Category Archives: Memoir

Racing to finish so many loose ends…

Tick, tock.

Kitty is guarding one corner of the bed.

People really should get a second chance at life.  What good are the lessons of destiny if you can’t apply them to fresh material?  Therein lies the allure of reincarnation.  I’d like to be on permanent vacation in my next life since this one has been so exhausting.  Not that I’d be a denizen of the leisure class—I’d work at something, I’m sure, only I’d do a job out of pleasure and not necessity.  I could probably accomplish this by ending up as a nun, only I’d prefer a nicer outfit.

112 Pieces, or so

The idea of constructing a quilt first came to me with a gift from my very important friend Michael.  He was taking an architecture course for which one of the projects was to design a permanent home for his university’s quilt collection.  Michael intuitively sent me a catalogue of the collection for my birthday, and thus provided the first real stimulus to the project currently under completion.

Although the catalogue’s illustrations of quilts emphasized the more elaborate museum pieces, a few simple block piece works gave me the idea that I might in fact have a hand at this craft.  What made me so susceptible to the charms of quilting?  The idea of working with fabric had intrigued me since the years I had lived in West Africa, where some of my happiest moments were spent going from bench to bench at the marketplace, looking at the bolts of choice lagos, the simple printed cottons of Senegal.

The actual construction of the quilt began late December as I visited my lover John at the hospital.

At this point it is absurd to begin a quilting journal, as the piecework is practically finished.  At best all I could do is write a memoir on the quilt, but then there are so many details involved that I can no longer begin at the beginning.  That, I suppose, has always been the charm of quilts, which stand on their own as silent biographies whose narrative can only be understood by the quilter.  Unless the quilter kept a journal, her project (for it was usually a woman) would be a relic of a riddle to later generations who might appreciate the curiosities of fabrics or patterns chosen without understanding the stories behind those choices.  Inversely, the quilter may be at a disadvantage for knowing too much of what there is behind the actual appearance of the work—well might the quilter envy the curiosity of the onlooker generations later, who reads mystery into a shirt scrap and some deep Freudian interpretation for an accidental pattern or color scheme.

The vantage point of an outside onlooker provides a point to begin this memoir of the quilt for the child of Debra Stretch and Mark Kitchell.  As the child has yet to come into the world, the quilter hasn’t been able to take his or her tastes into account and probably wouldn’t wait to consult the child anyway.  Interestingly enough, it is thanks to this unknown child that the quilt ever happened.  As it was to be the quilter’s first project, the occasion of a baby gave the prospective quilter an excuse to make his first quilt a smaller project.  The project thus shrank from a wedding quilt for Debra and Mark of 60” x 80” to a baby quilt of 40” x 50”.  If the parents regret having missed out on a wedding quilt, they can only blame their reproductive precocity as well as their scheduling the wedding considerably in advance of their first estimate.  Having thus missed the boat, Mark and Debra can only hope for the longevity of the quilter, who may be able to throw something together in time for their silver anniversary.  In the meantime, perhaps baby will lend them his/hers as a lap warmer as long as baby rests on top, of course.

The size then is 50 inches in length by 40 inches in width, which have been very comfortable dimensions for a first-time quilter who deserves a modest début into this craft.  It also allowed for a certain degree of mobility, since the majority of the construction has taken place during the quilter’s long vigils at the hospital bedside of his companion.  If anything good can be said about John’s stay of over three months in the hospital, the quiet moments provided to the quilter for his craft may be a slight glimmer of the positive in that very difficult medical sejour.

As the hospital has provided the quiet time, so has the quilt provided a refuge for the quilter.  Very little of anything positive can be said of the course of John’s illness.  Many good people suffer, of course, and it is never fair, but these generalities couldn’t diminish John’s pain or the despair of his bedside companion.  The quilt, with all the imperfections built into it by its neophyte creator, has been a faithful, silent companion through the nausea, tube feedings, injections, chemotherapy, surgeries and recoveries.  It has brought some color into John’s room, and some comfortable finiteness of purpose to the quilter.  When the quilter was powerless to do anything for John, at least he could make a stitch in the quilt.  Even before the baby, who has been the unknown patron of the project, has any use for the quilt, it will have already served its quilter and companion very well indeed.

The size alone thus says a great deal about the quilt’s conception and creation (neither being immaculate).  Another formative element in this quilt’s development (child psychology language—prospective parents and children alike must accustom themselves to it!) was the source for some of the fabric.  The paisley prints originate, in fact, from handkerchiefs purchased by John, the quilter’s companion, at the Oaxaca marketplace after New Year’s, 1988…

“In the Old Style” says Winnie in Happy Days: I lit a candle and meditated in the Virgin of Guadalupe chapel of the basilica—wax melts, fire evaporates.  I kneel my profane carcass before a symbol of pious devotion, reminding myself I can expect nothing, but only reaffirm my humility and gratitude for life: Gracias a la vida, for time in a labyrinth well spent, thanks.  And for all those people of faith who have that constant recourse to their despair, how I envy you!

(later)  The sigh, the rush of emotion, the incredulity over the physical presence of the book that had transcended the material world into that of the mind.  The book rests on the table; it should burst into flames, disintegrate, cede to its violence of ideas, power of language.  But it is still there, with its library code on the cover which, after the passage of time and its accompanying sobriety, will guide it back to its place on a shelf.

(10:30 PM, Morélia)  For once I can congratulate myself for la buena suerte; old infidel that I am, nuestra virgen de Guadalupe is watching over me.  After all, had I not arrived at the Pátzcuaro bus terminal by nine o’clock, I’d have had the rude surprise of having to do Pátzcuaro-Morélia-México D.F. at a much later and more aggravating hour.  Ah, the adventure of travel!  Having one’s bus stop at a filling station en route, and back-tracking to Morélia in order to get to México D.F.  Of course I’d have never thought of it, and of course no one at Flecha amarilla could have told me that when I bought my Pátzcuaro-México D.F. ticket.  The moral of the story: Always get to the station two hours ahead of time in México (and two days ahead of time in Tijuana!).

Monday, 4 July, 1994

He is in an entirely different part of the world, feeling his lesions and thinking about death.  Yesterday he looked at the joyful Mediterranean, and imagined a time when his body would not have limited him to an observer’s role in a beach chair as others dove into the salty water.  Visconti’s protagonist in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice came to mind.  And yet he was not a fictional character; he was a real human being who needed to remind himself that this trip to Israel and Egypt, however difficult it may be in underscoring his limitations, was nevertheless an affirmation of life, to see another part of the world and to gain a new understanding of it and, yes, even his own ever apparent mortality.  Perhaps yet his visit to the earthly Jerusalem would bring him closer to God’s kingdom.

[journal entry, his last summer, while traveling as a Fulbright fellow]

Very few moments in life do we feel the luxury of absolute franchise, openness, honesty.  But after all, once there is nowhere left to run, who has the time left for deception?  How nice to have reached the end of the line where one no longer has to bandy words with a person.  You and I have finally reached that point, old friend.  The compulsion to window dress with words is over.  How strange to think that at one time everything between us seemed to depend on words.  Through their construct, I hoped to win your heart; through them again, I hoped to keep it.  I wasn’t merely as good as my word—I was my word, so much I depended on it.  Now, finally, the words come so effortlessly we need no longer weigh them to measure their potential to please, wound, convince, expel, conjure, abjure, injure.  When I used to worry you with my silences, I was mired in a loss for words.  I could never see past my addiction for the verbal and simply reach out my hand toward you with a reassuring caress…

Well, you are no longer here to caress, but at least I can stop my calculations and let someone else judge the weight of my words.

[From Peter’s journal, December 1990]

Sweetheart, I was thinking

[Untitled]

Sweetheart, I was thinking this afternoon

How I might understand you, love you better

And enter a greater part of your world.

So I came up with a brilliant idea:

I need to study Chemistry!

 ~

Now I do not intend to make you work

(You already put in long enough hours)

And I would not wish myself on any

Scientist as his pupil given

My own considerable limitations

(I am scientifically illiterate and

Never even got through trigonometry).

 ~

But somewhere must exist a chemistry book

For the clueless, liberal arts refugee

Who ended up loving a master of science

And wants to see that much more of a

Glimmer of the intellectual life

Of the man he loves.

~

My love, help me discover

More of your world.

[San Francisco, August 1994]

Very few moments in life do we feel the luxury of absolute franchise, openness, honesty.  But after all, once there is nowhere left to run, who has the time left for deception?  How nice to have reached the end of the line where one no longer has to bandy words with a person.  You and I have finally reached that point, old friend.  The compulsion to window dress with words is over.  How strange to think that at one time everything between us seemed to depend on words.  Through their construct, I hoped to win your heart; through them again, I hoped to keep it.  I wasn’t merely as good as my word—I was my word, so much I depended on it.  Now, finally, the words come so effortlessly we need no longer weigh them to measure their potential to please, wound, convince, expel, conjure, abjure, injure.  When I used to worry you with my silences, I was mired in a loss for words.  I could never see past my addiction for the verbal and simply reach out my hand toward you with a reassuring caress…

Well, you are no longer here to caress, but at least I can stop my calculations and let someone else judge the weight of my words.

No I do not believe in luck but I do believe in fate.  Although fortune has rarely smiled upon me fate has spun me like a top.  And I am not sure I would prefer the former to the latter.  I suppose I’ve had dreams of a life of ease, the garden of Eden where ripe fruit would fall into my lap.  Apparently ever since one of my mythological ancestors got kicked out, however, all the rest of us have been banished as well.  Christians would have us subject hereafter to the wrath of God.  I prefer to think of it as the work of the Fates.

And yet I want to be loved for my artifice, my design, my calculations, and still hope they are a bitter distillation of who I really am.  Imagine seeking the truth through so meretricious a device as language!  Well, some of us are not slated for an enlightened existence.  For every Buddha or Saint Francis legions of us remain to confound ourselves in a dim and prosaic material world.  Mistake this not for derision.  I envy the saint, the modest monk, those lucky few who have opted for the simple beauty of a life of the spirit.  Think of Phèdre: “Que ces vains ornements, que ces voiles me pèsent!”  Had she only had the foresight to shirk her worldly passions and escape to a nunnery.  But our mortal weakness for ephemeral possession bends us like gravity to this muddled earth!

1 November 1987 [the first entry in Peter’s extant journals]

Beginning from an enormous desire to write—and then?  Thoughts escape me like so many days, and where is the journal then?

My ears are clogged up from swimming and it’s hard to think.

The ostensible reason for this journal is my current crisis—J’s diagnosis.  Was “La Plaie” a premonition?  How much more difficult it will be to live the scenario, not having any control over the denouement.  And how empty that story seems now.  And here am I on these pages now, trying to objectify the experience.  Since I wrote “I” in the short story, why not “he” here?  “He is very sad, very confused.  He sometimes looks at J when he is asleep and imagines him dead a second later.  When will that moment come, he wonders?  He is sometimes distraught in public places.  He is on edge at work.  But all in all he is holding himself together remarkably well.  But he is only going through the motions.  Going through them so well, that he doubts whether a single gesture of his is at all genuine.  I am a cliché!  His imperfect modesty sometimes reminds him that he is not alone in this mess.  But in his life he feels that he has had an immoderate share of the mess.  How many ghosts can one man support, especially on a teacher’s salary?  Well, we’ve seen repeating patterns before and we shall see yet some more.  The well-seasoned survivor always plods on and, as Samuel Beckett wrote, only grieves for himself.”

Autumn is here, and the weather is appreciably colder.  The sun hasn’t warmed the ground for a few days.

“He returns to the front line—will he tarry on the way?”