Embroidery and Other Lost Arts

In preparation for last week's baby shower for Irene, we guests received a square of flannel along with instructions to decorate it in whatever way we wished--paints, buttons, applique, etc. Also, we were to write a note about WHY we had chosen our design, which was to pertain to Irene, the expected baby girl, babyhood, parenthood, whatever.

The square I received was a solid dark brown. What? A baby quilt with dark brown in it? Nevermind. I decided to embroider it with a star. My note to Irene would explain that as I rocked baby Rachel I often sang "Twinkle, twinkle, little star." In the "How I wonder what you are" part of the song I would think about how I wondered how she would turn out--this baby, then this toddler--my own star.

Embroidering the flannel square--hah! First, I haven't embroidered for many years--decades, actually. Second, I didn't have any of the necessary supplies, being floss and an embroidery hoop. My friend Doris came to my rescue with the supplies, and to get a CLUE as to what the backstitch might actually look like I pulled out the fabulous, much cherished, quilt that Mom made when I was pregnant with aforementioned baby Rachel. She stenciled pictures from coloring books onto fabric pieces that she then mailed to family and friends with instructions to embroider the pictures and also their name. The most wonderful part--the part that makes me weep with joy and love and the memory of it--was that each contributor actually DID it--actually embroidered a quilt section and sent it back. OMG. Could this ever happen today? Answer: no. And that was a mere 30-some years ago.

How I cherish this quilt, with sections from all of my three grandmas (yes, three--there was a divorce when my dad was a boy), my best friends, my sisters, Tom's mom and sisters (for those of you who don't know, Rachel's dad and my second husband are both named Tom), my cousin, Rachel's future cousins.

The quilt now resides in my cedar chest, but that is ridiculous. I plan to hang it and decorate the guest room in yellow-complementing colors. I've made it quite clear to Rachel that although this is her baby quilt, it is not really HERS, since all of these contributors were doing it for me and her father, not HER. They didn't even KNOW her. In other words, she can pry it from these cold, dead hands.

The Best Potato Peeler

I finally found a potato peeler like my favorite one that Tom threw out.

When I grew up, we had potatoes for supper every night, so I have peeled a heap o' taters. I like a certain kind of potato peeler where you put your fingers through it and place your thumb on the end of the potato, and pull toward your thumb. And it has a little curvy thing to dig out the eyes. I hate using other peelers.

Tom saw that my peeler had a little rust on it, and rather than get out the S.O.S. pad, he threw it out. That was several years ago, and I have forgiven him. Not right away, of course. But that didn't solve the problem of peeling potatoes. I  looked everywhere for a new one. Googling stuff like "squarish potato peeler" and "old-fashioned potato peeler." Scrutinizing the houseware aisles at Kroger's and Target. Checking out Sur La Table and the Vermont Country Store catalog.

Tom kept bringing home new potato peelers and offering them to me. I have the Smoothglide Peeler, the Good Grip Peeler, the Swivel Peeler, the Rachael Ray Peeler. Nothing works like the old peeler.
But last month I found one at an antique shop in Lewisburg, PA.  I am so happy!

Tom and I stopped at this antique place called Roller Mills, on our drive from DC to Rochester, NY. It claims to have 400 antique stalls, and after spending an hour there, I believe it. I've included some pics for you. Tom wanted to stay all day. I just wanted to go home and peel potatoes.

High School Reunions

Why do I love having a reunion with my high school class?

I trekked to Michigan a week ago to participate in a high school reunion. It wasn't an "official" reunion of my graduating class, but an all-alumni get-together that occurs every 5 years. I  went to a lot of effort to get there and to try to get my own classmates to show up. And I loved it.

But I was stuck for an answer when Roger (I had to put the email strong-arm on him to get him there) sat down across the table from me and asked, "Why do you want to have a high school reunion?" or something like that. I've been thinking about it. What's behind this urge (longing?) to see people from decades ago?

I've rejected the common wisdom that people go to reunions to see how we stack up. Oh, that's probably in there somewhere, but I don't think anyone wants to get together just to compare jobs (or at our stage, retirement packages), lifestyles, or wrinkle status. (OK, maybe how we stack up in the battle of the bulge is a consideration.)

I gave some thought to "catching up" as a motive for getting together. That's appealing, but there is only a smidgen of that, given the total time available to talk (and in my most recent experience, having to work in the catching up during the breaks in the Elvis impersonator entertainment--whose idea was THAT?!). But I did find out a few things--like that fact that Jane goes to Hilton Head every winter with her mom, that great blue herons frequent the lake in front of Roger's house, that Mary Lou has moved to Bass Lake (was it Bass Lake?), that Kay comes home from California several times a year to visit her mom. But a reunion isn't really required to catch up--we have email and Facebook and Xmas-card newsletters for that.

I've concluded that most of what pulls me back to Ionia falls under the umbrella of nostalgia. I never lived in my home town after high school graduation. And, as with women being willing to go through childbirth more than once, the wonderful trick of memory has diminished the bad parts and rendered the picture far rosier than it no doubt was.

I am drawn to that past--not to live there (god, no), but to touch it. High school was a shared experience, and these are the only people who lived it with me. Every girl in my class lined up for phys ed  in her blue shorts and ironed (!) blouse while Mrs. Shutes called the roll. Everyone took the Kuder Preference test in Mr. Griffin's guidance class and gave declaratory speeches in Ray Monte's speech class. We all know what Union Hill is, and the Junior High Annex, and Perrone's. We saw Ben Hur and Pollyanna in a movie theater that had ushers, or maybe at the drive-in. We bought school supplies at that ridiculous little window on the first floor. We dissected frogs and spat out chewed potato into a test tube in 10th grade biology. The answers to some secrets now emerge--who painted "Class of '63" on the water tower, and how Mr. Pepple's (was that his name?) Isetta got picked up and moved from his driveway on Halloween.

Shared memories, shared experiences. Priceless.

Late bloomers

I just read (in the New Yorker, natch) about Kay Ryan, the U.S. Poet Laureate (the 16th one, ever). Her poetry  wasn't "discovered" until she was 54. Nine years later, in 2008, she became poet laureate. Reading about her gave me a great idea that there is still hope for me. I could be a late bloomer, and my genius might still be discovered!

Producing great art, making your mark late in life, is sort of a reverse Mozart situation. He died at age 35, so indeed the world had only a small dose of him. We lost a lot of geniuses at an early age. Van Gogh was 36, Keats was only 25, Schubert was 31, Byron was 36. But then there are those who didn''t reach full flower until later. Raymond Chandler published his first short story at age 45; Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't write her Little House on the Prairie books until she was in her 60s; Daniel Defoe came up with Robinson Crusoe at age 61. Maybe the work, the genius of the late bloomers balances out the lost art of those who died young.

The important thing, no doubt, is to believe in yourself. Kay Ryan had to self-publish her first book of poetry, and apparently no one paid any attention. But she kept writing. Ditto Emily Dickinson. She wasn't even discovered until she was dead! So there's still hope for me. Now if I could only figure out what I should start doing that I might become famous for.

The Happiness Scale: Childcare or Doing Dishes?

A recent New Yorker contained a review of two new books on happiness research. We learn along the way that happiness research is an actual field of scientific study, more or less launched by a seminal paper published in 1978. Who knew?

These juicy tidbits, tossed our way so effortlessly by New Yorker staff writers, are precisely why I read the magazine cover to cover. And precisely why I suffer so every December 31 when I collect the year's unread issues from the bedside, the bathrooms, the coffee table, and the handbags and force myself to throw them out, an act showing considerable strength of character, in my view. I have to fight against the Grandma Myrtie gene.

Grandma Myrtie read the Lansing State Journal every day, and at some point--she must have been in her eighties--she could never quite finish the day's paper. But she refused to discard them because she still wanted to read them. Was still sure she would read them. By the time she was 90, the newspapers were stacked waist-high against walls and heaped on every chair and couch. My house would be thus littered with New Yorkers if I followed my genetic impulse.

Back to the happiness research (yes, we're still on that topic, and I'll soon get to the point). Not eight lines after the field-of-happiness-research tidbit came this wow statement--offered only parenthetically, mind you: "Studies have shown that women find caring for their children less pleasurable than napping or jogging and only slightly more satisfying than doing the dishes."

Ah, scientific support for what I have believed for years.

Recently a friend with a toddler posted on Facebook: "Eat breakfast, have playdate, walk to park, eat lunch, take nap, visit grocery store, push trike, eat dinner take bath, read story, hit sack. Repeat."  I commented: "That's what I now refer to as Parent Prison. You're in the hard labor part--on the chain gang." I knew my friend would recall our recent coffee date (sans toddler) when I had pointed out that a young woman, juggling coffee and a squirming child at a nearby table, was in Parent Prison.

But after my clever post, other of her Facebook friends weighed in with positive comments on motherhood and toddlers. I felt, once again, that I am the only one who thinks putting Cheerios in a Ziploc bag and scheduling my life around naptime is akin to hard time on the rock pile. OK, maybe not that bad, but go with the hyperbole.

I considered posting a follow-up explanation on Facebook, explaining that I do think having a kid is thrilling and worth it all and something I would not trade for anything.

Thank you, New Yorker. I am vindicated. I was in the mainstream all along when I was a lot happier taking a nap than playing Candyland.

A Van Gogh painting from China

Sometime in the last year I realized we had two poppy pictures in the dining room: a poster from the 1992 Matisse exhibit that Dianne, Joie, and I went to on one of our jaunts (New York City, oh, yeah), and a still life in an antique frame that Tom brought with him when we got married (he doesn’t’ know where it came from . . .). 

What with poppies being my favorite flower (recently passing the iris), I thought it would be great to have a whole wall of poppy pictures. I hadn’t started this project, though, when I came across an item in one of the 2,348 Christmas catalogs delivered last year. It was a tapestry of a Van Gogh painting, Vase with Red Poppies. I had never seen that Van Gogh painting (the original is in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut) before.

I didn’t want a tapestry, so I searched online for a print and ended up ordering a handpainted reproduction from China! To be more precise, from the Shenzhen Yayuan Art  Gallery, Dafen Oil Painting Village, Buji Town, Longgang District, Shenzhen, China. 

And yes, I did wonder if using Pay Pal on a Chinese website was a good idea. 

But I was totally reassured the next day when I got a personal email from one Mr. Yu Lin. This was the email subject line: Re: 收到付款的系统通知

I am not making this up. How cool is that? The email was in English, ending with “Wish you have good days.” Yu Lin and I were pretty tight after that.

The painting arrived on a rolled-up canvas. One of our friends who knew it had been handpainted in China commented, “So this is the one painted by the child down in the mine?” 

There is a footnote to the whole “poppies in the dining room” story, though. When I was reporting all of this to Dianne on the phone, she said, “But those aren’t poppies in the Matisse poster—they’re anemones.”  Oh, no, I argued. They are poppies. 

As I spoke, though, it dawned on me that I had never seen pink and white and purple poppies. Matisse—such a colorist. So while we talked I wandered over to the Matisse poster and read the caption. In very fine print under the picture it reads Anemones in an Earthenware Vase. Whoops. That Dianne. She knows these things.

The Mysteries of Life: Things That Have Gone Missing

You know that parlor game where you name the person, living or dead, whom you would most like to have dinner with? Well, this is not about that.

This is about another fantasy. My fantasy is that some day I will learn the answers to all my questions about the mysteries of life. The great unsolved conundrums. All I have to do is ask. No, not who built the statues on Easter Island. Not the crop circles. Not even the Loch Ness monster or the communication of humbpack whales in their songs.

I want to know what happened to the missing piece from the unicorn puzzle. Also the ibuprofen pill I dropped in the downstairs bathroom last August. Missing socks are of course a major life mystery.

I don’t have to know about that brown glove that slipped out of my pocket in Alexandria, or my cell phone that got left in the movie theater on 72nd Street in New York City. Those are things that I lost. I’m talking about things that just disappear.

In my fantasy, the Lord of Things That Have Gone Missing will answer all my questions. What happened to my teddy bear that was on my cot in our tent at Camp Anna Behrens? And that roll of film from the 1983 vacation in Port Huron, after I mailed it in to the processing place? Where are Tom’s two favorite mugs that vanished into thin air last year?

Lost mail is a whole subcategory for the interrogation. The 6” x 8” envelope I sent to Rachel on December 12 is tucked behind some postal machine this very moment, or in the kitchen of one of her neighbors where it was delivered by mistake. Or maybe it’s in a landfill, crushed against a weekly circular from Shoprite because someone doesn’t recycle. I want to know.

These were real things in the real world, and they are some place on this earth. (Or, in the case of teddy, they were some place on this earth.) The Lord of TTHGM knows. Where were they all the time I was looking? Where are they now?

Until then, I’m doing my part (faith without works is dead, James 2:20). I keep the solo socks in a special little corner of the sock drawer. I never stop searching for the mugs. I go to the post office and grill them about the mail.

But I dream of that great day of reckoning, when all will be revealed.

Mantras and Motherhood

Yesterday I read on Rachel's Facebook page: "I've officially become my mother. I've adopted her habits, her mannerisms, the way she talks, and several of her mantras."

Wow! I was thrilled. I called her and told her I was putting my little finger to my mouth right then. My own Mini-Me! 

But I didn't even know I had mantras! She pointed out that my "let's make a spreadsheet" mantra is one that she has down. Good one. Every party I host has a spreadsheet. Christmas cards have a spreadsheet There are spreadsheets for birthdays and anniversaries, house projects, Daddy's funeral arrangements, medications. I mean, I can't imagine how people live without spreadsheets.

What other mantras do I have, I wondered. It would be fun to make a list. But first I should look it up. "Mantra: A mystical formula or incantation. Also, watchword." "Watchword: A motto that embodies a principle or guide to action of an individual or group; a guiding principle."

OK, that works. Here we go:

1. Always make a list.

2. Always look up the definition of words you're not absolutely sure of.

3. A place for everything, and everything in its place.

4. There's no point in owning a car that's not red.

5. What the world needs now is love. (I adopted that during the Vietnam war, which coincided with the first release, by Jackie DeShannon, of the song by Hal David/Burt Bachrach.)

6. Use beautiful postage stamps, not the boring ones showing the flag or the liberty bell. 

That's enough for now. What are some of your mantras?

A new year, a new puzzle

Last week when Sherry visited for four days we put together a wonderful jigsaw puzzle that Joie gave me for Christmas: a U.S. map picturing and naming all the state birds. The puzzle was extremely challenging--1,000 pieces, plus the puzzle perimeter is not straight but follows the U.S. border. This was a perfect present for me, as learning state birds, trees, and whatnot is one of my little side projects.

I actually own (gift from Rachel) a book of states with little flaps that lift up (like some advent calendars I've seen), under which the capital, state bird, and state flower are listed. I also own (gift from Rachel) a set of "state knowledge cards" containing quite a bit of state info, including their native peoples. And yes, the reason Rachel has given me these gifts is because I try to memorize state capitals, birds, flowers, and trees. For a while I kept the flashcards in my purse so I could pull them out on the Metro. I know what you're saying. You're saying that's just crazy to memorize state birds, when I could be memorizing the periodic table of elements, like you do. You think you're so smart. Let's hear you name the state bird of Louisiana. How about it? huh? huh? I didn't think so. Well, I happen to know it is the eastern brown pelican. And what state has the western meadowlark as its official bird? Take a guess. Wrong! The western meadowlark is the state bird of six states! I agree, one would think the states could have been a little more creative in picking a bird of their very own. But let's not forget this task is left up to legislators. The cardinal has in fact been adopted as the official state bird by seven states. OK, that's enough state bird info for today. Unless you really want me to tell you which states. . . . OK. Not.

Here's a more cosmic thought. Every new year is a 365-piece puzzle that we piece together. Unlike a jigsaw puzzle, there is no picture of what it will look like when we are done. I'm working on making 2010 beautiful.