From Kittens to Quilts via Way of the Underground Railroad

Our campus was excited---maybe not the WHOLE campus, but I sure was excited about the new visitor who spent a morning with us recently. His name is Mercury and he’d been lost for four days before his picture was snapped outside the window next of our concierge's desk. He found the right window to make his plight be known. The concierge was able to hook him up with some residents who have two cats of their own who provided food for the hungry little guy. Someone else found him a blanket and box where he warmed up after he was wandering around outside in our below freezing temperatures. But he was too sweet to be a stray so eventually he got taken to a vet to see if this guy had a micro chip implanted. He did. And his ‘dad’ came to pick up soon after we called. Mercury was nine months old and had traveled over a half mile from home where the thirty-something cat daddy’s girlfriend had “accidentally” let the inside kitten outdoors. I’ve joked many times that I wish a kitten or puppy would wander onto my deck so I’d have an excuse to keep one but I never really thought it could happen. I'm going to be more careful about my wishes from now on and hope a winning lotto ticket is in the mini pile of dried-up oak leaves blowing around on my deck.

To celebrate Black History Month our Life Enrichment Director booked a black college professor to talk about the Underground Railroad, concentrating mainly on the Railroad Stations here in Michigan. I’d pretty much heard it all before because a few years back I went on a day trip tour of some of the underground stations aka houses with secret rooms that housed run-away slaves. Some of them had tunnels connecting the houses with their barns so the human cargo in false bottomed wagons could be unloaded in the barn away from prying eyes. Then they'd walk the tunnel to the house where they’d be fed, get rested up and get medical attention if needed. Still, its always good to reminded of our collective history and I was happy there was standing room only for the lecture which isn’t often the case here in my Continuum Care Facility.

When it came time for the Q and A I asked if he could talk about the Quilts. If you don’t know about quilts in connection with the underground railroad you haven’t read the 1999 book by Jaqueline Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard titled Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. This beautifully illustrated book claimed there were codes in the quilt designs that pointed the way to safe houses along the Underground Railroad. The professor said, “I was hoping someone would bring up the quilts. That’s been debunked as a myth." “That’s too bad,” I replied, “It’s a lovely myth.”

Having mostly believed in ‘the myth’ for over twenty years I did  some research after getting back to my apartment and I found a recent interview of Marsha Mac Dowell, the director of the Quilt Index which is a massive online catalog of more than 90,000 quilts who refreshed my memory of the controversy about the quilts but the book authors to this day stick by their claims. Mac Dowell says before 1999 no one---not even in the African American quilting communities---had ever heard of coding in quilts. She says this comes up every Black History Month because in 1999 all the book reviewers at places like The New York Times, The National Geographic's, The Smithsonian and NPR accepted the content of the book as true without questioning its validity. It took on a life of its own, she says, that today has African American women making coded quilts for their daughters and granddaughters.

The information in the above paragraph was found in an article in Folklife Magazine and it ends with the author, Marie Claire Bryant, saying: “Whether or not the codes are ‘real,’ Tobin and Dobard are responsible for a twenty-year tradition of craftsmanship that has cropped out of a confidence in what they wrote, in the codes. Now the lineage of artisans using quilt codes is robust. For them, the codes are poetry, healing, and, especially, a means of expressing history.” 

I like how she kept the door open to the power and possibility that the myth has a grain of truth to it. And whose to say that at least one conductor on the Underground Railroad didn’t have a few stops that used coded quilts the way hobos riding the rails during The Depression used piles of rocks and sticks along side the tracks to point to houses where they could get a sandwich. There were many Underground Railroad branches operating secretly and independently from one another fanning out across upper northeastern part of the United States. It’s not like there would have been period handbills to be left behind as proof that quilts were used to point the way to Canada. Anyway, it’s fun to learn new things but not so much fun to have to unlearn them.

Until Next Wednesday. © 

 ** I wrote about my day trip to visit some stops on the Underground Railroad and the quilts in a post tiled Day Trip to Secrets and Accomplishments. If you're interested in the topic that post is more detailed than this one.

Two Little Words and a Cranky Widow

I was picking up lunch at Wendy’s in between Zumba Class and getting my new hubcap---that really isn’t a hubcap---installed on my car when I got annoyed at myself for thanking the guy at the first drive-up window for giving me my change. Am I the only one who still remembers when service people thanked you for your business? I hate it when I feel compelled to “close the deal” with the obligatory 'thank you' when people at takeout windows fail to say it. That's the way I was taught to do it in my teens when I was on the other side of the retail counter but kids, today, seem to be trained to believe customers should thank them for taking time away from their flirting with co-workers to wait on us. At the second Wendy’s window, as a girl handed me a junior bacon cheeseburger she said, "Have a nice day!” Oh...why didn't I think of that? I’m on the way to a funeral but I’ll try to have a nice day. My house is going into foreclosure but I’ll try to have a nice day. A friend is getting his leg amputated today but I’ll try to have a fricking nice day! Okay, I’m going to pretend I didn’t write this paragraph because I’m starting to sound like a crotchety old woman who beats puppies with her cane, begins every other sentence with “in MY day," and stir-fries kittens for dinner.

I didn’t go to a funeral that day and my mortgage was paid off two years ago but the son-in-law of my best friend was getting his leg amputated while I was at Wendy's. The patient, a young guy with twin toddlers and a daughter a few years older, has been cancer free for four years but the surgery to replace his thigh bone with a cadaver bone never healed. His only hope for a normal life, not dictated by pain management was to amputate. As sad as his plight has been, it’s also been a joy to see my friend’s amazing and supportive core family, extended family and church family all pulling together to support his daughter and son-in-law through it all. There are, of course, other families around like his but we don’t always appreciate their specialness or say out loud, “Thank you! Thank you for living your faith and values even when times are hard. Thank you for passing those values on to everyone in your sphere of influence. Thank you for being the best of the best role models." My husband and I always thought of our friend as the son we wished we’d had and it’s been a long time since I’ve told him that. Note to self: Do it soon! I’m not getting any younger. 

I don’t know, maybe hearing a string of insincere thank-yous at takeout windows dilutes their meaning when it comes to expressing heart-felt feelings so deep they make you teary-eyed just thinking about them....but I doubt it. How else do we express appreciation for everything from a stranger picking up something you dropped to a friend being the awesome person that he is? An online dictionary says ‘thank you’ is used “for telling someone that you are grateful for something said or done” but shouldn’t there be degrees of ‘thank you’---little thank-yous for takeout windows and huge THANK-YOUS when someone makes a real difference in their world?  Ya, I know, that's what adjectives are for, Jean! I can say, "A supercalifragilisticexpialidocious thank you, T.C.!"  Oops, I don’t think I used that word correctly but I have a strict rule that I only look up one word per blog entry so hit me with your best admonishment if supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is not a proper adjective.

The Dalia Lama is fond of saying, “The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.” I believe that. I believe we need to acknowledge goodness when we see it. I believe goodness is all around us, even in our darkest hours. And I believe few of us say the big thank yous as often as we should. They're such little words but if you believe the Dalia Lama they help the seeds of humanity grow. They make us feel appreciated, that's for sure, and they're probably needed more in the world today than ever before. So here I am writing this sugar shower to the son I wish I had to thank him for the things mentioned above and for having such a goofy sense of humor that he lights up every room he enters and for being the one and only person who would unabashedly cry with me after Don died.

Thank you to everyone still reading this essay. You may be interested in knowing I've made a promise not rag on myself the next time I say "thank you" at a takeout window. I'll just practice saying it small, no adjective needed. You may also be interested in knowing I have no funny or wise words to end this 'Sunday Sermon' but I do want to assure cats lovers that I could never, ever get hungry enough to stir-fry kittens. ©