William Soutar is one of my favorite poets. I love him so much I wrote a poem about him once. (It’s not good enough to share, yet; maybe someday.) Soutar, who was born in Scotland in 1898, suffered from ankylosing spondylitis, a crippling form of chronic, inflammatory arthritis, and was bedridden for well over a decade as a result. But by all accounts — even in his sickbed he seemed to know everyone who was anyone in those days so there are many accounts — he was beguiling, charming, warm, and obviously an insanely gifted writer.
When Soutar was diagnosed, he didn’t freak out. When he realized that he would no longer be able to play football, or garden, or travel much at all, he said to himself, “Now I can be a poet.”
Who does that?
I also love Soutar because he was a dedicated journal keeper. Me too, Billy; me too. And leafing through a journal from 2013 the other day — I was looking for a picture that I still haven’t found — I came across a passage from Soutar’s journal that I had copied into mine. It’s about why a person should keep a journal.
Or a blog.
“If you ask me why I deem it worthwhile to fill up a page such as this, day by day — shall I not reply, ‘Worthwhileness hasn’t very much to do with it’? The most natural reply might be, ‘Because I cannot go out and chop a basket of firewood or take the weeds out of the garden path.’
Yet that wouldn’t be a wholly honest answer. We are all sustained at times by the thought that whatever we may be we are certainly a solitary manifestation of creation; not a single other creature in all the history of the world has been just as ourself — not another will be like us.
Why not put on record something of the world as seen by this lonely ‘ego’: here and there perhaps a sentence may be born whose father is reality.”
Thanks, William. It’s good to know you think about this stuff, too.
But that’s my living room table-slash-sewing table-slash-second desk, a.k.a. Mission Control. I’ve got a presentation tomorrow (did a mini one today, too) and so many things due and last week I was in four states. I have decided the best way to keep things straight is to a) focus on one thing at a time and b) take pictures of everything and label them with numbers.
(Just kidding about the second thing except it’ll be fun to do it right now so let’s do it.)
Here’s what’s on my desk:
The “Heart Plus” cloth bucket my friend Theresa made for me when I went to Portland last year and saw her and the gang at the Portland Modern Quilt Guild and Fabric Depot. I use it every day, T. (My sewing machine is about two inches from the frame of this picture, by the way.)
My class readings for The Literary Animal class (orange notebook) and my “citizen scientist” fieldwork journal. We read Virginia Woolf’s “Flush” for this week’s discussion. Do you know that novel? It’s great! Woolf wrote it from the point of view of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. What a woman!
My Tivoli radio. I have to bang on it to get it to work and that’s half the fun.
Pencil cup.
A printout of Winslow Homer’s “Croquet Scene,” 1866. I can’t tell you more at the moment, but just you wait. I’m gonna blow your mind later this week when I tell you about this picture! It’s part of an assignment. I’m freaking out!
I went to visit my friend Sophie’s School of the Art Institute (SAIC) studio today. While we were talking, she took an illustration of a girl reading books in a library off her wall and got out a spiral thingy and took out this thing that looked like a cross between a three-hole punch and a paper cutter and she made me a journal. While we were talking and eating generic M&Ms. She knows bookbinding and just like, made me a little spiral journal while I was complaining about needing just 2-3 more hours in the day. This is art school, I think.
To-do list. (Second one today.)
My latest poem: “The Field Mouse.” See No. 5 and stay tuned!!!
My day planner (yep, paper) and a handout that are the exact same color of banana yellow. I didn’t even plan it.
Log cabin blocks that I showed in class today. Yup: all-white. So many things to tell you, so much art to make, so little energy left in my fingers to type it…
High-contrast blocks I also showed in class today. Guess what? Everyone loves patchwork. Everyone melts when they see fabric in pretty shapes sewn together. Isn’t that what we do, quilting friends? We take soft fabric and we make pretty shapes and we sew them together. When you share patchwork in a class full of art people who are getting writing degrees, you inspire like 90 stories or poems or journal entries, etc., etc. I saw it happen. I was there. It was so awesome.
Dinner with my amazing, elder, Manhattan-dwelling sister and my mother. Mom and I are here for the Quilters Take Manhattan event this weekend; I’m emceeing the big event tomorrow and Mom’s a special guest.
That picture up there of my family is interesting. It was taken of my mom and dad, my paternal grandparents, and my two sisters and me in 1982 at the christening of my little sister Rebecca.
Pendennis is very busy commenting in a hotel room in Oshkosh, WI. Photo: Me.
The new coat of paint that the ol’ PG got a number of weeks ago (thanks, Sally!!) didn’t just make ‘er prettier; it also fixed several things.
You can comment on a post now, for example.
Comments never worked on the old platform. I don’t know why because that’s above my pay grade. (Pay grade = zero grades.) I would’ve liked to see reader comments on the posts themselves but bad things happen when Pendennis tries to change “widgets” on blog “dashboards.” (More on this below.) So my Facebook page was the place where beguiling, effervescent, almost wickedly attractive PaperGirl readers would leave comments. But as many of you have discovered, you can leave comments on posts now and I hope you will.
While we’re on the subject: PaperGirl readers are funny, insightful, compassionate, and have excellent grammar. I know this because of the comments, wherever they may be. I see few typos; I see critical thinking. I see thoughtful sentences. I am often moved to LOL.
I don’t comment back too much, however, because I simply can’t. I can’t! Writing this blog takes many hours a week; to reply to more than a meager few means to reply to everyone and that means adding many more hours to producing the blog. Right now, I can’t afford to do it. If there’s someone out there with buckets o’ money who wants to underwrite the ol’ PG, this will change immediately. You know where to find me.
The other fix that has been done has to do with the broken RSS/subscription button that had been giving me fits for awhile. Please re-subscribe if you haven’t been getting your email when I post a new post! I love you. I’m sorry.
The button was broken a month or so ago when Pendennis tried to be cute and re-write the “Mary Fons: New Post” subject line. He broke it, not me. I would totally know how to not do that. Totally.
So, friend, subscribe and comment and underwrite. Or two out of three.
I was walking with my pal Stephen a few weeks ago. We were both sweating because it was 87 degrees outside. We fantasized about the day when we could once again describe the air as “fresh” and “crisp” instead of “sorta like a wet gym sock.”
“Speaking of gym socks,” Stephen said, “I’ve got tickets to the first Bears home game on the 20th. You wanna go??”
Football is another reason Stephen likes when summer gives way to fall. He was never a sports fan growing up but fell in love with football a few years ago and now he’s really hooked.
Having never set a toe inside Soldier Field (I know — ridiculous!) and also being fond of spending time with Stephen, who is just a cool person, I said yes! I don’t have much time for diversions these days, but how could I say no to a Bears game? My first ever!
It was an incredible experience that I’d like to write about but not in this post. This post is about how I lost my wallet on the way home from the Bears game…and someone found it and returned it to me.
Here’s the thing about going to a big sporting event at Soldier Field: no purses or bags allowed. Well, that’s not entirely true: You are allowed to carry a purse/bag if it is a NFL-sanctioned, clear plastic bag that I’m sure costs $100. The only thing I’m less interested in doing than purchasing a $100 plastic bag is carrying the thing. With these cute shoes?? Are you crazy?? I decided I would leave everything at home and I put my license, debit card, and a $20 bill in this slim little black wallet and put it in my back pocket.
Exactly.
It was so weird to be out in the world with no purse. It almost ruined everything for me. A woman’s purse is her brain and I have lots of things in my purse. Eventually, I relaxed into the experience and watched big, beefy dudes kick a little ball around fake grass and I really enjoyed it. Until I got home last night and realized: no wallet.
Oh, I wept. I wept and gnashed my teeth. How could I have been so dumb? Did it fall out in the stadium? Or in the pedicab on the way back to drop off Stephen? Did it fall out on the street before I went into my building? I was really sunk because in less than 24 hours, I was set to rent a car to drive to Oshkosh to teach and lecture! I would have to go to the DOT and get a new license. Needless to say, I did not sleep well.
This morning, I opened my laptop with a heavy heart to check the hours of the DOT and of course clicked open my email to see if anyone had given me some sort of Lifetime Achievement Award overnight. And there, better than any Lifetime Achievement Award, was an email from Ryan B:
“Hello, Mary: I believe I have your wallet. I found it last night on the sidewalk outside of Shedd Aquarium. Please contact me at 123-456-7890. Thank you, Ryan.”
Ryan and his wife were riding bikes out at the Museum Campus where Soldier Field, the Shedd, the Field, the Planetarium, etc., are located. They spotted a little black square on the sidewalk — amidst a sea of people! — and they picked it up.
I made strange sounds of joy and gratitude. I wept. I called Ryan. I babbled thank you, thank you at him and praised his True Goodness and possibly weirded him out when I said, “Mister, you’d better tuck those angel wings into your jacket before you go to work!” and then he told me he’d give my wallet to his receptionist and I could come by anytime today and get it. His office is downtown; it was a 10 minute bike ride from my Literary Animal class at school. I had my wallet back — debit card, $20 bucks, and license intact — before 1:00 p.m.
When I spoke to Ryan, I asked him if he had any food allergies because I’d really like to give him a treat, a reward for returning my wallet. He protested:
“No, no. No reward needed. What goes around comes around, you know?”
He’s right — but no way was I not gonna do something nice for this guy. Rather than treats, I decided on a Starbucks card. If I had buckets o’ money, I would’ve gone in for $100 and really wowed him; instead, I put $20 on the card, the exact amount I thought I’d lost forever.
Thank you, Ryan. You did a Very Good Thing and I thank you. We all do!
