Reasons To Move Back to Chicago: Chicago Botanical Gardens
posted in: Day In The Life
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There are lots of other reasons. I’ve been making a list for about a year and a half.
Quilt Market Countdown: 4 Days
What could it mean? You’ll see very soon. I leave for Quilt Market Thursday. The sneak peek “Schoolhouse” sessions and the insane “Sample Spree” both happen Friday. The big, multi-pronged, gorgeous Thing will be revealed Saturday, bright and early, when the Market opens.
It’s getting more and more uncomfortable having to keep the secret now that the launch is so close…. Okay. Forget this. I have to tell. Damn the consequences. Ready?
For the past four years, I’ve been training mice to sew. No, no, that’s not the surprise. Everyone knows I’ve been training mice to sew. The real surprise is that I’ve developed a sewing machine that runs on olive oil. No, that can’t be it: corn oil make a superior fuel. Fine! Enough pulling your leg: I bought Quilt Market. I own it. The whole show. I just woke up one day and was like, “I want to buy a trade convention worth a bazillion dollars after I eat a bit of yogurt.”
Just kidding. We’ll both have to wait just a little longer for the truth.
Compassion Station: All Aboard
posted in: Day In The Life, Tips
2
I flew across the entire continental United States yesterday. Portland to Washington, D.C. is no joke: six whole hours in the air, plus layover. I could get from D.C. to Paris in about the same amount of time. I’m not complaining: Portland was great. But, you know. Paris.
Halfway through the first flight, I went to visit the commode in the back of the plane. I had to wait for it to be available and found myself inserted into a conversation between an airline attendant and a man in his late thirties. I picked up that the man was a retired police officer. He had brown hair, a sweet disposition, and was remarkably heavy. I didn’t think much of any of this until the man shared with the attendant that he had been shot four times during a drug bust.
“One of the bullets went straight through my chest, yeah,” the man said. He said it like it was no big deal, like plenty of us get shot in the chest.
“Oh no!” The flight attendant’s hand covered her mouth. I wasn’t exactly part of the conversation, but I gasped, too.
“Yeah. Crazy. I’ve gained eighty pounds since then. That was maybe two years ago, and they’ve got me on all these steroids. It’s really bizarre, you know. I used to be really fit.” He said it matter-of-fact, but there was some shame, I think, in his voice, like he was apologizing.
There are so many things we think we know and we know basically zero things. Maybe I would’ve seen that man and thought, “Wow, he’s really heavy. Maybe he should take the stairs and not the escalator,” or some other judgey, useless thing. I wouldn’t know that he was shot in the chest at work and to keep his heart working or whatever so he can be alive for his son or whatever, he’s on steroids. Steroids cause weight gain in most people who have to take it.
Whenever possible, I try to find a Family or Assisted Care bathroom in public places. I can’t tell you how helpful it is to have a private bathroom when you are a person missing several organs in the lower half of her body. Trust me. But if you were to see me go in, would you purse your lips? Would you think I’m going in to like, do my hair or just have more space? Would you give me a dirty look if I caught your eye as I went in because here I am a young woman in high heels, clipping along just fine down the airport terminal? I don’t look disabled. I don’t have a baby. But you don’t know my life. You don’t know so many things.
The guy who cuts you off in traffic shouldn’t. But maybe he’s got one last dinner with his kid before the kid goes to live with his mom in Mexico for the rest of the summer. (I know someone in such a situation.) We don’t know what people are up against. The only thing we do know is that life never, ever looks like we thought it would. Even when it’s good, it still doesn’t look like the pictures we paint in our heads.
Moral Dilemma: Grandma’s Recipes
I got a gift from a relative today. It’s a spiral-bound book made from my paternal grandmother’s recipe collection. Venita died several years ago and had amassed many recipes over her homemaking years in Houston, TX. That the recipes have been compiled is very sweet and it was a kind gesture to send me a copy. There is a problem, however.
These recipes make me violently ill. I’ve been through this 200-page book twice and can’t find a thing I would even consider making in my kitchen. These are not mysterious and delicious knäckebröd recipes brought over from the old country; there are no inked-in notes from my grandmother’s grandmother, warning against too much salt or suggesting a helpful whisk technique. That would be a mazing. No, this is a compendium of recipes lifted straight from the pages of Better Homes & Gardens and similar magazines published between 1950-1979. Here’s what that means:
Apricot Cheese Salad — that’s gonna be cheddar
Fruit Cocktail Mold — contains hard-boiled egg and pimento
Hot Turkey Salad — includes crushed potato chips, grated onion, and “squirt of Tabasco”
Crunchy Veg Casserole — with frozen cauliflower and 2 cans cream of mushroom soup
An astonishing number of these recipes call for olives. Green, black, stuffed — just when you think an appetizer is going to escape the olive treatment, ohp! There it is! Also included in the book are menus. These are records of all the foods served at various luncheons and gatherings my grandma attended. It’s incredibly sweet that she kept such records. It’s also deeply depressing. I’m sorry, but I cannot read these menus without a tear rolling down my face for a generation of women who would’ve loved to be working on the Human Genome Project but instead were making sure they got tips for Loretta’s ham loaf before they left the living room. Why, here’s a menu now:
Menu #15 — Bridge Luncheon at Sandra’s
1. Chicken Salad
2. Potato Salad — large leaves around inside of bowl. Tomato peeled and opened like a large flower in center on top of salad
3. Avocado gelled salad in mold
4. Layrered Jello — in square pan. Layer of clear Jello on top, then diet cream cheese (pink color), then layer of clear gelatin
5. Fruit salad
6. Egg salad in Knox gelatin — in loaf — very good
7. Salted nuts
8. Coffee and punch
That’s three instances of Jello. I know: I live in a country so wealthy I can afford to make fun of food; my disdain for my dearly-departed grandmother’s recipe collection is (almost) as gross as the celery-and-macadamia nut “ring mold” on page 59. I have shame. I also have a moral dilemma. Do I keep this book? I do not want it. I loved my grandmother. But I do not want this. What do you do with a gift that doesn’t fit, is supposed to be imbued with sentimental value, and can’t be re-gifted?
Wait a minute… Do any of you want it?! I’m serious! It would be really cool to send it to someone who is into ’50s and ’60s food! There have to be people out there who like it, even in an ironic way. I’d be so happy to send it to you if you’ll use it. Please email me. First-come, first-served. So to speak.
Dear Colleen: My Dry Cleaner Cleaned the Pope’s Cassock
posted in: D.C., Day In The Life, Story
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Dear Colleen:
You do such a great job sewing step-outs and demo materials for Love of Quilting for PBS and for many videos for Fons & Porter. It’s great that I get to see you twice a year when we tape TV in Iowa. You’re great.
As you are an enthusiastic Catholic, I thought I might tell you a pretty cool story.
Before I left for this four-day trip to Portland, I went to get my trousers tailored at the local dry cleaner in my DC neighborhood. While I was waiting for the lady to issue me the ticket for pickup, I looked around and spied two photographs and a letter professionally framed in a single frame hanging on the wall to my right. The pictures featured my dry cleaner lady and her husband proudly holding a big white papal robe. There was a nun (sister?) in the picture, as well. I walked over to get a closer look.
The letter was from an apparently important church (order?) in town. The author of the letter was the nun in the picture. The letter was addressed to the owners of the dry cleaning business, thanking them for cleaning the robes (habits?) over many years and always doing a great job. The letter then thanked them for cleaning the Pope’s robes (cassocks?) while he visited Washington a few weeks ago.
“Holy crap!” I couldn’t help but exclaim, later recognizing that I’ll never get to use the phrase “holy crap” in a more appropriate situation ever again.
“You cleaned the Pope’s robes??” I asked the lady. She nodded and gave a little smile that said, “We are actually the bomb chronic, yes.”
I never thought about how the Pope needs stuff dry cleaned like everyone else, Colleen! What amazed me is that his entourage would take his (His?) special outfits — outfits no one on the planet but him is able to wear in a non-ironic way — to a neighborhood dry cleaner! If I had ever considered it, I’d figure they had a holy dry cleaner who used that special incense thing (thurible?) to steam clean Mr. Pope’s things. Who knew? Well, the nun knew. But I didn’t know and now we all do!
I thought you might like that story, Colleen. Have a great day today.
With Warmest Wishes,
Mar