love
Purple joy
Always a reporter, never a source (except maybe once)
For about six months in 1997, this tapestry lay over the table in the breakfast room at our house as we worked with two other couples and a high school student to turn it from bits of amazing fabric to the beautiful design you see here.
It is one of the five large tapestries that hangs during the Easter season at our church, St. Philip the Apostle Catholic Church in Lewisville. Three are conceived as panels in the main display, two more flank the sanctuary, and a sixth, smaller tapestry drapes over the altar.
For Easter season alone, we had to have enough volunteers to make the six tapestries. Multiply that by the many seasons of the church calendar — the bold red tapestries for Ascension and Pentecost (Sam’s favorites) hang for just two weeks — and you get the sense of what a barn-raising that was.
Mark announced in 1996 that he wanted to convert, something apparently he had been quietly thinking about for years. In the early 1990s, we’d found a good church home in Sacramento, at St. Francis, during, of all things, the time when they were retrofitting the sanctuary for earthquakes and Mass was being held in the school gym. Mark said he hadn’t known such a spiritual home when he was growing up, which always made me a little sad. I know there were times as a child I didn’t get what church was about, but there were times that I did.
The first year after Mark died, I came to help switch out the tapestries between Lent and Easter. There was a team of volunteers who did it regularly and they welcomed me. Once they knew I was part of the team that stitched it together, I got peppered with questions, as if they were historians that had just stumbled upon the best primary source ever.
They had a burning question. Was is true, that one of the Easter tapestries had a bit of a parishioner’s wedding dress on it?
Yes, I said, pointing to the tapestry that we had made.
Now, don’t get excited, dear Internet people, it wasn’t a piece of my wedding dress. Mark and I were such hipsters back in the day, I made our get-married-barefoot-on-the-beach-in-Kona clothes of a buttery linen. This tapestry is filled with bridal fabrics, but full of shiny silks and satins and sparkly lames and organzas.
Two Dominican nuns designed the work and set up all the volunteers with the patterns and fabrics needed. They included a little extra for errors.
Our team didn’t quite cut all the fabric at once, which we maybe should have, but we were also worried about losing track of some pieces. By the time we came to the very last piece, there wasn’t quite enough of the creamy white, rich brocade the sisters intended. We nearly panicked. No matter which way we turned the piece of remaining fabric and pattern, we couldn’t make it work.
Marcy, one of the volunteers, studied it closely. “It looks like my wedding dress. I bet I have enough fabric left,” she said. We were stunned when she brought the piece the next week. It was almost a dead ringer for what the sisters had given us to use.
We decided to sew it on and tell the sisters later. They thought it was a great solution, but the story still turned into church folklore. As my friend, Donna Fielder says, now that I am too old to die young, I see that’s what people do with certain stories.
Each Easter season, I get a little misty when I see this tapestry, knowing that Mark’s signature is on the back with mine and that of our friends and knowing the year the tapestry was started was the year he was welcomed into the church.
Random thoughts from the Possum Kingdom 20K
Running 4.5 hours of a 20K equals 17 miles, plus or minus. This proves that lesson from my parents that there’s a price to pay when you don’t think for yourself and just follow the guy in front of you. (But it did make up for the marked-too-short Easter 5K in Cowtown.) The wildflowers were many and the trail was varied, if you consider alternating between sand, rock and hills varied. The air was fresh and clear. Once it was filled the sweet, tangy smell of just-made cedar chips. Another time a smokey smell wafted our way, and then we realized it was just medicinal. Some runners wore “For Boston 4-15-13” shirts. When I got home, I started a batch of kolaches. And, let me say this: compression socks. 
UPDATE: On the way home from Possum Kingdom, we saw a dad helping his kid fly a kite. It was a great day for kite-flying and I remembered this video Mark shot with the kids one day not long after we moved here. Susan said kite-flying is a dad thing.
Again, this is something Paige rescued from the nearly magnetized tapes so it isn’t the best quality, but it’s nice to hear Mark’s voice. If you can hang out til the end, both bugs and more tennis shoes make it on screen.
Lullabies are the original love songs
If you are even a wee bit Irish, or Irish in spirit, this little gem — an old lullaby from the Emerald Isle — will grab your heart.
Recorded on the old Shakey’s Pizza Parlor piano via iPhone.
Can’t get more heartfelt than that.
Smart as a 5th grader #6
3-5-99
At the middle school gym, I made 5 shots. They only give you 50 tries. But 5 shots is OK. Jamie made 25 shots, that is good. It’s pretty fun at the basketball hoop shoot.
3-22-99
This spring break I went to Colorado and there was snow. I went to my grandma’s house. I stood there from Monday to Saturday. It takes about a day to get there from my house.
3-26-99
This weekend, coming up, I will probably go places tomorrow. On Sunday, I’ll rest. I might go a lot of places, but I don’t know, but both the days, I will watch TV. I can’t go a lot of places on Sunday because Sunday is a day of rest.
3-29-99
Jake is 11 years old. I’m invited to his party. I don’t know where it will be, but it’ll be a good place to have a party. I’m gonna have fun!
4-1-99
Yesterday, I went on a field trip. I went to UNT. I described animals and did a dig. I also did fun stuff and went to the sky theater.
4-8-99
My favorite relative is Don Heinkel. I call him Grandpa because he’s my grandpa. I love him a lot. That’s why he’s my favorite relative.
Parenting is a contact sport
Some people like to claim their gray hair comes from things their kids did. I see my scars and remember.
I have a long skinny scar that runs from knuckle to knuckle on my ring finger that came while digging in the garden with Michael. He felt so badly when he saw that his little shovel missed its mark and drew blood.
I was surprised how strong he was.
I’ve got a knot on my forehead from trying to help build a fence for the cashmere goats, a 4H project that lived here for 5-6 years. I got clubbed so hard by a round of woven fence wire that was hung up on a t-pole — almost spring-loaded, like a giant mousetrap — that it should’ve killed me. But the kids were all standing there, so I told myself to take the hit and keep on ticking.
Today I went to work with an odd-looking burn on my chin, like a permanent dribble of hot chocolate. I thought for sure at least Bj would say something, but no one asked.
Last night, Sam was determined to learn how to cook fish tacos. He dropped in the first battered fish strip from such a height, the frying oil splashed. Sam got a few splashes on his arm and I took one on the chin. But by the third strip, he was dropping it in perfectly.
Like Jason Robards character said in Parenthood, parenting is “like your Aunt Edna’s ass. It goes on forever and it’s just as frightening” and is unlike football, since there’s no end zone where you get to spike the ball and do your little dance.
Except he missed the part where parenting is a contact sport.
Another lullaby
Here she is. Jan DeGaetani singing Alec Wilder’s, The Seal Lullaby.
Ray Wright’s arrangement is amazing.
In the old days, they all helped my babies go to sleep.
Christmas Eve
No other holiday has a night before the way Christmas does. There’s this quiet that comes on Christmas Eve, if you let it. The more Christmases I celebrate, the more I like Christmas Eve.
Glass bulb, 2012
I try to make a lot of the presents we give instead of buy them. It forces me to plan ahead and, as a result, elevates the entire experience a little.
The kids and I have let some of our traditions evolve, too, so no one goes crazy trying to keep something going. When the kids were little, we made a gingerbread house and took it to preschool for the Christmas party. All the kids had fun picking it apart to take a piece home. When they got older, I made a one-dimensional piece for the mantel one year. Then I just made dough so the kids could make cookies. This year, Paige asked when she got home from the U of Iowa if there was any gingerbread dough in the freezer. There wasn’t, and we didn’t make any.
But on a whim, we stopped at the Russell Stover factory store in Terrell on the way to celebrate the season with Aunt Regina in East Texas. We bought a cardboard gingerbread house filled with peanut brittle.
New to the tree in 2012
We spent some time in downtown Kilgore, ate lunch at Nanny Goat’s Cafe, came back to Regina’s house and sang Christmas carols around the piano in the parlor. We played dominoes, too. We did cast a glance toward SantaLand on the way home (2.5 million lights strung along a driving trail in the East Texas woods), but saw the rush-hour-sized car line and took a pass. It had been a nice day. We didn’t need to spoil it.
Tonight, we are waiting for Sam to come home from work. He will help close the store. I had to work today, too. All that makes it hard to switch gears and make it to a candlelight service, but it doesn’t matter. We know how to do this. The serenity is settling in.
Happy Christmas everyone.
Great Hall, Wolfe House 2012
The Telephone Book Lullaby
Sam had a hard time falling asleep when he was a toddler. Some nights we had to lay in the bed with him. It got so tiresome that when he finally nodded off, we’d just go to bed, too.
We had a few tapes of lullabies we’d play for the boys when they were little, and it helped on nights that Sam was less fitful and didn’t need a human teddy bear to fall asleep.
One of the tapes was of Jan DeGaetani singing Alec Wilder’s Night Songs and Lullabies. If I remember correctly, Ray Wright arranged them. We wore out a copy I made of a recording borrowed from the Rochester Public Library. If there is such a thing as local produce, there is of music, too. She was a great singer that taught at the Eastman School of Music, and Wright headed up the jazz department. Wilder had his own connections to the school. I knew that bootleg copy was a keeper and I was bummed the day it wouldn’t play anymore.
From time to time, I would call the people at Recycled Books and ask them if they had a recording of Jan DeGaetani singing Alec Wilder’s Night Songs and Lullabies. Never worked out. Earlier this year, I got on a tear again. Another artist recorded it, and I bought the CD. Reading the liner notes, I’m not sure they were even aware of the other recording. It’s lovely, but it’s not Rochester-local. I don’t know how to explain that.
Editions of that music book that I’ve seen for sale are collector’s items. Published in 1965, it was a music manuscript collection meant for children — it’s illustrated by Maurice Sendak (yes, the author of Where the Wild Things Are). I’ll bet in some families it’s an heirloom. This month, I borrowed it through interlibrary loan and started playing the lullabies and night songs on the piano.
Oh, the flood of memories. I swear music hits way more memory spots in your brain than smells and scents.
I asked Sam if he remembered any of them, and he didn’t. In a way, for him, that’s a good sign. When he was little, his memory was lists and lists, like a telephone book. He mapped out everything and it was always available — addresses, people’s birthdays, etc. But as he got older, his memory got less savant, you might say, and that’s ok.
Wilder’s book has about 50 little tunes in it, many of them completely original. As I played through them, I realized not all of them were on the original recording. One of the lullabies, if it had been, would have been Sam’s favorite as a kid — then he may have remembered it as an adult.
When I played it for him a few days ago, he followed along with the lyrics and laughed. This was a good lullaby for kids, he said.
I think all parents of kids (and not just parents of kids with autism), desperate enough for them to fall asleep that they might just start singing the phone book, would agree.
The Telephone Book Lullaby, by Alec Wilder
Ada Jones, Agnes Jones, Albert Jones, Alec Jones,
Alfred Jones, Alice Jones
Alma Jones, Alvin Jones, Andrew Jones, Anna Jones and
All the other Joneses.
For additional verses, Mr. Wilder suggests you see “Jones” in any telephone directory.
What color is your agitator?
When Sam was in elementary school, he often asked people what color their washing machine’s agitator was. You would be shocked — shocked, I tell you — how many people did not know the answer to this question.
Many times people were so loving and accommodating. If we were visiting, they would say, “Let’s go look,” and the whole crowd headed to the laundry room. Sam enjoyed that. If they didn’t know, and didn’t suggest to go look, he didn’t obsess over getting the answer. He had picked up enough social graces that he would simply move on. Often, at that point in the conversation, he would share the color of our washing machine’s agitator. For some reason, I was slightly embarrassed the first few times he shared that — even though I told myself that was not the same as sharing other details about the family laundry.
I was never quite sure of his motivations for gathering that information. I don’t remember when he stopped asking for it. I asked him about it a few nights ago and he remembered that it was something he was curious about. “I don’t remember when I lost interest,” he said. He doesn’t remember why, either.
Sam has been researching home automation systems lately. He thinks about accessibility. A person in a wheelchair can’t reach the controls, he says, and an automated system would let them operate appliances by remote control.
He’s so determined, even if it means teaching himself code, which he finds exacting — even for him.
He had been quiet about it for awhile, but I asked him about it again after this video showed up on the browser history when I came home from work.
(Other parents might have to worry about stumbling upon porn. I just get to see a washer with three speeds of spinning.)
I don’t mind him experimenting on our house. And I wonder about how to show off that quality to an employer. He’s a problem-solver.
The current color of my agitator, you ask?
White.