Month: August 2019

THE COLOR PURPLE

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““I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it.”—The Color Purple by Alice Walker

My favorite pair of gloves are purple. They are not quite dark enough because I want the shade to conceal stains. That sounds practical, but I also prefer the shadows, which are not always practical. Just now I have fabrics spread out over the floor again. I am looking at a triad of deep purples and lime-sage greens and brilliant bittersweet, all batik. Waiting all over the floor because I have no wall space. Not practical.

My walls are painted pale tints of plummy gray, but what draws me to purple is the darkness. Purple has a royal association for many people, a sophisticated color. It might remind me of pain. As one example, I have been thrown from horses, kicked and bitten by them. People do die falling from a horse, but for pure suffering during recovery, I cannot recall anything more painful than that perfect purple-dark bruise risen on my shoulder that took a month to begin fading. That is what I think of first when I think of purple.

Violets have volunteered in our front garden. There is mostly only sand from where we removed the deck, the montbrecias coming up everywhere and mowed half down by the rabbits. (The rabbits have become large, and yesterday we watched one eat an entire dandelion—good bunny.) but just at the edge, between the expanse of sand and the hedge. a violet.

Many things that are called purple are not purple at all. Male purple finches have a reddish head. Purple prose is the overblown decorative fluff that gives English teachers a headache. On the other hand, blueberries are more purple than blue. The indigenous blue huckleberries make purple pies. Carrots were originally a purple root—the orange we know today is a sport that became so popular in Europe the original color is an oddity in modern markets. Few would consider purple carrots anything but fantasy. 

The tall flower spikes of Digitalis purpurea, as its name suggests, is usually light purple. When we were young, my girlfriends and I plucked the hollow flowers from foxglove spires as tall as ourselves. They bloomed on the edge of the woods and we slipped a glove onto each finger. We knew the flowers (and the stems, leaves, and roots) are toxic. Digitalis is the medicine my grandfather took for his heart, and too much can kill, but we ran with our purple-gloved fingers fanned before us in games. I always assumed that the foxglove of childhood games and that I saw along my drive to work each June was native. But it is an invasive species, just another European, like most of my ancestors. Maybe this is the source of my complicated love affair with purple.

The Purple Heart is a military medal for physical injury in the field of battle—implying nothing about the actions of the wounded, other than to honor the wound. An award for suffering.

Pretty purple things: amethyst and iolite and tanzanite and the opaque sugilite. The thick petals of orchids can be many colors, but the color “orchid” is violet. I have dyed wool lavender with iris flowers. That iris tint fades in sunlight. It is fragrance as much as hue: violets and lavender, the tuberose, iris, lilac scents. Somehow I associate purple as much with folly as with bloom—the pain bruises.

Yet, as a textile artist, it is the color I reach for, covet, value and strand in weaving. I choose to spice yellows or orange in a composition, to spark pinks or green. It is a hue that wants to shove gray around. And that is probably appropriate since purple has a long association with power. The ancient Tyrian purple dye worn by popes and sovereigns for thousands of years was harvested from the mucous of three species of predatory sea snails, known collectively as Murex. The fluid protects the unhatched eggs of the shellfish and drives off predators. It can be harvested by killing the snail, but also through “milking” the mucous gland of the creature. Rare but stubborn, the color, a clear reddish-violet to my modern eye, withstands fading through wear, light, and washing. The dye was already ancient when Aristotle, who was so right about some principles and so very wrong about so many particulars, detailed its production.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a British chemist invented the first aniline dye, originally called Tyrian purple and then marketed as mauve, a delicate, slightly grayed, reddish-purple. (Mauve pronounced with a long O, not a soft ah sound.) The first chemically created color ever. It is on the edge of being a cool color, found on the color wheel opposite yellow-greens. 

In youth I leaned to warmer colors—orange, vermillion, russet reds, dusty pinks, burgundy, and wine red. My preferences changed over the years and purple moved from a supporting role in accessories to center stage. This shift is reflected not only in what I wear, but in what I want to touch. I wore bellbottoms striped in black, lime, pink, and purple when I was fourteen. I dyed my hair purple when I was sixty, a joke on the old ladies of my childhood who used rinses to counter yellowing that turned their gray hair from murky yellowing gray to distinctly violet. 

Purple is the foil that makes paler, more timid tints dance. Purple is the look-at-me color, associated with power, with royalty, nobility, Lent, Easter, and Mardi Gras, but very rarely named as favorite. Studies suggest that it is a color preferred by artistic folk, more often women than men, older adults rather than younger ones, and that was the character of the room when I took a class taught by Jungians on Art Therapy. 

Sandra Cisneros had to fight conservative design review to paint her San Antonio, Texas Victorian home purple, a periwinkle blue, and pale blue-violet tint by my estimation, but the color proved to be historically accurate. There are painted ladies in San Francisco—not women, but the grand tall Victorian mansions of that city—painted in shades of violet. A favorite house in Seattle is a smokey violet shade I found on a paint chip called “Stetson” with a bright red door in the 70s before that became cliché. Hyacinth macaws are purple, and the queen of England is known to wear tints of that particular blue-violet. It is stitched into the border of a a sari or the facing of an Afghan dress. 

It makes a pattern in concrete sidewalks, city sidewalks built with glass “prisms” faceted to direct light to anyone working in the spaces beneath. Clear glass pavers were made with manganese to clarify the glass, but eventually the iron that once clouded the glass swaps ions with manganese and over years of exposure to sunlight, the clear glass turns purple. There are such sidewalks across the country in Texas and British Columbia, Seattle and New York City. Nearby in Astoria, broken pavers have been replaced. Many have been damaged over the years, but the surviving glass in sidewalks is generally quite purple. 

Violet is on the edge of wavelength in light that humans can see. Shorter X-rays and gamma rays and ultraviolet exist beyond the visible violet, just as microwaves and radio waves lie on the other side of the light spectrum beyond red. The rainbow shows purple inside the sweep to fairy gold. Some gifts seem the work of the supernatural. In The Color Purple, while discussing their view of God, Shug tells Celie she thinks God wants to be loved, “I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it.” We are supposed to appreciate the gift. 

We are supposed to appreciate the gift of that richness and precarious pleasure, the flower that blooms for a day, the shellfish that guards its eggs with purple mucous, the semi-precious gemstone, the pebble in the water, and even the fresh bump on an elbow, the toxic flower that cups a fingertip, the fine line between the violet we can see and the next shade over that is invisible to our eyes. There is beauty, but concealment too, a warning both ways. My purple gloves are meant only to protect my hands from the cold. In sunny weather I require some other protection. It is ultraviolet that burns our skin.

AMAZING NAMES

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“Not many things are orange . . .” Really?

On 10 September 2015, I created a folder on my computer titled COLORbook. My intention was to complete a series of chapters about color, an entire book of nonfiction about my personal and cultural understanding of color. The idea had been stirring in my head for a long time. My earliest essay about color I can find was created 2006 about orange. “The word itself traces its lineage from fourteenth century English, back to Old French or perhaps Spanish through the Arabic nāranj, the Persian nārang, and eventually to the Sanskrit nāranga, meaning orange tree, a word that might derive from an even earlier term meaning fragrant. Our word for the color orange and the fruit have an ancient co-existence, but the citrus fruit came first.” The color name or the name of a citrus fruit or acknowledgment of the incredible scent of fruit and flower, orange blossom.

Anyway, I meant to write a book about color. I had completed several chapters and begun thinking about sending them out when, probably in 2017, I learned of the book On Color by David Scott Kastan with Stephen Farthing. It was released last year and I have just begun reading it. I will have to stop soon. It is making me cross. The obvious reason is that I wish I’d written it and I am annoyed that I didn’t.

It’s probably for that reason that I am arguing with the book. There are marvelous lines like “The sensation of color is physical; the perception of color is cultural.” The book does a very nice job of explaining color as wound into perception and culture. Homer’s “wine dark sea” seems to trouble a lot of people including these authors who desperately want Homer to have said the sea was blue. Water has no color, but reflects the sky. Maybe saying the sky or sea were indigo blue seemed entirely unnecessary. I look at the ocean every day, for hours at a time. The color I remark upon is a deep green, which is not typical but a personal preference. Perhaps the wine reference refers not to hue, but purely to darkness, richness. A dark sea. I have seen that—even seen it dark and the color of wine. Color is very much a matter of context, both physically and culturally. The Kastan and Farthing book does a good job of introducing that confusion.

But then another sort of confusion: “Not many things are orange” the book states by way of explaining why the color orange was there, of course, but the color name of “orange” did not exist in English until the fruit arrived in England. There was no word for that color until the fruit. It was unnecessary, they suggest. (Really?) Chaucer refers to a color “betwixe yelow and reed.” (He knew how to mix paint colors? The connection is not so obvious as the authors claim. I have taught enough small children and older ones how to combine primary colors to make secondary colors to know that most do not see this without aid.) But the authors make a gigantic leap in claiming there was no need for the color name because not many things are orange? How about sunsets, rust, and hair we call “red” to name just three? “Not many things are orange . . .” Only autumn leaves, chickens and foxes, fire and flower stamens. Apparently the word was necessary in India for millennia before it reached the British isles.

[Fewer things are purple, but that word is very old in English, from the Old English word purpul from Latin purpura, from the Greek πορφύρα (porphura), the name of the Tyrian purple dye made from a Mediterranean shellfish. Maybe I will post my essay on the color.]

310euHZLD2L._SX328_BO1,204,203,200_.jpgAnyway, this is probably a better book than I would have completed, had I completed mine. Twenty-two pages of endnotes, so the scholarship is solid. The stories I found in my research seem to be mostly covered here, and my copy purchased at a local bookstore is a squarer shape than what I see on Amazon. A pretty thing.

Despite Crayola crayons and poster paints, Hazel Koenig at the University of Washington introduced me to color theory. Pink is a tint of red, brown is a shade of orange. Pigment combines three primary colors and black and white in ways quite unlike color in light (which achieves all colors from red, blue, and green light). The four-color printing process (cyan, yellow, magenta, and black) has always amazed me—how do yellow and magenta combine to make pure red? Amazing.

Some of my essays are here on my blog if you searched for them. “Color Blind” and “Blue Sky” for example. I also wrote about orange and hot pink and little black dresses, ten chapters in all for my COLORbook folder.

I never got to yellow because I left off writing new chapters when I understood that someone else had written and published my book. It is not the first time.

In 1995, I completed the first draft of a terrible novel, and then I began better one. This was called Clean Away (working title was Bitch Trial) about four generations of women in family facing similar struggles over and over and perhaps doing better and better at coping. The central character, the daughter and granddaughter of older generations and the mother of a younger one, finds her grandmother’s diary behind a wall in a tiny family house in Astoria. This reveals a scandalous secret and places her own life in context. I worked on that book for a few years and then abandoned it when I learned of a new novel with a similar plot. I read all the way through that one. It was very good. My book was funny and the other was not, but mine was never published.

I used to write funny. That got lost for a while. I blame my poor mother. (Mothers so often get blamed for everything.) By 2002 my mother’s health was undeniably failing and my husband and I took care of her, someone told me I was the “most dysfunctional person” he knew and stopped communicating with me, and I lost my sense of humor.

Perhaps I only misplaced it, setting it aside for best. Perhaps it was unnecessary at that time. Not many things are funny? Or perhaps humor may be returning.

Most afternoons I watch the sky change color, the darkening sky blue overhead and shifting to orange on the horizon without passing either purple or green. Amazing. “How we are named and what we are called” is a phrase that runs around my head. It titled a story about Arizona that I wrote twenty years ago. It is the paradox of naming and valuing what we name. It explores that power of naming and of un-naming as Ursula K. Le Guin imagines in her story “She Unnames Them” where Woman lifts names off living creatures, removing the burden placed upon them. Some species insist their names are theirs and pets demand their personal names, but all are assured they are welcome to keep whatever names they believe suit them.

English is not the final word, nor the oldest in the world. Imagine a color book written from the other side of the world. China’s imperial yellow, red wedding dresses, white for funerals. I would read that.

Orange is one of the oldest words because so many things are orange.

WASTED

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Yesterday on our predawn walk north, Gary stood on a rock that usually rises above my head from the sand. This summer it is nearly covered. This is the deepest sand we have had in twenty years. In January of 1999, a storm-driven high tide dug the basalt from under the sand into a high ridge and took out far more sand than usual. It’s taken all this time to see it return.

Wasted. Not drunk or high, I’m talking about money.

Our biggest waste was “The Maples,” a piece of land just over two acres that my husband and I purchased in the early 80s when our firstborn was a baby. I have photos someplace of me holding him in my arms. Above us are the enormous bigleaf maples that inspired our name for the property. It was on the other side of the coast range, up the Nehalem Valley on a road called Anderson, and a stream ran along the north side. No houses I designed had yet been built, but I had great hopes for that property, purchased on contract from a widow.

And then the sale of our Seattle house fell through. What year was that? We’d accepted a very long escrow in return for a very large earnest deposit of $5000. That was in the fall. It was the following spring, early June, a week before the sale was supposed to close that the buyers told us they’d changed their mind. “No hurry” returning the earnest money.

And the money was spent on The Maples. We didn’t have it. We could not pay back the deposit, which was paid to guarantee that the buyers would not do what they did. Change their minds. I was pregnant with our second son, and we had counted on the sale closing in order to pay off the land because we really could not afford the house payments as well as the land payments.

And suddenly we were in trouble financially with contract payments on the acreage and mortgage payments on the Seattle house. Remodeling on the house I had inherited from my grandfather’s third wife. Renters had been turned out of the Seattle house, as the buyers requested, and there was some damage from the buyers opening walls and from the house lying empty for all those months. We had lost the rent and now had repairs to make before the house could be sold. Less than month before our second child was born, I was not in a position to drive back to Seattle and do the work myself. My Visa bill already did not bear thinking about. We had hard decisions to make.

We gave the land to the people who had bought the property next door, just gave it away. They would take over our payments and Tootie Anderson, from whom we purchased it, would not miss payments she relied upon, and we would be out from under one of those monthly payments we could not afford.

The Maples were gone.

Gary has a hunk of quartz crystals found at the base of one of those spectacular trees. Gary calls it our “thirteen thousand dollar rock.” That was what we lost in down payment and monthly payments on the property we gave away.

There have been other wastes. When I opened this page, I’d intended to talk about my husband’s dismay when he found that a coat he purchased a few years ago, an expensive cold-weather coat, was on sale for a quarter of what he’d paid. There are plenty of examples of wastefulness, wasted spending. Bad meals in restaurants. A pair of shoes I could not return after they gave me blisters. Fabric. A braided rug. Gary has bought CDs he realized he already had, or once had and did not like. Three incomplete sweaters that I will never finish. I have bought yarn I never used.

In our downsizing process, I let go of many projects I no longer wanted to work on. I sold a few hundred dollars worth of yarn for $90 and gave away my enameling kiln to a former student. I never heard from her afterward. Perhaps she didn’t like the yarn. I unearthed additional tools related to the kiln that I would like to give her. Perhaps the kiln did not work. Perhaps this is her own story of waste. sigh

But most of our “wasted time” was not wasted at all. It was lived. Dozens of stories and several novels consumed half a lifetime and that was not wasted time even though they are unpublished. But money. Money is not something we are supposed to talk about. For almost the whole of my life I worried about money, a habit encouraged by my mother who actually prided herself on being a “worrier.” It is a waste of time, I think.

A friend referred to travel by train as a waste of time. But on the one train trip I took as a girl, watching the countryside pass by was not a waste. Biking across a landscape is not a waste of time, running the Hood to Coast was not a waste of my time. Walking the beach this morning—we plan to walk south around the Cape—is time spent, not wasted. Time lived.

There is rain today, cooler temperatures began yesterday and I slept right through the lightening and thunder last night. Slept a good eight hours. Not a waste. Life.

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This is also from our four-mile walk, looking south. Last year we could not walk between the Seal Rock and the headland—the gap above that is filled with sand. Last year it never filled in even by August and there were pools of water and barnacled rocks. This year that is all under feet of sand.

 

NO LIE

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just for fun.

“On the Decay of the Art of Lying” is a short speech (or essay) written by Mark Twain in 1880 for a meeting of the Historical and Antiquarian Club of Hartford, Connecticut.

Observe, I do not mean to suggest that the custom of lying has suffered any decay or interruption–no, for the Lie, as a Virtue, A Principle, is eternal; the Lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man’s best and surest friend, is immortal, and cannot perish from the earth while this club remains. My complaint simply concerns the decay of the art of lying. No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted. In this veteran presence I naturally enter upon this theme with diffidence; it is like an old maid trying to teach nursery matters to the mothers in Israel. It would not become to me to criticize you, gentlemen—who are nearly all my elders–and my superiors, in this thing—if I should here and there seem to do it, I trust it will in most cases be more in a spirit of admiration than fault-finding; indeed if this finest of the fine arts had everywhere received the attention, the encouragement, and conscientious practice and development which this club has devoted to it, I should not need to utter this lament, or shred a single tear. I do not say this to flatter: I say it in a spirit of just and appreciative recognition. [It had been my intention, at this point, to mention names and to give illustrative specimens, but indications observable about me admonished me to beware of the particulars and confine myself to generalities.]

No fact is more firmly established than that lying is a necessity of our circumstances—the deduction that it is then a Virtue goes without saying. No virtue can reach its highest usefulness without careful and diligent cultivation—therefore, it goes without saying that this one ought to be taught in the public schools—even in the newspapers. What chance has the ignorant uncultivated liar against the educated expert? What chance have I against Mr. Per—against a lawyer? Judicious lying is what the world needs. I sometimes think it were even better and safer not to lie at all than to lie injudiciously. An awkward, unscientific lie is often as ineffectual as the truth.

Now let us see what the philosophers say. Note that venerable proverb: Children and fools always speak the truth. The deduction is plain—adults and wise persons never speak it. Parkman, the historian, says, “The principle of truth may itself be carried into an absurdity.” In another place in the same chapters he says, “The saying is old that truth should not be spoken at all times; and those whom a sick conscience worries into habitual violation of the maxim are imbeciles and nuisances.” It is strong language, but true. None of us could live with an habitual truth-teller; but thank goodness none of us has to. An habitual truth-teller is simply an impossible creature; he does not exist; he never has existed. Of course there are people who think they never lie, but it is not so—and this ignorance is one of the very things that shame our so-called civilization. Everybody lies—day; every hour; awake; asleep; in his dreams; in his joy; in his mourning; if he keeps his tongue still, his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude, will convey deception—and purposely. Even in sermons—but that is a platitude.

In a far country where I once lived the ladies used to go around paying calls, under the humane and kindly pretense of wanting to see each other; and when they returned home, they would cry out with a glad voice, saying, “We made sixteen calls and found fourteen of them out”—not meaning that they found out anything important against the fourteen—no, that was only a colloquial phrase to signify that they were not at home—and their manner of saying it expressed their lively satisfaction in that fact. Now their pretense of wanting to see the fourteen—and the other two whom they had been less lucky with—was that commonest and mildest form of lying which is sufficiently described as a deflection from the truth. Is it justifiable? Most certainly. It is beautiful, it is noble; for its object is, not to reap profit, but to convey a pleasure to the sixteen. The iron-souled truth-monger would plainly manifest, or even utter the fact that he didn’t want to see those people—and he would be an ass, and inflict totally unnecessary pain. And next, those ladies in that far country—but never mind, they had a thousand pleasant ways of lying, that grew out of gentle impulses, and were a credit to their intelligence and an honor to their hearts. Let the particulars go.

The men in that far country were liars, every one. Their mere howdy-do was a lie, because they didn’t care how you did, except they were undertakers. To the ordinary inquirer you lied in return; for you made no conscientious diagnostic of your case, but answered at random, and usually missed it considerably. You lied to the undertaker, and said your health was failing—a wholly commendable lie, since it cost you nothing and pleased the other man. If a stranger called and interrupted you, you said with your hearty tongue, “I’m glad to see you,” and said with your heartier soul, “I wish you were with the cannibals and it was dinner-time.” When he went, you said regretfully, “Must you go?” and followed it with a “Call again;” but you did no harm, for you did not deceive anybody nor inflict any hurt, whereas the truth would have made you both unhappy.

I think that all this courteous lying is a sweet and loving art, and should be cultivated. The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.

What I bemoan is the growing prevalence of the brutal truth. Let us do what we can to eradicate it. An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie. Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving. The man who tells a lie to help a poor devil out of trouble, is one of whom the angels doubtless say, “Lo, here is an heroic soul who casts his own welfare in jeopardy to succor his neighbor’s; let us exalt this magnanimous liar.”

An injurious lie is an uncommendable thing; and so, also, and in the same degree, is an injurious truth—a fact that is recognized by the law of libel.

Among other common lies, we have the silent lie—the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all. In that far country where I once lived, there was a lovely spirit, a lady whose impulses were always high and pure, and whose character answered to them. One day I was there at dinner, and remarked, in a general way, that we are all liars.

She was amazed, and said, “Not all?”

It was before “Pinafore’s” time. so I did not make the response which would naturally follow in our day, but frankly said, “Yes, all—we are all liars. There are no exceptions.”

She looked almost offended, “Why, do you include me?”

“Certainly,” I said. “I think you even rank as an expert.”

She said “Sh-‘sh! the children!”

So the subject was changed in deference to the children’s presence, and we went on talking about other things. But as soon as the young people were out of the way, the lady came warmly back to the matter and said, “I have made a rule of my life to never tell a lie; and I have never departed from it in a single instance.”

I said, “I don’t mean the least harm or disrespect, but really you have been lying like smoke ever since I’ve been sitting here. It has caused me a good deal of pain, because I’m not used to it.”

She required of me an instance—just a single instance. So I said—

“Well, here is the unfilled duplicate of the blank, which the Oakland hospital people sent to you by the hand of the sick-nurse when she came here to nurse your little nephew through his dangerous illness. This blank asks all manners of questions as to the conduct of that sick-nurse: ‘Did she ever sleep on her watch? Did she ever forget to give the medicine?’ and so forth and so on. You are warned to be very careful and explicit in your answers, for the welfare of the service requires that the nurses be promptly fined or otherwise punished for derelictions. You told me you were perfectly delighted with this nurse—that she had a thousand perfections and only one fault: you found you never could depend on her wrapping Johnny up half sufficiently while he waited in a chilly chair for her to rearrange the warm bed. You filled up the duplicate of this paper, and sent it back to the hospital by the hand of the nurse. How did you answer this question–‘Was the nurse at any time guilty of a negligence which was likely to result in the patient’s taking cold?’ Come–everything is decided by a bet here in California: ten dollars to ten cents you lied when you answered that question.”

She said, “I didn’t; I left it blank!”

“Just so—you have told a silent lie; you have left it to be inferred that you had no fault to find in that matter.”

She said, “Oh, was that a lie? And how could I mention her one single fault, and she
is so good?—It would have been cruel.”

I said, “One ought always to lie, when one can do good by it; your impulse was right, but your judgment was crude; this comes of unintelligent practice. Now observe the results of this inexpert deflection of yours. You know Mr. Jones’s Willie is lying very low with scarlet-fever; well, your recommendation was so enthusiastic that that girl is there nursing him, and the worn-out family have all been trustingly sound asleep for the last fourteen hours, leaving their darling with full confidence in those fatal hands, because you, like young George Washington, have a reputa— However, if you are not going to have anything to do, I will come around to-morrow and we’ll attend the funeral together, for, of course, you’ll naturally feel a peculiar interest in Willie’s case—as personal a one, in fact, as the undertaker.”

But that was not all lost. Before I was half-way through she was in a carriage and making thirty miles an hour toward the Jones mansion to save what was left of Willie and tell all she knew about the deadly nurse. All of which was unnecessary, as Willie wasn’t sick; I had been lying myself. But that same day, all the same, she sent a line to the hospital which filled up the neglected blank, and stated the facts, too, in the squarest possible manner.

Now, you see, this lady’s fault was not in lying, but in lying injudiciously. She should have told the truth, there, and made it up to the nurse with a fraudulent compliment further along in the paper. She could have said, “In one respect this sick-nurse is perfection—when she is on the watch, she never snores.” Almost any little pleasant lie would have taken the sting out of that troublesome but necessary expression of the truth.

Lying is universal—we all do it. Therefore, the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others’ advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling. Then shall we be rid of the rank and pestilent truth that is rotting the land; then shall we be great and good and beautiful, and worthy dwellers in a world where even benign Nature habitually lies, except when she promises execrable weather. Then—But am I but a new and feeble student in this gracious art; I cannot instruct this club.

Joking aside, I think there is much need of wise examination into what sorts of lies are best and wholesomest to be indulged, seeing we must all lie and we do all lie, and what sorts it may be best to avoid—and this is a thing which I feel I can confidently put into the hands of this experienced Club—a ripe body, who may be termed, in this regard, and without undue flattery, Old Masters.

NOTE: I have made “corrections” for the sake of modern grammar, punctuation, and spelling, and suspect Twain would laugh about that. I realized as I did so that my youthful fondness for Twain might help explain other fondnesses—for the em-dash, as an example.

This essay is not so sharp as some by Twain; his humorous observations are almost sweet compared to the liars we know now who might be the worst kind, worst than the poor well-intentioned lady described: Some think they have a magical gift whereby speaking the lie turns it true.—jp

 

STEP 8: Done, sort of

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BlueToo, the second blue-and-yellow quilt top. In life, it is an 84″ square, not a trapezoid.

I completed two quilt tops this month, and pieced the back of one of them too. To be perfectly honest, I have completed two quilts at once before. But this was especially fun. I could, in the simplest form, sew two lengths of cloth together to make a front and do the same for the back, adding an additional strip because the backing must be larger than the front to accommodate the machine quilter. In real life, it’s not so simple.

The theoretical simplest quilt would require at least ten or eleven yards of 44″ fabric. And in the old days when quilts were created to use up scraps of fabric (a practice not actually as common as the mythology suggests), a quilter would gather bits of fabrics for years from making shirts and dresses, wool pants and skirts. In practice, many quilts were made with specially purchased fabric or fabric dyed for use in piecing a quilt. All quilts result in ever smaller scraps. I have a small mound of blue-and-yellow scraps and thread trimmings from my work this month.

I make quilts from ordinary fabric and still hand-quilt such quilts on occasion because I really do like the look and the control. Most of my quilts these days are made of Asian batik fabric which is hand-dyed and boiled making a tight, smooth cloth that is not easily pinned, much less hand quilted. I took a hand-quilted batik quilt in to show a friend who owns a quilt shop. (“You hand-quilted this?” she said. “Didn’t your fingers bleed?” Well, yes, as a matter of fact they did. I could only work for a short time each day until my fingers were too bloody to go one without staining the fabric.) She’s the one who urged me to find a machine quilter. “No one hand-quilts batik.”

I made a small quilt for my mother from Liberty cotton lawn. I made quilts for each on my sons when they turned two and when they went off to college and when they married. My grandchildren have each received three so far.

Each of these quilts incorporate dozens of fabrics, a few thousand yards of thread, and often have pieced backings. The two shown here, except for the backing on one and a third of the backing for the other, were made entirely from fabrics I have collected in what textile people would call my “stash.” I have, let us say, several large plastic bins (and several smaller ones) filled with fabrics to use in quilting. These cottons are mostly purchased in quarter-yard pieces (about 9″ x 44″) and some of them are over forty years old. The newest are a few months old.

I made my first pieced quilt when I was pregnant with Alan, my first-born son. That was thirty-nine years ago. I took the bus to Spokane to visit a friend and she took me to a quilt shop where I bought small pieces of red on white and white on red prints of conventional cotton. The quilt I made was a double nine-patch. I backed it with one of my grandmother’s pilfered hospital sheets. Over the years since, I made an Ocean Waves and a Snail quilt. I have made variations on log cabin several times. Mostly, though, I make them up. I think through not only the appearance, but the construction of the piece—what must be done first and how.

All this planning is not the result of an orderly and methodical personality. I am what is called an Abstract/Random. I am inclined to mess and disorder and risk.

I had to learn how to be linear and meticulous instead of lazy and meandering because the things I wanted to make demanded those processes that from me. I draw thumbnails. I make lists. I stare and stare and lie awake at night figuring things out.

There is a skinny line in the quilt above, the dark blue between the grayish outside border the bluer inside panel. That narrow piece is called a “frame.” I am fond of frames in my quilts, but this one was not supposed to have one. When I realized it needed that narrow dark blue frame, I felt a kind of despair, just for an instant. I was not sure the backing I had would be large enough to add two more inches both ways.  Otherwise I would have to dig through my stash to find enough fabric to enlarge the already-huge backing for my already outsize pieced top. I laid the backing out on the bare floor and measured. Fortunately it was plenty big, though out of square and longer on one side than the other from the way it was cut from the bolt (not my fault, that).

Most of my quilts run around 80″ square or a bit larger. I meant to make a pink quilt for a twin bed once and it turned into a 90″ square. Things just got out of hand. Making a special size is another whole struggle for me. I made one for a king-size bed that was a nightmare. The size (106″ square) was more than I could manage and I swore I would never do it again. I would do it differently now but smaller pieces would be nice for a change. Doll quilts are fun. A hanging would be fine but I do not have space to hang anything. But smaller, perhaps. I could try out ideas without committing eleven yards. Or I might be ready for the plastic bin with silks.

I have been collecting silks the way dress-makers did in the nineteenth century: an entire bolt of 14″ wide kimono silk, scraps salvaged from saris and other projects. I have a couple of yards of orange silk velvet, pink charmeuse, crepe with red apples on green. Bits and pieces. They would all be interesting to piece and quilt. Slippery and shedding but precious and variable in texture. It is the shifts in texture that attract me. I once pieced fabric for a jacket—all sorts of textures including corduroy—in long narrow strips. I wish I’d kept a piece of that. The textures are what I want, in addition to the play of color and value. Something quite different. Soon.

I cast on a knitting project last night and completed a couple of rows in a fancy pattern—unlike me in knitting. I like to think I can start something new because the quilts are done.

But first, these pieces go for machine quilting and when they return in a couple of months, I will still need to bind them. So . . . not really done. Close.

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This is Blue Ladders, the quilt I originally set out to make this summer. I will negotiate with Linda Pinkstaff from Astoria Quilting about thread color tomorrow. Her advice is always good. I feel the need for a fancy quilting pattern here. We’ll see what Linda says.

 

REVISION

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

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I have a story under consideration just now at two literary journals. One of them has had it for well over a year. The other began considering it today. It is an important story to me for a variety of reasons and has received a good deal of praise from editors who “nearly” chose to publish it. Those personal rejections came from the more prominent journals. (It is some sort of irony that the journals who publish a larger percentage of submissions reject it quickly compared to the journals that accept only a fraction of one percent of submissions.)

The story matters to me, and that is why I keep sending it out. It is the reason I have restructured the story, changed the point of view, expanded it to over six thousand words and carved it back to barely three thousand. I have revised the story at least every six months for the past fourteen years. That is, I have dozens of drafts, some of them quite dramatically different..

I know when I wrote it because in 2005 I was admitted to an MFA program and this was the story I submitted with my application. It was the story that earned me a place in the program and that gave me my first response in an MFA workshop. I had experienced cruel feedback many times by then in various workshops and classes. I expected it. When the instructor objected to the twist at the end, I rewrote the story to reveal information early. The next editor found I’d tipped my hand too early. I moved things around again.

You get the idea.

A lot of life seems like that. You try to be polite and are accused of failing to address an issue head on. You’re more direct and someone’s feelings are hurt. Can’t you be more subtle? A little too small, too large, too fat, too thin, not beautiful enough, too clever by half. On and on. I get things wrong.

And then there are the people who stand by you and love you no matter what. You make mistakes and speak without thinking, you forget something that is important, or you insist on something that isn’t actually important at all. Or, at least I have done those things. What can I say?

My story is imperfect. My story is imperfect.

Back to work, honing my imperfect self, my imperfect story, the story of my life.

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‘Are we there yet?’

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We found this about a mile and a half north. It had survived a couple of high tides, but not the one last night. It was gone this morning.

It’s one of those phrases. “Poor kitties” is another. I should probably list more, but two will do. Today is our anniversary. Forty-fifth, unless you count our time together as a couple, which pushes it to fifty. We have a lot of lines and inside jokes that no one gets but the two of us. We were laughing about that this morning as we walked. We were out for about an hour.

Nothing last forever, certainly nothing human. But we have lasted a very long time as a couple. Fifty years is a long time in people-years. Three or more lifetimes for a dog or cat. Thirty-seven thousand high tides.

Numbers.

Human beings are devoted to numbers. it is our fundamental technology, like nest-building for some birds. Spiderwebs. I recall being told that a mother cat licks each kitten by way of counting them. Perhaps. Certainly a mother cat keeps track of her kits. But cats care nothing for mathematics.

My English students complained about doing math in my class. I thought they should understand how many words they read in a minute, what a score of 67/90 points worked out to as a grade (74%, a C). They thought they should not have to deal with such calculation unless they were at the other end of the school in a math class. Once, when I passed back an exam worth 50 points, an Honors English student started to haul out his calculator. He was taking Trigonometry that term and needed a tool to calculate his grade? I about had a fit. Double your score and that’s your percentage! How do you not know that?

I was never one of those girls who are “not good at math.” I loved math in school. I still do. I use it all the time, numbers running through my head as I bake or sew, the way they used to run through my head as a runner. (When I could not compute minutes/mile on a run I knew I needed a walking break. Thirty seconds. Maybe forty seconds of walking. I would return to a run and recompute how much time I would spend on the distance.)

Hood-to-Coast is this weekend, that Mt Hood to Seaside relay. I ran it five times, 1996-2000, first out of the second van, about 16 miles total. My pace on a very good day running the beach or even highway hills in those days was 8.5 minute miles, but usually I ran a steady nine minute mile. I never got close to that on the Hood to Coast. In 1996, the temperature on my first 6.2 mile leg was 96°F, already rated “very hard” for hills and distance. I had never run in heat before, but I maintained a steady pace. The night run was another sort of revelation. I had never run in the dark before, and it was lovely. I calculated my speed throughout my three runs. Another runner commented that my first mile and my sixth were almost exactly the same speed. Oh yes.

My last long run was from home to school on the first day of in-service in 2011. I underestimated the distance by a half mile and I forgot to wear my new shoes. By the time I was into my sixteenth mile I ran slow and would have taken a ride if Gary had not lost me along the way. My shoes were flat and I damaged my feet that morning. My minutes/mile do not bear thinking about. I would never run further than four miles again.

Numbers.

Fifty years married. During that time, my husband and I have traveled together and apart, completed five college degrees, worked in a dozen retail businesses and for five public agencies, saw through life ten dogs and five cats and a conure and a parrot, raised two sons, lived in three homes, bought seven vehicles, but I will not count the times we each lost our tempers and did incredibly stupid, bonehead things for which we have been forgiven. The love does not take to counting.

This morning we took our walk. We walked north and then south to home again, about three miles. Sometimes we walked side by side and sometimes fifty yards apart. I picked up seven shells, he gathered seven bits of beach trash. We’ve missed our walk only a couple of times this summer. A few times we walked twice. Sometimes we walked a couple of miles, and on an ambitious day we walked five. I will be 67 in a couple of months, he will be 70 in eight days.

Those numbers do not matter at all, of course. That’s just our technology—a foolish way of measuring progress.

It’s about glancing up shore to see where Gary is walking. It’s about knowing he is there. It’s about the walk. Not about how far or when we arrive. We arrived a long time ago.

Happy anniversary, sweetheart.

HIM

/ janpriddyoregon / 7 Comments

I have avoided saying his name or typing it, but it’s really getting out of hand now. I am sorry if you disagree. (Trump supporters had best avert their eyes. I am not likely to devote another post to this particular issue. It will be safe to return.)

Recent events and words are beyond offensive. They seem to me insane. And much of the medical community and even the more circumspect political analysts are speaking out. This is not my rant, but another’s. Follow the link and read the whole thing.

from James Fallows in The Atlantic, “If Trump Were an Airline Pilot”:

“But now we’ve had something we didn’t see so clearly during the campaign. These are episodes of what would be called outright lunacy, if they occurred in any other setting: An actually consequential rift with a small but important NATO ally, arising from the idea that the U.S. would “buy Greenland.” Trump’s self-description as “the Chosen One,” and his embrace of a supporter’s description of him as the “second coming of God” and “King of the Jews.” His logorrhea, drift, and fantastical claims in public rallies, and his flares of belligerence at the slightest challenge in question sessions on the White House lawn. His utter lack of affect or empathy when personally meeting the most recent shooting victims, in Dayton and El Paso. His reduction of any event, whatsoever, into what people are saying about him.

“Obviously I have no standing to say what medical pattern we are seeing, and where exactly it might lead. But just from life I know this:

  • If an airline learned that a pilot was talking publicly about being “the Chosen One” or “King of the Jews” (or Baptists or whatever), the airline would be looking carefully into whether this person should be in the cockpit.
  • If a hospital had a senior surgeon behaving as Trump now does, other doctors and nurses would be talking with administrators and lawyers before giving that surgeon the scalpel again.
  • If a public company knew that a CEO was making costly strategic decisions on personal impulse or from personal vanity or slight, and was doing so more and more frequently, the board would be starting to act. (See: Uber, management history of.)
  • If a university, museum, or other public institution had a leader who routinely insulted large parts of its constituency—racial or religious minorities, immigrants or international allies, women—the board would be starting to act.
  • If the U.S. Navy knew that one of its commanders was routinely lying about important operational details, plus flaring up under criticism, plus talking in “Chosen One” terms, the Navy would not want that person in charge of, say, a nuclear-missile submarine. (See: The Queeg saga in The Caine Mutiny, which would make ideal late-summer reading or viewing for members of the White House staff.)

“Yet now such a  person is in charge not of one nuclear-missile submarine but all of them—and the bombers and ICBMs, and diplomatic military agreements, and the countless other ramifications of executive power.

“If Donald Trump were in virtually any other position of responsibility, action would already be under way to remove him from that role. The board at a public company would have replaced him outright or arranged a discreet shift out of power. (Of course, he would never have gotten this far in a large public corporation.) The chain-of-command in the Navy or at an airline or in the hospital would at least call a time-out, and check his fitness, before putting him back on the bridge, or in the cockpit, or in the operating room. (Of course, he would never have gotten this far as a military officer, or a pilot, or a doctor.)

“There are two exceptions. One is a purely family-run business, like the firm in which Trump spent his entire previous career. And the other is the U.S. presidency, where he will remain, despite more and more-manifest Queeg-like  unfitness, as long as the GOP Senate stands with him.

“(Why the Senate? Because the two constitutional means for removing a president, impeachment and the 25th Amendment, both ultimately require two thirds support from the Senate. Under the 25th Amendment, a majority of the Cabinet can remove a president—but if the president disagrees, he can retain the office unless two thirds of both the House and Senate vote against him, an even tougher standard than with impeachment. Once again it all comes back to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.)

“Donald Trump is who we knew him to be. But now he’s worse. The GOP Senate continues to show us what it is.”

HERE WE ARE

/ janpriddyoregon / 7 Comments

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Rabbits ate my new roses. Bother [both] of them. Every leaf. But the stubborn plants refused to die. They pushed out new leaves. One of them blooms. Last year a visitor asked my husband why he’d hauled a twisty drift-root up from the beach. “What are you going to do with it?”

This.

REPRESENTATION?

/ janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments

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Yesterday there was a march and protest in Portland. Our younger son and his wife work in the theater, which means that they are nearly always downtown on Saturdays. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is on stage at the Keller. The A.P. reported: “Flag-waving members of the Proud Boys and Three Percenters militia group began gathering late in the morning, some wearing body armor and helmets.” Proud Boys are designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The white nationalist American Guard also said it would have members in Portland. Local news reported, “Steven Howard, a Vancouver resident who was the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, told KOIN 6 News he will attend the protest on Saturday.”

The tweeter-in-chief: “ ‘Major consideration is being given to naming ANTIFA an ‘ORGANIZATION OF TERROR’, the president wrote from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey on Saturday morning. ‘Portland is being watched very closely. Hopefully the Mayor will be able to properly do his job!’ ” The actual marchers—such as Proud Boys, self-described as the all-male western chauvinists—are bigots, but the president didn’t say a word against them.

Portland mayor Ted Wheeler said of Trump’s tweet: “Frankly, it’s not helpful. This is a potentially dangerous and volatile situation, and adding to that noise doesn’t do anything to support or help the efforts that are going on here in Portland.”

The president expressed concern only about those protesting the protesters, Antifa, but it is the Proud Boys who threaten to return to Portland streets every month: “Sooner or later, [Portland mayor Ted Wheeler] will run out of money and his counterparts in government will no longer take him seriously. The path forward for Mayor Wheeler is simple, free your city from the grip of Antifa, take direct and meaningful action.”

In the mean time, police seized weapons from and arrested thirteen participants. None of these people represent Portland’s community. Only four minor injuries were treated and reported by medics on the scene, but it was a tough day for police officers.

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“We receive criticism no matter what. It’s either too much, not enough, you arrested this group and not this group,” Portland Police Bureau spokeswoman Tina Jones said. “It seems like some people are keeping score, and that’s not what it’s about on the law enforcement side. One hundred percent, it’s about public safety.”

My husband and I worried about the police presence and their safety, ordinary shoppers and shop-keepers, working people, and the safety of our family. We worry because Trump has taken sides and fanned the flames of violence. Again.

We don’t think any of these extreme groups are representative of our nation.

An Op-Ed in The Washington Post reveals how a fake article by a fake “real live worker” calling himself Archie Carter, not only outwitted (biased) fact checkers to find publication but “sheds light on the way right-leaning commentators depend on the voice of an imagined white working class to legitimize and advance their own viewpoints — viewpoints that are often opposed to those of the real working class.”

Before the gunman killed 22 people, authorities believe he wrote, “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”

This polity — white working class, racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic — is just as imaginary as Archie Carter.

We are better than that. A lot better. Most all of us descend from or are immigrants in the United States. We get it. The right, especially the reactionary extreme right we are seeing in Congress and in the White House and all over certain media outlets, is wrong about who Americans are and what we believe.

Working class people overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton by a 10 point spread. “Reagan actually lost union and low-income households to Jimmy Carter.” Working people, actual middle class and working class people are not so racist, xenophobic, misogynist, and homophobic as the Right likes to believe.

Most Americans do not share these vile views. Most Americans find the Proud Boys Western Chauvinists, Patriot Prayer, KKK, and Antifa, who protested in Portland to be despicable. (We might even call them “deplorable.”) Most Americans are opposed to the hate speech we hear coming from the White House. Most Americans did not vote for him and continue to oppose him.

Yet, he still lies: “I got it approved. Veterans Choice,” Trump has claimed more than eighty times, of the program signed into law by Obama in 2014. Thousands of lies, lies every day, every time he tweets or talks. Such bizarre things come from him that it’s hard to joke about what he might do. Nothing is too outrageous. He would like to buy Greenland. Yes, really.

Political satire begins to sound reasonable. The Borowitz Report suggests that Denmark might offer to purchase the United States. Perhaps we could benefit from national health care, education, and reasonable compromise in pursuit of common goals? Heck, let’s give ourselves away. Isn’t that what we are doing already?

Denmark, come and get us!