things you’ve done, but at least you’d be more human.
And in the third stanza, Ol’ Tenny says that the people who say, “Love! Who needs it! I’d rather be alone and not cry than put myself out there and get stomped. No, no love for me. I’ll just stay inside and have my cheese and crumpets, son.” Well, the poet doesn’t think much of these people. He doesn’t want to be like them because they suck.
No, in the fourth stanza, our narrator tells us just what he wants — and he second line is the one that makes my chest ache every time because it’s this aside. He’s making his point and he pauses to say, “And look, I feel this way even when I’m in it, even when the breakup is happening, even when she says she doesn’t love me anymore, even when I miss her, even when I sorrow most — even then…”
You don’t need me to analyze the last two lines. You understand him, don’t you.
German warning sign. That’s what my box looked like! Photo: Wikipedia
Yesterday I tripped and fell flat on my back. Since I’m okay, it’s hilarious.
It’s strange to trip and fall down as an adult. Toddlers fall all the time because they’re figuring out how to walk. Children fall because they’re running and playing. And of course the elderly fall sometimes and that is dangerous and can even lead to death if they can’t get to a phone for help or if the fall is particularly bad, what with all those brittle bones. But to fall all the way down to the ground in one’s thirties is a rare occurrence and disorienting.
Here’s what happened: I had to ship a huge box of wardrobe and quilts to Chicago. I printed out my UPS label and went to take it down to the front desk of my building for pickup. On the way to the elevator, I decided to just push the box with my foot; I had my purse and my computer bag in my hands.
When I got to the elevator and the doors opened, I kept trying to kick the box in but it was getting caught in the space between the hall and the floor of the elevator. I leaned into the box and when I really tried to give it a shove with my whole leg, that’s when I fell, tumbling over the box, right into the elevator. I was “a– over elbows,” as they say; finding myself looking at the ceiling of the elevator. My purse went flying and my computer bag fell with me with a troubling thud.
After I recovered, I burst out laughing. Then I got up to collect my things and myself off. The elevator doors kept trying to shut on that darned box until I finally pulled the thing in. I thanked my lucky stars no one had seen this.
The last time I fell as an adult, I was walking on an icy sidewalk. And in middle school, I was running way too fast and tripped on concrete, flat on my face. I broke my nose or at least cracked it; I never saw a doctor, so I have this strange little bump on the side of my nose that has never gone away. You can’t really see it, but I know it’s there.
If I had a nickel for every time there was a screenshot created of me mid-sentence, I would be very wealthy and would then pay to have them all removed from the Internet.
When my St. Louis-to-D.C. flight landed late last night, we taxied on the runway; once I fetched my luggage I taxied on home and then I taxied my batooski right into bed.
Tonight and tomorrow, that’s all we got in Columbia’s District before heading onto Chicago to tape twenty-seven episodes of Quilty in three days. That’s just how good we are, brother. The days are long but the days are good and this time, they’ll be extra hard and extra good because it’s my last shoot. Many of you know now that the magazine is closing but they’re keeping the show going and I’m sure the person they put in the host position will be fabulous and do a far better job than I ever did; it’s my sincere desire that this is precisely what happens.
In St. Louis, I met so many devoted Quilty fans. It’s hard to leave. It’s really hard to leave. If I think about it too long, I feel wistful and sorry. But there are projects on the horizon that swoop in and take that maudlin business away and that’s what I grab onto. I can’t talk about anything, yet, because nothing is final, yet; counting chickens before they hatch is like, the worst job you could ever, ever want. Tedious, stinky, and you’re probably gonna be wrong.
I’ll just do the shoot this weekend and go from there.
Munitions plant worker has a date with her boyfriend. Photo: National Film Board of Canada.
When I visit big groups of quilters to lecture or teach, it’s not uncommon for one or two of the ladies to ask me if I’m single and then, when I reply that yes, I am, they suggest that I date their son.
“Oh, he’s very sweet, very sweet,” they say, and usually something about how handsome he is. I have no doubt all these men are both, but as sincere as they are, it’s probably unlikely I’ll go on a date with one of these sons. I live in D.C., which is a long way from Omaha, say, or Pensacola. Most of the time the proud moms will sigh and say something like, “That is a problem, isn’t it?” Yesterday, this did not deter one mother.
“You are single, aren’t you, Mary? My son’s coming to pick me up after the lecture,” she said, “And you need to meet him.”
“Yes,” I laughed, “I’m single.” To humor her (good-naturedly, of course) I asked, “What’s his name?”
“Brian,” she said. “You’ll love him!”
“Well, I’m sure he’s fantastic,” I said, “but I live in DC. It’s not so convenient to date someone in St. Louis, you know.”
Without skipping a beat, she said, “Oh, he’ll move! He’ll move.”
I didn’t meet Brian. It might’ve been a little awkward, but it’s not that I avoided it; Mom and I were absolutely wiped after our third day in Missouri and we high-tailed it out of there. I should book more gigs in the D.C./Virginia area. There are many moms with many sons and no one has to move.
Who needs a lecture about the (fascinating) East India Company? Photo: Wikipedia
One of the more maddening conversations (or is it proclamations?) that I hear these days are among parents lamenting how their kids are always tied to their phones and video games computers and tablets, how social media sucks up all their attention. Stop buying them these devices, then. They get them because parents buy them for the kids. A parent may protest, saying that life is impossible without these tools, that their kids will be hopelessly lame and isolated from their peers without them. A fair argument; now, parents leave those kids alone.*
As it pertains to my life, however, I abide by one simple rule: I only use my smartphone for entertainment or time-passing if what I’m surrounded by is — without a shadow of a doubt — less interesting that what’s on my phone.
Usually, this means that don’t use it that much when I’m out and about. I do check email, I do respond to texts and things; if I’m getting navigation information, of course I use my phone because it’s made of magic. I’m talking about sitting in a coffee shop and burying my head in the thing, or being in an airport and never once looking up because I’m scrolling through Facebook. In a coffee shop, in an airport, in a hotel lobby and other places like these, I’m confident that what I’ll observe around me is more thought-provoking than playing Candy Crush.* Look at that: the woman eating her breakfast alone. The couple arguing under their breath over by the window. The beautiful chandelier. The bellman who is past retirement age but still working as a bellman. What is the world made of? What is American culture? Someone designed and built this building, someone is about to lose their job today, someone is having sex somewhere, right now, in this hotel! Observing the world leads to wondering how we interact. There’s so much to see absolutely everywhere.
Now, consider an empty doctor’s office with a table of magazines offering Newsweek, Golf Digest, and Men’s Health. I might peruse Newsweek for the 6.1 seconds it takes to go through the entire thing nowadays, but after that, it’s Phone City for me. There’s very little to take in in that situation; anything that might be worth it, I’ve already seen. I feel the same way about standing in a vestibule waiting to be picked up. Looking at Instagram seems appropriate there: pictures of quilts and Madonna’s latest selfie are way, way more interesting than staring at a vase of fake pussy willows.
As always, giving advice feels wrong, but a floating a friendly thought for consideration seems okay: consider the bird, not the tweet.
*I’ve never played Candy Crush, so I could be wrong about this, but I’m gonna roll those dice.
Mom and I arrived in St. Louis last night around 10pm. Our attractive and capable BabyLock hostess/event producer picked us up and we got to the hotel. The beds are clean as can be, the room is spacious, and you could eat an omelet off the bathroom floor (I will not be attempting this) but I must confess my sails luffed when I saw the name of the place, driving up. It’s that hotel chain that pops popcorn in the lobby. You know the one? It’s a nice gesture, but it makes the whole hotel smell like a movie theater. Bed + buttered popcorn is not a good sensory mix. It reminds me of one of those weird all-night church youth group shut-in things at the local cineplex where everyone is doing things they should not be doing. So much safer at home.
Anyway, Mom and I approached the desk and we’re checking in and the lady helping us has this absolutely bizarre accent. I mean, it’s really unusual. I’ve got a pretty good ear for accents, can usually tell the difference between, say, a South African and an Australian accent. But this one was totally beyond me. In just under two minutes, I decided, “Oh, I see. She has a speech impediment.” And I felt really glad I hadn’t asked her where she was from.
“Where are you from?” my mother asked, cheerily. And then, in a way that would make me gasp with laughter in my hotel room later, Mom said, with absolutely zero trace of malice or entrapment, “I have to ask because your accent… Well, it’s just… It’s unplaceable!”
“Ew, oim frum Englund,” the girl said, suddenly now more affected than she had been before.
Ah. Now I understood completely. This woman, rather than to repeatedly hit her head on the popcorn machine to add interest to her long, dull, Drury Inn nights, decided to affect a “British” accent to help pass the hours. It was not a British accent. It was… It was not a British accent. But that’s cool. My friends and I used to do stuff like that. We’d be at a Perkins in Des Moines, eating cheese sticks and drinking Cokes and we’d decide to pretend we were all foreign exchange students from Ireland and start talking with the worst brogues the world has ever heard.
“Top o’ th’ marnin’ to ye,” one of us would say. Then someone would say, “Eim rrrrrrrrredeah ta arder, Miss.”
“What can I get for you?” the waitress would ask, bone weary, silently pleading to whatever god she prayed to that the Perkins would be struck by lightning and Ray would send her home early. We’d fool around with our accents for awhile, get bored with them, and then go back to being something approaching socially acceptable. For the love of Mike we were so obnoxious. I’m so sorry, Perkins lady.
I texted Mom when I got to my room: “She’s from England like I’m from Malawi.”
Mom’s reply: “Yeah: England, Arkansas.”
We’re on the road together four days. Further dispatches to come.
If you want to write, you have to read all the time because reading is the other half of writing. A person who is serious about identifying herself as a writer ought to say, “I’m a writer-reader.” We could get rid of that annoying hyphen and make it one word: writerreader. It’s hideous, but so are “stomachache” and “anodyne” and we get along with those all right.
Philip Roth said that the novel has about twenty-five years of relevancy left for the general public. Novels will still be written, he says, but the number of people who read them will get very small, similar in size to those groups of people who enjoy reading Latin poetry, say. Roth says that because print is changing so rapidly and because our pace of life is simply not matched to the form of a novel — neither in length or content — these particular sorts of books will fade away. Reading a novel takes focus, he says, focus and attention on one larger thing that we so often trade for many smaller things. “If you haven’t finished reading a novel in two weeks,” Roth said, “then you haven’t read the novel.”
While my hosts and I waited for a table at the restaurant in Georgia last weekend, I wandered into a used bookshop. I hunted for poetry but there was none to speak of, just a biography on Anne Sexton. (I think in my current brooding state five-hundred pages on the life of a brooding poet would be nothing short of disastrous.) The “Classic Literature” shelf drew my attention, but my perusal was desultory. As Roth said: a novel demands time and focus and I choose to spend mine elsewhere. Of course I read novels from time to time and I’ve read some pretty important ones (Crime & Punishment = hated it so, so much) but reading an engrossing novel almost unpleasant for me because I get too carried away. It’s the same reason I don’t watch or follow sports. A couple hours into great literature or the NFL and I start shouting at the book or at the television. I throw the book down and have some spasm on the couch because Character A is so stupid! stupid! stupid! or I jump up and down and twirl and hot-step when there’s five minutes left in the quarter (?) and my team is hanging on by a thread. I don’t like those feelings. I feel manipulated and vulnerable.
But I bought a novel anyway. The edition of Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser was just too perfect to pass up and at $4.25 I couldn’t afford to. The story of Sister Carrie is kind of my own: country girl goes to Chicago and makes good/bad. How did Dreiser know to write my biography 80 years before I was born? But here it is, to my left, a book published in 1900 that sketches out great tracts of my experience in this life. It’s hard to put down for that reason; it’s also hard to put down because the late-Victorian mores are hilarious. Here’s how Carrie and a character I won’t name communicate their white-hot, all-consuming, life-destroying passion for each other, no kidding:
He leaned over quietly and continued his steady gaze. He felt the critical character of the period. She endeavoured to stir, but it was useless. The whole strength of a man’s nature was working. He had good cause to urge him on. He looked and looked, and the longer the situation lasted the more difficult it became. The little shop-girl was getting into deep water. She as letting her few supports float away from her.
“Oh,” she said at last, “you mustn’t look at me like that.”
“I can’t help it,” he answered.
She relaxed a little and let the situation endure, giving him strength.
“You are not satisfied with life, are you?”
“No,” she answered, weakly.
He saw he was the master of the situation — he felt if. He reached over and toughed her hand.
“You mustn’t,” she exclaimed, jumping up.
“I didn’t intend to, he answered, easily.
Sister Carrie has been called “the greatest of all American urban novels. I’ve thrown it across the room twice already, which means it gets at least three stars from The PaperGirl Book Review.
“The Little Lame Prince and His Traveling Cloak,” by Dinah Maria Mulock, 1909; illustration by Hope Dunlap.
What’s wrong with me?
I go out on the open road, I long for my bed. I long for the crisp sheets that I washed in the morning and put lovingly on the bed for the moment when I’d sink down into the white. Out there is the lush green of Georgia, the thunderstorms over St. Louis, but once there I long for the sewing machine that is always right where I left it. I love my luggage, but I miss my sink. Even the dumb kitchen sponge.
I come home and I embrace my sponge and my french press with an almost uncomfortable enthusiasm; these are inanimate objects, Fons. I realize that, but god how I missed you, little kitchen sponge, little frenchy-french. Then, watch a week go by and what happens? I wake before sunrise, as always, and pad to the kitchen and lo, the faintest sigh of longing comes as I go about my ritual: fill kettle, turn on burner, rinse french press, put in tea, close tea container, pour cream into pichet, get spoon for honey. Put all on tray. Scratch. Yawn. Think about life. Look at counter. Feel desire to scour it later. Wait for water to boil. Wait for the quotidian to kill me, eventually.
When the tea is ready, I’m so happy to have that morning hit of sweet, creamy Earl Grey, I forget that moments ago, I wished I was out on the road. Out of the house. Out of me, I guess.
I can’t be pleased and it drives me to drink (tea.) Forget the grass being greener; I don’t care about green. I just want the grass to be interesting. And what I can’t figure out is if there’s more to be found by chopping wood and carrying water day in, day out at the homestead or more to be found seeking whatever’s new around every single corner that I meet.
George Harrison said, “The farther one travels/the less one knows.” And there was a Swedish painter I read about years ago who never, ever left his hometown and painted the most wonderful paintings. His thing was, basically, “What on earth is there more beautiful than this? Why would I go anywhere else? I mean… Look.” But come on. Where would we be without the peripatetic, the restless, the road dog? We’d be at home. Booooring.
On Thursday, I go to St. Louis for four days. I’ll be lecturing with Mom, which tonight makes me so happy I could cry. Most of the time I travel alone. With Mother, you see, I get the best of both grassy worlds: I have the familiarity and comfort of my very own mom mixed with the plane and the pavement, the hotel room and the view of The Gateway To the West from whatever hotel room I’m assigned.
Somebody please tell me what the Sam Hill I’m supposed to be and just what I’m supposed to do. I assure you I have no clue. None.
Dear Quilty, available at fine bookstores everywhere, local quilt shops, and on my website soon.
Friends! Countrymen! People afflicted with the desire to tear up perfectly good cotton fabric and sew it back together again! I have an announcement:
Dear Quilty is here and it is really good. (It’s a book.)
Working alongside Team Quilty, I selected some of the best, most beautiful, most approachable quilt projects (and one totebag project) from the past four years of Quilty magazine. The full patterns of the quilts are inside, there are tutorials and demos, there are links to Quilty video tutorials, and of course, Spooly is all over this thing, helping you out, being your pal, possibly getting in the way (adorably, of course.)
But it’s more, y’all. It’s more than that.
Dear Quilty was a way for me to tell the full story of the show, the magazine, the whole point behind Quilty, which was: Make a friendly landing place for beginning quilters. We cannot shame the people who don’t know what a bobbin is. We cannot snicker when a new quilter brings in a poorly made first attempt. We can’t ever stop learning from the beginner, either (that means you, Advanced Quilting Lady a.k.a. Quilt Policewoman. And no, there are not Quilt Policemen. They are always women. I don’t know why.)
In the book, you learn about the people who have made the magazine over the years. You get these great interviews with them and also with the Chicago film crew who has made the show with me since 2010. There are fan letters in the book, too, proving that Quilty has changed some lives, man! Pretty groovy.
Now that the magazine is going away and I’m leaving the show, this book is kinda extra special. Quilty the brand isn’t going anywhere, it’s just entering a new phase. But Dear Quilty is a record of what may be “vintage” Quilty? Maybe? That makes me feel old/too special for my own good, so let’s not say “vintage” at all. Let’s just say the book is great and you should get one immediately. I saw the first copy at my gig in Georgia and it turned out even more amazingly cool than I could’ve hoped for.
Within the next week or so, I’ll have a link to buy the book from me — psst… I’ll be doing some giveaways! Until then, ask your local quilt shop to order it for you and check in with ShopQuilty.com as inventory comes in. This one’s hot off the press.
America is not always easy on the eyes. We’re disfigured, materially and psychically. You see the rips and tears in the outskirts of Baltimore. Once-thriving small towns in Nebraska are pock-marked, defeated. Suburban malaise spreads and spreads like runny, watery jam. The ants are either coming or they’ve already set up shop. I don’t like ants. I’ve never liked jam, either, while we’re at it.
But I love America anyway. I believe being a patriot means just that: seeing the whole mess and loving it anyway.
Part of the way I earn my bread these days is by traveling across this country, which means I get a good look at the thing. A friend and I were trying to figure out how many states he had visited and I had him beat with a stick. He’s never been to Minnesota! Or Nebraska! Or Iowa! I realize these states do not have the glamour profile of California or New Hampshire, but the rolling green hills pushed up by the mighty Mississippi? The endless blue sky of Kansas? The splendor, however diminished, of downtown Minneapolis? These are American gifts, every bit the knockouts of a Connecticut in autumn or a Sonoma during the grape harvest. Don’t make me get out Great American Literature, man. I ain’t afraid to hit you with Dos Passos, Twain, Cooper, Cather. You get into those and you’ll be on the next flight to the flyover states, looking for the American splendor you’ve been missing.
I’m in Columbus, Georgia tonight, resting up for a packed day tomorrow with the GALA (that’s Georgia/Louisiana) quilters. We did a meet-and-greet this evening; tomorrow it’s two lectures, a workshop, and a trunk show and book signing. My evening will be free and my hosts asked me if I wanted to go see the downtown area, take in a view of the Ocoee River, at least drive past the American Infantry Museum though it’ll be too late to go inside. Yes, I want to see these places. Yes, I want to get a feel for this place before I leave, before I know it. I’m a citizen of this country, after all. I ought to know where I live.
Columbus is Detroit is Palatine is Napa is New Haven is Greenwich is Pensacola is Boise is Brooklyn is Dyerstown is Eugene is Toledo is West Ridge is Princeton is Davenport is Fairfield is Bangor is you is me is you is me is me is me is you is you is me.
Do you have quilts in your house that are just sitting there? Are they folded, perhaps in the closet, perhaps on a shelf? Put another way: is it time for you to give some quilts away? Probably.
Generosity is in quilters’ DNA. We typically do give quilts away, which is fabulous if you’re a person who knows a quilter, because if you wanted to buy a beautifully made, king- or queen-sized quilt, it would cost you several thousand dollars; if a quilter loves you, you get it for free.
I give quilts away because there is nothing worse than looking at a stack of beautiful quilts languishing in my closet or in baskets around the house. What good are they doing there? The joy is in the making. Once the quilt is finished — unless it’s one I’m going to use for teaching or one that means so very, very much to me personally it’s like a limb — it’s time to give it away. Everyone but everyone needs a handmade quilt.
Today, my bestest friend Sarah got her quilt. It was a wedding gift way overdue. It’s the cover quilt for my book, Make + Love Quilts (available at fine bookstores everywhere!) It’s perfect for her, her husband Seth, and their kids, Little Seth and baby Katherine.
The quilt is out of my studio, out of my home, out of my life. I couldn’t be happier.
This is actually a shot taken in New Jersey, but I’m appropriating it for D.C. so take that, Jersey. Photo: Wikipedia.
The following is a transcript from a meeting that took place this morning (March 19th, 2015) at the offices of the Blossom Rights and Standards Committee of The National Cherry Blossom Festival, or, BRSCNCBF for short. Note: all speakers are actual cherry blossoms.
[BEGIN TRANSCRIPTION – 0.00.00.0]
TED: Okay, everyone. Let’s get started. Patty, are you here?
PATTY: Yes, I’m here! I’m in the back! Sorry, I was getting some coffee and the [LOST AUDIO].
TED: Great. All right, I’m going to jump right in, here. We’ve got a couple items on the agenda, but before we do that, uh, Bill… Did you want…
BILL: Yeah, I do. Thanks, Ted. Hi, everyone. I just wanted to start out the meeting with kind of a special announcement. Some of you may have heard that my wife and I are going to be moving and this is gonna be our last festival. It’s been a really hard decision, but we know it’s right for us and —
SALLY: Where are you guys moving?
BILL: We’re going to Tokyo. [Light murmuring, gasps.] Uh… I know that’s a decision that might make some of you, uh, maybe uncomfortable in some ways, ah, but Sandy and I really think it’s right for us and the boys, so… Um… Anyway, thank you all. We’ve loved being in DC all these years. It was a real tough decision. [clears throat.] Thanks.
TED: Okay, thanks, Bill. Thanks. You know we all think the world of you and wish you and Sandy luck and the boys and everything. Allrighty, let’s press on. As I know we’re all aware, the festival starts the day after tomorrow. Did you all know that? [laughter from the group.] You didn’t need a reminder? There are few concerns I’m looking at, but for the most part, we’re probably sitting in a better place than where we were last year. Action items, let’s see —
[Timestamp: 0.08.23.1]
PATTY: Ted, I don’t mean to interrupt, but I just want to let you know that I didn’t send it to you, but I got confirmation that everyone’s 1077 Do Not Pick Me forms were filed with the State Department. They did go in last month —
TED: Oh, great. That’s great. All of —
PATTY: All of them, yep, so we’re all good. Part of the confusion, if anyone cares, is that the form used to be the 1054 Do Not Pluck Me form? So it was all screwed up because of that. And actually, some blossoms are still filed under that form, but it’s getting phased out. Anyway, that’s it. Sorry.
TED: No, it’s great news. Thanks. Let’s look at these items real quick: Jerry, tell us what happened with the Bee Department.
JERRY: Um… [papers shuffling.] Hang on… Right, here we go. Uh, I spoke with William over there — I think he’s the —
SALLY: He’s the new guy.
JERRY: Right, right, I think he was a queen hire, actually, but anyway, he said that the torch lights are not getting placed on the west side of the far hill to the west of the Lincoln Memorial? No the bees are all good. No smoke problems this year for them over there, so any blossom over there in… I guess it’s District 8 is not going to have any pollen distribution trouble. Which is nice.
[Timestamp: 0.10.4.1]
BILL: Jerry, is that, are they not doing the torches because of the landscaping projects, or —
JERRY: I think so? But they didn’t go into it. I think so, though, yeah.
TED: That’s great. Thanks. Um, Amanda, tell us about No Blossom Left Behind. Joan, could you grab me that bottle of water on the table? Just throw it. Thanks.
AMANDA: If I make zero sense, just ignore me. I’m sneezing like crazy and I was up all last night with Nick; he’s blooming early, of course, like, now. I’m sleep-deprived. Anyway, donations are still way down, which is the bad news; but the good news is…that…we got the the koi fish grant. [Applause; cheering.] I know. It’s so great. They’re really wonderful, actually. Yeah. They’re all about it. And it’s not just the grant. They’re going to help collect petals from the ponds and everything and uh —
PATTY: Didn’t they say they could get the meeting set up with that pruner, too?
AMANDA: Yes! Thank you. I almost forgot. Henry is the main koi fish over there and he says he can get us that meeting with… I forget that guy’s name, but yeah. That’ll be a priority when the fest is over — thanks, Patty.
TED: Amanda, thank you. We’re getting so much positive press about No Blossom Left Behind; it’s been really impactful, really disrupting everything, so go team. Now I’d like to go around the room and hear from everyone about the goal sheets I passed out last time. I also want you to remind us all where you are, your District. And let me know if you need comp tickets and how many. I absolutely have to have the requests in today or you’re out of luck. Julie, how about you start?
