PaperGirl Blog by Mary Fons

SaveSave

12 Nov 2013

Veteran’s Day.

by Mary Fons | posted in: Paean | 2

Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958. Encaustic on canvas, 30 7/8 × 45 1/2 × 5 in. (78.4 × 115.6 × 12.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; 50th Anniversary Gift of the Gilman Foundation Inc., The Lauder Foundation, A. Alfred Taubman, Laura-Lee Whittier Woods, and purchase 80.32 Art © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

The question, “Who am I?” is laughably vague. Are you supposed to answer that in specifics? Example: “I am male. I am 60-years-old. I am 6’2.” Or is it meant to be answered abstractly, even dramatically? Example: “I’m searching. I’m broke. I’m only flesh and bone.” Sometimes that question is just plain cruel, given to high-school freshmen to determine too early a career path.

If I were asked to take a stab at it, though, I know what my first answer would be. I’ve known it for a long time.

I’m an American.

Being an American is the characteristic that comes first in my “Who I am” book. My family does not identify strongly with ancestry. I’m a little Norwegian (Dad’s side) and a little Scottish (Mom.) I’m a Fons for sure (it’s the nose.) So I feel American before I feel much else. It’s in my core. It is my core. The spirit of my country pulses in my veins. I work hard to make sure I’m good enough for this blood.

How do I try? I work hard. Even when I’m afraid, I try to be brave. I am a total idiot, but I try to learn from the head-over-heels tumbles I take and when I crash into someone else in the process, it feels right to help them back up and fix it, and I try to do that. American is a wild horse and I feel like a wild horse: out of control, ambitious, messy, able to use my powers for good if I focus. And I like to have fun.

All the sailors, all the flowers. All the wagon trains, the butter churns. All the novels, the rivers of money, the mistakes, the disgraces, the candy stripers clicking heels down the hallways. The mud spatters on the boots. The unregulated masses, all the glittering city blocks. Kansas. Every outdoor concert venue, every blackberry bush, all the kids in the high rises. The medication. The journalists, the crates of fish, the lawns. All the pig troughs, the seashells, the test tubes and the sewing machines. The elderly. The algae. The ox.

America, I love it all. And people just like me and you and my neighbor in the next unit over died for it all and are dying for it all right now. They do it so we can glimpse the fawn and buy the car and smile at the baby in the ICU; so we can listen to Madonna records and open a bakery. Start a bridge club. Film a movie. Get a job. Keep it. Get a raise.

Thank you. I will probably not sacrifice my life for my country, but I promise to live for it.

10 Nov 2013

“Trashy Is The Lime”: An Anatomy of Poetic Inspiration

by Mary Fons | posted in: Art, Food, Poetry, Word Nerd | 7

I wrote a poem yesterday morning and I’d like to share how that happened. The generation of “Trashy Is The Lime” is proof that as a writer, I must read writers who are better than I am every day. (The good news is that there are many, many writers better than I am, so I shall never be done reading. A good problem to have.)

It’s like wrestling. You wanna be a better wrestler, you gotta wrestle bigger dogs. You gotta hustle your way into the next weight class and get mopped up by Brutus a few times until you get strong enough to give him hell. You might not win, but look at your triceps! Writing is the same. Read the classics, read the best of the best. Your brain has to run pell mell to catch up and you will trip, son, but in the running you get faster and in the running you are running, which is far better than sitting.

Yesterday morning I closed the latest big dog (Dr. Faustus, for class) and took from my coffee table one of my favorite books ever: the latest (18th) edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. I flipped to a random page and discovered a stunning entry about my favorite place on earth, Chicago, USA. Check it:

“Gigantic, willful, young.
Chicago sitteth at the northwest gates.”

The quote was ascribed to writer William Vaughn Moody from a poem he wrote in 1901 called “An Ode In Time of Hesitation.” I snatched my iPad off the couch and tippity-tapped my way into the life of Mr. Moody (no relation to Dwight L. Moody, the famous Chicago preacher, FYI.) Moody’s poem is crazy good, inspired by the statue of a black soldier who served at the head of the first enlisted negro regiment in Massachusetts in 1863. It’s long, it’s intricate, and that line on Chicago is dope. As I read the full piece, I tried to figure out the rhyme scheme; before long, I had to get out paper and pencil to suss it out. It’s wild:

A-B-A-A-C-D-D-B-E-C-C-B-E **

“That’s bananas!” I cried, to no one at all because I was sitting in my living room alone. Saying “bananas” made me think of my collection of fruit poems. It’s an ongoing project; I’ve shared The Cantaloupe Poem here and the first half of The Preposterously True Tale of Pru Huntington’s Pineapple. Well, Mr. Moody’s crazy rhyme scheme was too tempting to ignore, so I set about writing a new fruit poem in the style of “Ode to Hesitation.” First, we must take a look at Moody’s opening verse, so you can see how the man did it.

I.
Before the solemn bronze Saint Gaudens made
To thrill the heedless passer’s heart with awe,
And set here in the city’s talk and trade
To the good memory of Robert Shaw,
This bright March morn I stand,
And hear the distant spring come up the land;
Knowing that what I hear is not unheard
Of this boy soldier and his negro band,
For all their gaze is fixed so stern ahead,
For all the fatal rhythm of their tread.
The land they died to save from death and shame
Trembles and waits, hearing the spring’s great name,
And by her pangs these resolute ghosts are stirred.

Awesome, right? Yeah. So, rather than do the 9,000 other things that I desperately need to do, I wrote a fruit poem. The poem is entitled “Trashy Is The Lime” and it’s about how limes are kinda gross, definitely ubiquitous, and, yes, trashy. It’s a rude thing to go from Moody’s gorgeous verse about the noble soldier to my attack on defenseless limes, but this is what I consider fun. This is my entertainment, what I do in my time off. And I would like to thank W.V. Moody, Bartlett’s, the Academy, and the editor of Love of Quilting, who is about to kill me because I’m late on an assignment. This is partly why. Enjoy!

Trashy Is The Lime
by Mary Fons

Limes! limes! It must always be. The drinks we pour
Are sticky, and our garnishes are green
And sour, and this is what they’re for:
Lick, drink, suck; the lime be the cocktail’s whore.
The manner-est born in the family dwell
In Florida, armpit of our nation;
“Key” limes prized from this location,
But the compliment is mean.
Acrid, useless without supporting cast,
A wince on the tongue, a straight-up hard sell —
The lime behind the bar at the Hilton hotel,
Crushed with the coconut and everywhere seen,
Like roaches, limes shall humans outlast.

** If anyone knows what this poetical form is called, please, please tell me. I do not have a degree in English and I’ll be 70 before I will have the time/talent to get into the Iowa Writer’s Workshop MFA program in poetry where you might actually learn stuff like this.

10 Nov 2013

I’m Doin’ a Giveaway!

by Mary Fons | posted in: Quilting | 56

How about a giveaway!

I do these from time to time with Quilty, but this is a straight-up Mary Fons giveaway. Look, I really appreciate all the emails, the comments, the Facebook love. I’m very close to 5,000 likes, and while I know that age and Facebook likes ain’t nuthin’ but a number, it still feels good to be 33 and way more popular than I was in high school.

I also have a lot of books. A lot of books. I’d like to give you one. Share the link to my blog on Facebook. Comment here on the blog. I don’t know how to do these things. I’d like to tell you that it’s very scientific and I do have a system that I intend to follow to pick a winner, at random. But basically, let’s just have a little blitzkrieg love fest and somewhere in the mix, someone will get a book.

I’ll write you a hand-written letter, too. A nice note on some nice Mary Fons letterhead. I’ll give you advice to a problem you might have. [NOTE: No purchase necessary and no problem necessary. If you don’t want advice on a life problem, don’t worry about it — you don’t have to have problems to win.*] So comment away, and share away, and perhaps you’ll get a book! Look, someone will win. It might as well be you. Let’s jack up those Facebook likes. Let’s get a few more readers on the ol’ P-Girl. And then at least one other person on the planet can talk to be about Lee Miller’s War. Or Encyclopedia of the Exquisite. Or Babbitt. Or Binky’s Guide to Love.

Two words: Treasure. Trove.

Good luck. Spread the word. This blog is real life!

*”you don’t have to have problems to win” = suddenly in the running to be the copy on my headstone

8 Nov 2013

Step Into My Office.

by Mary Fons | posted in: Art, Chicago, Day In The Life, Poetry, Work | 2

There are fires to put out.

There are fires to put out and people to give things to. There are tasks need done and a clock that’s ticking in the halls of my brain. There’s a hard stop for it all on Wednesday morning, when I leave for Oklahoma for a several day-long lecture series — but that’s a hard stop no harder than a day all-too-soon when we sign off on the latest issue of the magazine.

My kingdom for a kingdom. Then I’d have help.

And all of this while the sawing and the buzzing and tour de force takes place in my home and the men shout, “‘Ey, Ryan! Bring me that pipe?” from the other side of the house and I can’t write. So I leave and find the best place to be homeless today. The coffee shop on Tuesday was good, but a weirdo was staring at me so I couldn’t edit. The common room in my building yesterday was okay, but there was a chill and I felt sad.

Today, I’m here at the Hilton. It’s just around the corner from the cavity they’re drilling in my bathroom. There’s fresh coffee to scam off the buffet and there’s a convention going on with free wi-fi to be had. And I found this hall-slash-ballroom upstairs from the lobby where the sun is streaming in and the chandeliers have been dusted recently. It’s vast and paneled and there’s not a soul in sight.

When you work from home and you can’t be home, you can work in a ballroom. And that makes all the difference.

6 Nov 2013

Another Bathroom Story or, “Toilet Humor.”

by Mary Fons | posted in: Day In The Life, Story, Tips | 3

I locked myself in the bathroom Monday night and against all odds, with nothing but human ingenuity and good old fashioned fear, I escaped.

The bathroom I was in is the one that today is absolute rubble and exposed pipe and tufts of insulation. Before it was rubble, though, it had to be a bathroom without any stuff in it. This is an important detail.

“Get everything outta there,” my contractor said on the phone, “’cause on Tuesday the whole thing’s going into a dumpster.” My eyes got real big and I began at once to move my belongings into my back bathroom with visions of Danny and his crew tossing my perfume samples and sea sponges into a bin with the old tile. By the end of the day, the bathroom was denuded, empty of mouthwash bottles, bobby pins, half-rolled up tubes of Ben Gay (when did I buy Ben-Gay?) and contact lens juice. I did leave a roll of toilet paper in there, however. Until they removed the toilet, the bathroom was still functional in that regard and I might as well use that part of it, right?

No. Dumb.

On Monday night I went into that bathroom to pee. (Well, it’s true!) I shut the door behind me, heard a tiny click, and A Great Dread passed over me. There was no doorknob on that door. What there was was the inner apparatus where there is typically an attendant doorknob. This meant that the door’s internal tumbler latch thingy was latched but there was no knob to turn the works. I stuck my finger in the metal and wiggled it. Okay, wow. I was locked in my bathroom. An empty, tool-less bathroom. Had I not taken every last item out of the space earlier in the day, I wouldn’t have been terribly worried. A toothbrush would jimmy the latch all right; one of those bobby pins would’ve worked great. But I had nothing. And I would need something to work in that door latch. Immediately.

I spun around. Ah-ha! The shower curtain! I hadn’t taken it down! I seized the curtain and pulled off one of the hooks. Yes, a piece of skinny metal! But it was useless; the curve of it was too thick and tight and it wouldn’t fit where I needed it to go. I tossed it to the floor. What else, what else? Ah! There, by the sink, an empty matchbook! I grabbed it and tore it into a hard little cardboard stick and jimmied at the latch. The stick bent. It bent into a wad and the door laughed. I was getting concerned. My ultimate “I will do anything to get out of here” plan was to body slam myself against the door again and again and again until I broke it open, but getting a running start from the tub was not going to be easy. It would be more of a flying leap from the edge of it and I foresaw a chipped tooth and a concussion, but I ask you: What price, freedom?

Just as I was about to start my flying leaps, I saw it: the doorstop. One of those spring metal ones. I wrenched it off the door and uncoiled it, bending it back on itself, fashioning a dandy and rather dangerous-looking tool. I worked it in the latch. Worked it some more. Turned. Jiggled. And then…

Ah.

There was no fanfare. No picture in the paper celebrating my derring-do. I had but the personal satisfaction of a job stupidly done (locking myself in my empty bathroom) followed by a job well done (getting out.) Incidentally, I had an appointment with my shrink yesterday and when I got there, he had locked himself out of his office — the key had broken in the lock. The session would likely not happen, he said, which was fine with me. Sometimes I don’t feel like digging through the dirt. The weather was so rainy and cozy, I just wanted to drink cocoa and read a book.

“I’m so sorry, Mary. I’ll call you to reschedule,” said Dr. Herman. “Twenty years of practice, this has never happened to me before.”

“You’ll figure it out,” I said, opened my umbrella, and walked out into the rain.

« 1 … 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 … 246 »