I’ve been working on this quilt for too long. I’m really tired of it, but I can’t stop now as I spent a gank of money on the fabric and don’t want to just put it up on the shelf. Besides I know I’ll like it when it’s done. I hope.
When I was in grad school and slogging through the writing of my novel, it feel like sometimes I was being tortured, one paragraph at a time. There’s days when even though you are sure you’re writing The Great American Novel, it’s all just too much. I wanted short stories! Poems! Essays! Anything that had a page count of less than twenty pages.
And now? I want to make a baby quilt! A lap quilt! Anything with a block count of less than twenty blocks.
Last night Dave and I went to see the movie Julie and Julia. I’d read all the pre-event publicity–the interview in the NYTimes with Nora Ephron and the reporter making an apple tart, press about the food stylists, press about the preparation of the food, director’s musings (that would be Nora Ephron again), analysis by Julia Child’s friends and relatives–and I was ready.
We stood in a line at our theater, while the local oldies station was having a Spin the Dial and DJ event to publicize the opening. While standing there, thinking how nice this was that they’d publicize the opening, a couple approached us and asked us if we’d like two free tickets. Sure, we said. They slipped in line in front of us–seems they got them from the oldies radio station–and they’d get the tickets then give the two free ones to us. We chatted for a bit, then she said, “You are in line for the GI Joe opening, right?”
My first thought was “Do we look like the type that goes to GI Joe movies?” But I said, “No, we’re here for the Julie/Julia movie. ” Dave added, “At 7 p.m.”
Oh, they said, and started asking others if they wanted free tickets. Okay, I should have known that the oldies station wouldn’t gear up for a movie about cooking.
I noticed that the audience in our movie was trending toward Social Security recipients, but we found our seats, and endured the endless previews (We found one we won’t be seeing: “Stepfather,” about a guy who’s trying to marry into a family with children and turns out to be a murderer. Great.).
It was worth it. The movie is a four forks rating, two thumbs up, a veritable delight. We laughed and laughed and were pulled into the Meryl Streep magic, and empathized with the plight of Amy Adams’ character (as well as her husband). We got a kick out of seeing Blogger in its infancy, and liked the fact that the movie was about the cooking and creating of the food, rather than the emphasis found in many current shows–that of the consuming of it, as well as trying to create it under manufactured false pressures. (Note to producers: I want to see a reality show of trying to fix a balanced meal, having just discovered you are missing a key ingredient, all the while answering phone calls, supervising homework, and navigating the toys strewn around the kitchen by the toddler and the baby. None of this Iron Chef stuff. I want Iron Mother.)
I went home and thought about buying Mastering the Art of French Cooking, you know, just to have the book. Actually the scene with the chocolate cake was a real motivator. The copies I saw on Amazon were running in the fifty-buck-and-up range for a vintage book.
So, we’re eating dinner tonight and I idly look over at the bookcase. There between The Naked Chef and Fannie Farmer is. . . yes! Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I recognized the cover as being similar to the one shown in the movie last night. Can’t believe it.
It’s got some food stains on the front, and when I opened the cover, neatly penciled in the corner is the price: $8.00. It’s a first edition, 10th printing in August of 1965. I must have purchased it at an estate sale here in Riverside. I wonder if I bought it at Norma Baricelli’s sale; she was a neighbor who also taught me at RCC. I have no idea really, but I did pick up quite a few cookbooks at that sale.
So now I check Amazon since I have more specific details, in order to find out the worth of this book. I like that it has the same printed cover as the one in the movie, and see the little “Ecole des 3 Gourmands” logo facing the title page. I wonder if it’s worth that 50 bucks that I’d seen before.
The zeitgeist in the online quilt world this past few weeks seems to be nine-patches framed by white sashing.
So I made one myself.
I finished the quilt top of the red, orange, pink quilt and also stitched all the squares together for the back. I think the quilter lady is out of town, but my part is done and I’ll wait for her to return.
This summer I have also stitched together a totebag (had to try the pattern), a jacket, two skirts, a purse, two quilts, finished editing my father’s memoir, watched my youngest son get married, taken three short trips, maintained several blogs, written up my teaching course outlines/documents/syllabus and a couple of the first assignments.
I actually made a List of Summer Goals, and was able to check off most of them, including reading the Michael Pollan books, a novel, a “reflection” (that’s what the dust jacket says) and a memoir. I also planted my garden (although its performance is abysmal), had countertops put in, new windows installed, made a trip to L.A. and didn’t get killed on the freeway. And while my hands were busy, I thought about the novel I began in grad school and never fleshed out, never finished. Time to think has been one of the biggest yields of this hiatus.
I need two more summers like this one in order to catch up with everything on my To Do List. But my question is, is this summer my real life, or is it that other life, the one where I’m running like a crazy person, avoiding the grading, trying to check off the list of “have-to” chores and always tired (I counted yesterday while doing errands: a total of 100% of people, when greeted by a friend or a salesclerk asking How Are You? answered “Tired.”).
Is it This? Or That?
Maybe this is why I see lots of cartoons of people shackled to their desks in their cubicles, dreaming of breaking off the cuffs. Maybe that’s why I hear about people quitting their jobs and trying something smaller and new (although my son will attest to the fact that if you are thinking of quitting your daytime job and starting a small business, this is NOT the year to do that).
Maybe we all dream of that Other Life, which holds our possibilities, our potentials while we trudge along in the life that pays the bills, feeds the children, wipes up the floor, watches the tomatoes shrivel in the garden, swelters in the heat and dies knowing they missed out on their Big Chance.
I couldn’t really talk about these before because they were both gifts. The one above was for my son and his wife. When I made the first round of HUGE quilts, they’d just gotten married and weren’t really sure they wanted a quilt (she told me later her grandma made VERY traditional quilts, and she’s more of a modern gal). But after seeing some of mine, we all went down to the fabric store last Thanksgiving and picked out the pattern and fabrics; I added some from my stash when I needed to broaden the palette.
I gave this to Matthew and Kimberly this weekend, and they seemed happy to have it. I’m sure they’ll send me a photo of it on their bed soon (hint, hint) and I’m happy they like it.
I didn’t really have a name for it when I sent it off with them, but today I had some time to think about it. . . and go through my favorite quote book. I couldn’t resist Marlowe’s verse, from The Passionate Shepherd to his Love:
Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That valleys, groves, or hills or fields,
Or woods and steepy mountains, yield.
While it’s everyone’s mind runs to the obvious (we are so conditioned) I read it on a different level. The quilt has zig-zags, that when looked at from a sideways direction, looks like little mountains, so the name is Steepy Mountains. And for Matthew and Kimberly, who are one of the Most Alive Couples in the universe, they will have lush groves in their life, mysterious woods, rolling valleys, but also the steepy mountains and fields and fields to sow and tend and harvest. Of course, I wish them cuddle time under this quilt, but I wish them most of all, that they live together forever and ever and be each other’s love.
This one, titled Sun and Sand was made in honor of the marriage of my son Peter to his love Megan this past weekend. While they both live in Davis, the wedding was held in Monterey, where a lovely confluence of beach and tide pools and sun and sand occurs. The colors of beigy/yellow of a warmed beach and delft blues of a clear summer sky I thought would represent the world around them on the weekend of their wedding.
It was begun in a class I took last summer, and I wasn’t quite sure about it initially. It’s hard to see the final project when you’ve just spent hours at the sewing machine. I bothered my friend Rhonda in Washington, DC until she said finally: “Get it quilted, and then decide!” I took her advice (she’s an award-winning quilter with impeccable taste), and when I brought it home from the quilter’s, I fell in love with it. I’d already decided it should go to my newlyweds, but boy, did I have a hard time parting with it!
And isn’t that how love happens? We begin, we stitch our lives together, not always knowing how things will turn out, but over time, we blend our hopes and dreams and fears together, and our love changes a few disparate pieces, a lump of wadding and some raw materials into a sun-bursting of a quilt. And we like it, and each other. (Of course, this is all rather cheesy, but hey, I’ve just been to a wedding and I’m all aglow.)
I first discovered this experience when I was stitching a quilt at the bedside of my mother, who had just had a heart attack. I had just pinned the quilt top to the batting and backing and struggled to get it in the hoop to quilt it. I sat there day after day, visiting, working. As I put more quilting stitches in, the quilt sandwich ceased to be three separate pieces of fabric and instead started to behave as one piece.
Enough of the metaphors. . . I just know I send my love to these two couples with my hands and heart and quilts.
OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 