65th Birthday Quilt

Last August, as my 65^th birthday approached, I asked the members of my immediate family to each give me a half a yard of brightly colored 100% cotton fabric as a birthday gift. I explained that I would use the fabric to make myself a quilt. I have made quilts for others for new babies, graduations, and weddings; but I had never made a quilt for myself.

 The fabrics they gave me are exquisite and in many instances quite representative of those who selected them. My son who has a passion for anime gave me fabric covered in Totoros (a famous Hayao Miyazaki character) that he special ordered from Japan. My daughter-in-law the florist chose a fabric that features flowers. My grandson who adores anything that “goes” chose a print with cars and airplanes. My son the musician chose a woven fabric, which I feel represents the action of weaving his musical competitions from different strands of sound. His girlfriend is an artist who does a lot of printmaking and she gave me a fabric that’s a print. I also received bright purple fabric from my husband and bright orange from my daughter. From these raw materials provided, I pieced my personal story cloth of family, home, ancestry, land, and the fruition of a decades-long marriage to my husband, keeper of my heart.

The quilt contains my family’s gifted fabrics as well as fabrics I have used in the past to make quilts for lifecycle events, fabrics handed down to me by my mother and grandmother, and fabrics taken from clothes I wore when pregnant and during my years raising my children. The square representing my baby grandson is made from the fabrics I used to make his baby quilt. 

One square features a Hmong story cloth given to me as a farewell gift when I left a city job that I loved to move to my home in the country. The Hmong historically have no written language. They preserve the narratives of their lives and history through story cloths. The one included in my quilt depicts their grief when forced to leave their ancestral home and the plants, animals, and natural environment they cherished. I identify with this loss. It grieved me to leave my home in the forest where I raised my children when Ron and I accepted the limitations brought on by age and moved into town. It will always grieve me. 

The individual quilt squares represent my husband, my three children, my daughter-in-law, my youngest son’s girlfriend, my two grandsons, my matriarchal ancestors, and the home I left in the forest. One additional square represents future grandchildren I may have. The Hmong story cloth that resonates with me provides the final square to make one dozen. 

I pieced the quilt (top and bottom) and then I paid a quilter to stitch the quilting using a computer program on a long-arm sewing machine. The quilting pattern I chose is hands. You can see them more clearly on the back of the quilt than on the front. Finally, I sewed the binding by hand to complete the project. 

It has been nearly a year since I turned 65. My birthday gift was both the process of making my own story cloth and the finished product. When I wrap myself in my birthday quilt, I feel embraced by family, home, land, and personal history. It comforts me in these miserable times we are living through and helps me cling to hope for a better future. May love wrap us in its embrace and save us all.

This Is Not the Apocalypse

Quite a few people have taken to saying they are living in the apocalypse. These may be miserable times but it’s more than an exaggeration to characterize our present situation as the apocalypse. This doesn’t look like the end of days to me. I have developed a brief quiz to help you determine if you are living in an apocalypse or not.

1) Do you have access to food and potable water?

2) Do you have a safe and sheltered place to sleep at night?

3) Have you seen a tree lately?

4) Do you have electricity in your home?

5) Are you able to communicate with distant loved ones using an electronic device?

6) Was your trash collected at curbside as regularly scheduled?

7) Can you flush your toilet?

8) Have you been attacked by giant mutant wolves?

9) Have you seen aliens in your attic?

10) Have you noticed any dead bodies lying about in your neighborhood?

11) Have you found yourself interacting with a different version of yourself from another space-time continuum?

12) Do you suspect you or someone you know is a zombie?

I’ve made my point. Case closed.

Granted, we are experiencing a number of post-apocalyptic scenarios that contribute to people describing this as the apocalypse. These scenarios include 1) people dying of plague and 2) an ignorant, degenerate president and his military bullies committing violence against our country’s own citizenry, commonly referred to as fascism. But I wish to point out that I am not eating acorns and dandelion greens yet. Many people have apparently mistaken this historical moment for the apocalypse. Consider this moment as an awakening instead. It’s a catalyst for us to think about what we cherish and want to fully appreciate in case the systems do fully collapse and humans vanish from Earth in massive numbers, or entirely. Consider this a moment of reckoning, to motivate us to make the changes necessary to avert an apocalyptic full collapse.

Some days as I swim to consciousness from sleep, I wonder what planet I’m on. After six months of only seeing one another on screenchat, my three-year-old grandson and I finally, joyfully, saw one another in person when my husband and I drove (taking precautions en route) from California to Oregon for a recent visit. When we arrived at my grandson’s house, we emerged from the car and walked over to him in the front yard. He looked us up and down and asked, “How did you come to Earth?” While I can’t truly know what he meant by that or what he perceived in his toddler mind, I imagine he wondered how we got out of the computer and landed in his yard in flesh and blood. I replied “Greetings Earthling.” While I might wish I could go home to a different planet, I remain deeply earthbound in a vulnerable human body.

This virus has laid us humans low, but it has not killed all of us off, and our systems still work even if not as well as they once did. Many of our systems, such as the healthcare system and the economic system (that has resulted in egregious income inequality), never did work. But a full systems collapse of the magnitude of an apocalypse has not happened. It may feel like an apocalypse to people at ground zero of the pandemic. But, face it, we know well that a full-on apocalypse would be exponentially worse than this.

This not-apocalypse simply poses new challenges and requires that people learn to adapt, and, dare I suggest, use their creativity. Humans need to care, think, innovate, and imagine. We need to rise to the occasion. We need to change. Americans don’t have a good track record when it comes to these kinds of things. The inconveniences, challenges, and tragedies of the present situation do not an apocalypse make. For example, a failed trip to the grocery store is not apocalyptic. Yes, I am going to share this story because that is how I wish to work through the trauma of a singularly dreadful morning food shopping. Last week when I went to my local natural foods store, I discovered a sign on the door informing me that they had closed because two employees had tested positive for the coronavirus. They would remain closed until all employees could be tested and the store could be deep cleaned. So I reluctantly proceeded to a grocery store that carries many natural and organic products. I don't know my way around that store, and consequently it took me a long time to shop. I had to locate my preferred products and had to make many substitutions. I was finally almost done shopping when I went to the restroom, and in the time it took me to sanitize my hands, my shopping cart disappeared! After looking for it myself for a few minutes with no luck, I spoke to an employee. Several employees then helped me comb the store for the cart but we couldn’t find it. If this were a real apocalypse, my cart would have been abducted by aliens or I would discover that I had made a space-time continuum leap. In the not-apocalypse, I had to do my shopping all over again. Two hours after I entered the store (or perhaps two hundred years in a different space-time continuum), when I got to the checkout stand, a store employee came over to tell me that they had just discovered that another shopper had taken my cart, thinking it was hers. How senile was she? My cart was fully loaded with a week’s worth of groceries. How could she possibly mistake all the items in that cart for her own? Was she me in a different space-time continuum? Possibly, because I never saw her. Did it seriously take her an hour to realize it was the wrong cart? Honestly, a real apocalypse would go unnoticed in this country because America is basically already full of zombies.

The frustrations of my ill-fated shopping trip, caused by the coronavirus situation, do not match the horror of a full-on apocalypse. Let’s all take a step back and recognize that things could be considerably worse. Even so, I’m hanging on by my fingernails until the election in the expectation that we might have some actual leadership waiting in the wings to step up in 2021. After four years of this mayhem, rampant ignorance, injustice, catastrophe, death, and fascism, I’m exhausted. If an actual apocalypse occurs, I wish to go gently in my sleep to a surprisingly marvelous afterlife with no zombies. Either that or send me through a space-time continuum vortex to eighteenth century Scotland with the characters in Outlander where I will happily finish out my days drinking excellent Scotch, cooking and baking for my favorite fictional people, spinning wool, and cultivating a Scottish accent. Aye, I am a fan. Outlander helps me survive the pandemic, economic meltdown, long-overdue reckoning with racial injustice, and threat of a fascist dictatorship. Pass the whiskey. Sláinte.

Remembering John Lewis

Rest in power.

On Sunday July 26, the body of John Lewis traveled once again across the Edmund Pettis Bridge. Few have been so brave. Few have made such a difference. 

Black Lives Matter

The fact that Black lives matter even needs to be said breaks my heart. With gratitude to Touré for stating things better than I could, I want to rerun my blog post from March 2012 after Trayvon Martin was murdered. My position in this struggle is complicated because I am not Black, yet I am no mere ally. I am the wife of a Black man and the mother of Black sons and a Black daughter. Blood of my blood. Beloved of my heart. I fear for the safety of my immediate family as they go out into the world every day in this racist country. My husband spent a weekend in jail in his youth for “dirty license plates,” or, as commonly called in the Black community, DWB (driving while Black). This man, to whom I have pledged my soul, could have died right then for one mistaken movement, one eye roll, one unfortunate word; and I would never have met him, married him, bore his children, spent 42 years loving him and being held in his love in return. I am more than an ally. I am the wife and mother of Black men. I claim that. I live inside it. Grant me the right to speak the truth of my narrative. Without further preface, here is a revised version of my blog post from eight years ago. A blink of an eye. Has anything changed in that time? Tell me, what can I find to give me hope?

March 25, 2012

One day in 1996, I received a phone call while at work from my friend S., who lived about 45-minutes-drive from town in our rural community. S., who is part Black and part Native, was in a panic because her son, R., who was 20 at the time, had called to tell her he had been arrested for “making an unsafe maneuver on his bicycle.” She begged me to go to the jail to make sure R. wasn’t mistreated or injured before she could get into town. She was terrified he would be beaten. Or worse. When she called, I was about to leave work to pick up my boys (ages 8 and 4) from daycare. I promised her that as soon as I had my boys I would go to the jail.

As I drove over to retrieve my own Black sons, it dawned on me that I would have to explain to them why R., who often babysat them, was in jail. And to explain that, I would have to explain why the police arrested him on a false charge. And to explain that, I would have to break the news to my children that the police were not always your friendly neighborhood helper if you happened to be a Black boy (or a Black man). And if I did that, it meant that their dad and I would have to have the talk with them, the talk that I hadn’t expected to have with them until they were much older. How could we explain to such young boys that they were less safe than their white peers, and why? How could we explain the precautions that Black young men must take to attempt to stay safe in America? They were so young, so trustful.

We later learned that R. had crossed the street on his bike in the middle of a block instead of at the corner. A police car immediately bore down on him. R. was in front of the house where he rented a room from our friend J. and he was terrified when the police pursued him. He panicked. He threw his bike on the front lawn and ran into the house. Within moments, a half a dozen police officers forcibly entered J.’s house, with a police dog and weapons drawn, threw R. on the floor, cuffed him, and accused him of resisting arrest. Meanwhile J. (who was physically restrained in her own home by officers) was screaming at the officers that they had no legal right to enter her house without a warrant. Later, when the dust cleared, the city offered to drop all charges against R. if he agreed not to sue them. R. wanted to put the whole awful experience behind him and he took the deal. S. didn’t want him to have a criminal record and the agreement would ensure that his record remained clean so she didn’t protest either. The police department should not have walked away from that filth unscathed, but I understand why R. and S. made the choices they made. Not everyone is a hero.

I remember this story today because of Trayvon Martin. The most insightful, moving, and useful words that I have read in the wake of the murder of this Black child in Florida were written by Touré for Time Magazine in an article entitled “How to Talk to Black Boys about Trayvon Martin.” It is a healing and honest discourse. You can read Touré’s full list of talking points here in the Time archives. Allow me to share some of Touré’s words because they touched me so deeply as the parent of Black children. He provides excellent advice to Black young men regarding how to respond in potentially life-threatening situations. Here is an excerpt from Touré:

It's unlikely but possible that you could get killed today. Or any day. I'm sorry, but that's the truth. Black maleness is a potentially fatal condition. I tell you that not to scare you but because knowing that could save your life. There are people who will look at you and see a villain or a criminal or something fearsome. It's possible they may act on their prejudice and insecurity. Being black could turn an ordinary situation into a life-or-death moment even if you're doing nothing wrong.

There is nothing wrong with you. You're amazing. I love you. When I look at you, I see a complex human being with awesome potential, but some others will look at you and see a thug--even if their only evidence is your skin. Their racism relates to larger anxieties and problems in America that you didn't create. When someone is racist toward you--either because they've profiled you or spit some slur or whatever--they are saying they have a problem. They are not speaking about you. They're speaking about themselves and their deficiencies.

What if it's the cops who are making you feel threatened? Well, then you need to retreat. I don't mean run away. I mean don't resist. Now is not the time to fight the power. Make sure they can see your hands, follow all instructions, don't say anything, keep your cool. Your goal is to defuse things, no matter how insulted you are. We'll get revenge later. In the moment, play possum. Say sir. They may be behaving unjustly, but their lives aren't in danger. Yours is. If you survive, you will be able to tell your lawyer what happened. If you don't …

Never forget:  As far as we can tell, Trayvon did nothing wrong and still lost his life. You could be a Trayvon. Any of us could.

I have often wondered if Emmett Till’s mother had a 1950s version of the talk with him before he left Chicago and went to visit her people in Mississippi in 1955. If she didn’t, how she must have wished that she had. If she did, why did he forget her words? If only something she said had stuck in his mind and prevented him from risking and losing his life at the age of 14 for the foolish act of whistling at a white woman, the wife of a white supremacist. His gruesome and brutal death was a significant event in the advancement of the civil rights movement. But if you were to ask me, to ask any mother, to choose between having my sons make history and having them alive and well, you can guess what we would choose. I have asked my children to read Touré’s words. His advice could possibly save their lives sometime. I wish it were otherwise, but we have chosen to live in America, choose it again every day. My husband’s ancestors did not have that choice, and the legacy of that crime will not go away.

Father's Day Reprise

In 2012, I posted the following blog about my father on Father's Day. A lot has changed in eight years, with both of us slower than we were in 2012 and the world going all to hell. But for those of you who have stuck with me and still read, I want to repost this blog entry. Dad is still with me at 91. Lucky me.

Here's the 2012 blog:

When I started my blog a few years back, Dad requested that I respect his privacy and not talk about him on it. I have mentioned him from time to time, but I have consciously left him out of most of my musings. Today he will have to suffer being the subject of my blog entry of the week. After all, he’s 83 years old, and although he’s going strong, I treasure every Father’s Day that I still have him around. If I want to take a minute to appreciate my dad, then I will. I think he can handle it.

One of the greatest gifts that Dad has given to me, his only daughter, is the ability to have a positive attitude. I have received this from him as a result of genetics, of having a get-up-and-go Daddy as a girl growing up, and of watching how he continues to maintain his positive approach as he has aged.

Life is not easy; and it becomes more and more difficult as the years go by and we must assimilate the inevitable challenges, losses, and disappointments that accompany aging. Loved ones pass on. Our bodies don’t work so well anymore. We must reconcile ourselves with the differences between the life we imagined for ourselves in our youth and the life we actually lived and are living. Dad has never been one to dwell on the negative. He wakes up every morning ready for an adventure and eager for a new discovery. He works at not letting things get him down. He looks for the good in other people, delights in the wonders of the natural world, makes opportunities to enjoy the creative efforts of others (in art, writing, song, dance, etc.), uses his extraordinary gift of mathematical ability to contribute to the advancement of his field of inquiry, and generally explores the world. He loves to travel, to meet new people and try new things. He is always hungry to learn. The entire world is his playground. Nothing is beyond the potential realm of his vastly inquisitive mind.

Although I may not be quite as adventurous as my globetrotting father, I share his enthusiasm for life and his desire to make good use of my time here, not to squander my gifts or fail to notice the miracles of everyday. Having a positive attitude has made me resilient. I have been able to cope with worries great and small, obstacles, those losses and disappointments I mentioned already. It is my positive attitude that has made it possible for me to persevere as a writer, recover again and again from rejection, and eventually achieve publication. I try not to have regrets. I try not to hold grudges. I try to let go of anxiety, frustrations, and anger. I try to appreciate the beauty and the wonder. I try to be creative, to find humor, to act from love, and to listen to others when they speak their truest selves.

In some ways, my most fundamental philosophy about life, my way of being in the world, came to me through Dad. I believe that our purpose as human beings is to promote positive energy and that when we engage in positive acts, acts of kindness and compassion, acts of creativity and preservation, we have a positive impact on the universe. Through the gift of a positive attitude, Dad has given me abundant joy. What greater gift from a dad to his daughter? Happy Father’s Day, Dad. Love you.