The Royal We, by Mary Fons, 2013. It’s in my book.
Last night, I had the pleasure of speaking at a quilt guild in the Chicago suburbs. Everyone was gracious and awesome. There were many pans of bars. A merry time was had by all and I was honored to be there. Thank you, ladies.
When you do public speaking, there are a few loose rules to follow. You want to start out with thank you’s to the audience and the organizers, calling out specifically (albeit subtly) the person who will be signing your check; you want to keep things clipping along, so watch those tangents; if it’s a slideshow have lots of slides; and always have a closer.
This last thing is something used more by comedians than Toastmasters, but it’s a smart move for anyone who has the attention of a large, seated group of people for more than thirty minutes. A closer is the last bit a comedian does before leaving the stage. This closing piece is typically the comedian’s biggest joke and receives the biggest laugh.
I have a closer. Slays ’em every time. Wanna hear it? This comes straight from Marianne Fons, who, you’ll remember, is hilarious. It’s really better in person, so you’ll have to invite me to your guild, shop, or event so I can bring the house down with it, okay? You might have to be a quilter to really get it, but I assure you, this illicits howls of laughter for those who know.
How To Wash a Quilt In 6 Easy Steps
(The Fons Way)
1. Get your hands on some gentle detergent. Orvus paste is good, even a gentle lingerie detergent would do.
2. Find a front-loading washer with a gentle cycle. (The front-loader’s agitation is better for a quilt than the spinny, top-loading model.)
3. Get a large, oldish towel. This could be a beach towel, or something else from the linen closet or garage.
4. Fold the towel several times long-ways. Place towel at the base of the machine, right there at the front.
5. Load your quilt. Load detergent. Press “start” on the machine.
6. Get down on your knees on that towel, woman, and pray.
Also, the taxi vouchers should look like this. WWII British Army Forces Voucher. Photo: Wikipedia
Six days to D.C. I am counting hours.
Speeding along in a taxi to the airport this morning, I watched the meter. I wasn’t expecting a surprise; the glowing, upticking numbers just caught my eye. A taxi from the Lower East Side to La Guardia is about $34 + tip, sometimes more with tolls unless you take the Williamsburg Bridge, which is my preference. I take taxis to airports a lot and this morning, I had an idea:
I think airlines should offer taxi vouchers to frequent fliers.
I am well aware this is a service-oriented idea in a service-oriented culture and this idea is small ball. Peter Thiel’s new book, Zero To One, encourages us all to chart new territory in the world and not repeat what’s been done before.** Taxi vouchers from airlines hasn’t been done before but there are a lot of vouchers in the world. I have not created a hoverboard. I have not invented a safe and effective method of giving humans tails, which I think would be fantastic.
But I am putting a number of Southwest Airlines’ children through college at this point and though it’s a nice gesture, drink tickets aren’t my idea of a real perk. The only way to make Jack Daniels worse is when you’re drinking Jack Daniels mixed with Diet Coke at 35,000 feet. I like being in the VIP line a lot, but every time I go to or from the airport, I’m in a taxicab. Wouldn’t a voucher be great for some or part of the trip? Totally.
With apps and Uber and the service-oriented economy, surely this is possible. We put a man on the moon and Lady Gaga is going to sing in space in 2015! There are cats on the Internet who sing in chorus. I have every faith in humanity that this idea can be a reality.
I will wait with anticipation to get a taxi voucher from an airline and I will relish separating the check from the attendant thank-you letter. You know what I mean? When you tear a check or a voucher along that perforation line? God, I love that.
**I highly recommend reading Thiel’s book. Thiel was the founder of PayPal and one of the first investors in Facebook. It’s a game-changer and I’ll be giving everyone a copy for Christmas along with candy of some kind or other.
I got the mail today and what was inside but a small, padded manila envelope from one Margaret Maloney. Margaret lives in Brooklyn and we had a blind date set up to go to a quilt guild meeting together this summer. I was unwell when the day came, however, and had only recently arrived home from an out-of-town trip. I was too pooped to pucker and bummed out not to meet Margaret.
Not long ago, she asked me for my mailing address, which of course I gave to her. Here is what she wrote on the card that came with the item you see above:
“Dear Mary,
I hope that this Pocket Pendennis can be a help to you at times when a full-size sock monkey might be impractical. I think it is lucky — I worked on it on the train to and from a successful interview for admission into medical school. I’m sorry this city hasn’t been good to you — it doesn’t know what its missing! I hope our paths will cross another time.
Best,
Margaret”
I’m pretty speechless, Margaret. Thank you. Congratulations on getting into medical school and way to go being extremely articulate and possessing of stunning penmanship, but mostly thank you for hand-appliqueing my sweet little monkey on a quilted square. You cannot know how much better you made my day. It was rainy, I was sad, and my tummy is extremely mad at me these days.
My mother is writing a novel. I may have mentioned it.
She’s had her concept for years but in the past eighteen months she’s actually started writing the thing. At the start of the process she was brimming with confidence and wore her task with no sense of burden or doom. As she’s descended further into the pain and agony of writing a book that she very much wishes to be good, she’s decidedly less chirpy. My mother is the first to say that she has a lot to learn about writing; she’s joined several writing workshops, she’s read or is reading lots of books on how to write effective, engaging fiction, and she’s working every day on this project. She’s going at it the right way, now. She’s going at it like she’s going into battle.
When I’m home in Iowa or up at the lake house as I was for the past five days, I am the first to greet my mother each day. This is because she and I wake up about the same time and do the same thing every day, wherever we are: we write. She gets her coffee and her laptop and stabs away at her novel there on the couch; I get my Earl Grey and my current journal and write away in that, sitting in an easy chair (in another room.) We don’t say much at that hour — it’s usually before 6am — because neither of us has gotten up to chat. We’re up to write, good, bad, or ugly. What is true for me is true for my mom, too: that morning writing time is usually the best part of our day. No matter where I find myself in the morning — a Holiday Inn in Omaha, a brownstone in Manhattan, an airplane, etc. — I find my pen and spend time on paper.
Why do it?
Mom and I have different reasons for writing, but whatever compels people to get up before dawn to put thoughts into words is complex, so it’s hard to sort motivational distinctions. Most writers want all the things being a “good writer” confers; the order of the list of stuff might change, but the stuff stays the same. My mom wants to write a novel because she loves to read; because she wants the sense of accomplishment that being a published fiction writer would bring; she wants to show the world she’s good at something other than quilts; she loves and believes in her book concept; because writing it is hard but it is frequently fun; because it’s a challenge. She wants to be interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, too, and has a few of her replies already prepared for when the time comes.
I write for different reasons and before I say what those are, I must emphasize that Mom’s reasons are not better than mine, nor are mine better than hers. They’re just different reasons. I write because I would lose my mind if I didn’t. That’s not hyperbole; that’s the straight dope. The only way I can make sense of my life, this planet, what I see, what I experience, how I think, what I do, what you do, and what it all might possibly mean, is to write it down. If I don’t write it down, it didn’t happen. That’s figurative (read: “If it’s not written down, it didn’t matter that much”) but it’s also literal: If I don’t write it down, I fear it did not happen. There isn’t always reliable proof of the past. Were we there? Did she say that? Is he really gone? When did we go? What was I wearing? Could we have really felt that way and then felt another way? Life is but a dream: I’d better keep a record or risk waking up and forgetting it completely.
I also write because of something American philosopher John Dewey said that, when I came across it many years ago, stuck to my brain like a wad of gum on a theater seat:
“If you are deeply moved by some experience, write a letter to your grandmother. It will help you to better understand the experience and it will bring great pleasure to your grandmother.”
To make sense of the world, I have to write it down. If it brings pleasure to someone else, well, that’s some pie a la mode, right there. Most of it sucks. I’ll never be Mark Twain. I’ll never even be Erma Bombeck (who was great, in her Bombeckian way.) I’ll just be me, sorting it all out.
The first time, I had it against my will. This was 2009, and things were not good. The malnutrition, the double-barrell medicine regimen they had me on, the surgeries, the infections, the stress — after all this, my hair follicles were like, “You’re kidding, right?” and they quit. I remember sitting on the bench in the shower of my mother’s house as the water pelted down. I was maneuvering around the tubes and the ports in my body so I could wash my hair; it was among the first times I had been able to do so myself since going into the hospital almost two months earlier. It was exhausting, but I was stoked to be in a shower alone again (orderlies with sponges are appreciated but not ideal.) I was rinsing out the shampoo and felt something strange:
My hair was coming out.
I gently ran my fingers through the length of my hair and long strands came out, too, smoothly detaching from the hair that was still secured to my head. My jaw dropped and water came into my mouth. I spit the water out and shook the clump from my fingers. Splat, on the shower floor. My hand went back to my head to make sure what had just happened had just happened. Another long, wet rope of hair attached itself to my fingers. Splat. The clumps were too thick to go down the drain, so I saw them gather there as the water pelted my head and ran down into my eyes. I sat there a long time, watching that shower floor.
There can be no doubt that it’s hard for men to lose their hair. But I don’t think many would argue that it’s harder for women. I’ve had an ostomy bag twice, accidents of various kinds (in public and private) and the very nature of my condition means I wind up talking about the bathroom way, way more than most people could bear, but none of these dignity-crushing experiences have been quite as hard on my femininity as it was to lose my hair. I don’t know why this is, but it made me so sad and it still does.
There were bald spots. I had to do something, so when I was next in Chicago, I went to a nice salon and told the stylist my situation. I told her I needed to just cut my losses, literally, and that she had full permission take it down as far as she needed to to make me look more like a girl with a cute pixie cut and less like a girl with mange. I left with very little hair. A month later, my mom and I filmed a DVD called “Learn To Quilt.” I can’t bear to watch that video, though it’s very good. I can’t watch it because when I’m cutting or looking down at the patchwork we’re making on the table, you can see my scalp. We talked about getting me a wig for that shoot but decided that was overreacting. We should’ve done the wig.
Well, I’ve cut my hair again. I took a picture of Anne Hathaway to Yuka, my stylist in New York, and I said, “Yuka, my relationship has failed. I have many work projects to focus on. Please make me look like this,” and I showed her the picture of Anne Hathaway.
“Ah! Yah!” sweet and awesome Yuka said, in her very thick Japanese accent. “When you come in, first time, I think-ah you look like her! We can do.”
It’s a cliche, I realize, to chop one’s locks when a relationship ends. I’m that cliche right now and it’s fine; I’ve been all kinds of cliches in life (e.g., white chick into yoga and sushi, etc.) and will be many more (e.g., fortysomething woman with interesting eyewear and a masters degree, etc.). My short cut won’t last long; the moment Yuka was done, I began the grow-out process. But right now, I need the focus that short hair brings. There’s less attention from men when a gal has short hair, I think. There’s less primping for me to do. Short hair, in our culture, is a way to distance oneself and I guess I feel like doing that in ways I don’t completely understand.
