Connecting Threads

The picture is of 1600 yards of hand-dyed Tencel embroidery thread, work that has occupied me for the past couple of days. Absolutely shimmery! Now, to other work.

The radio is filled today with talk of war and peace, of dead soldiers and remembrance, it being Memorial Day and all that. Memorial Day belongs first of all to the Civil War, a war in which the state of Washington definitely did not participate as a state. It was organized as a territory in the 1850’s, but was not admitted to the United States until 1889. I think, because that is typical of most of the western states, the Civil War has very little purchase here. I know that in the South, for many people, it’s not forgotten because it’s not over. But for many of us out here, it never exactly even started, at least once they and we got here.

My maternal great-grandfather left his Illinois home as a 14-year-old in 1862 and joined the Union Army. He ended up with little glory, I suspect, in Andersonville Prison which, obviously, he managed to survive, a testament to the strength of youth. After the war, he moved west, to Utah, where he found a happier career as a copper miner and, eventually as the mayor of Park City, Utah. My great- grandmother’s Virginia-born father fought for the South and at the end of the war, he and his family moved to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, where he worked as a freighter. One of the grandchildren of this Southern soldier and this Northern soldier was my mother, and I guess the Civil War ended for them there, if it hadn’t actually ended a lot sooner by their decision to move West.

The West is where you went to get away from the problems of the East and the problems of farming in the Mid-West. The West is where you went to get away, period. So here we all are, out here, away, but with no further West to go to now, and back in the middle of some new Civil War, although we might perhaps better think of it as the Uncivil War. The Internet permits and even encourages a lot of incivility. It’s better than guns, though. Nevertheless, it’s hard to be generous in a period in which the coin of the realm seems to be who is patriotic enough, who stands in the right position for the national anthem, whose hands are where for the Pledge of Allegiance with its deist demand, whose lapel sports which pin. In a time when we cannot seem to find little discussion of or even a modicum of agreement about what constitutes the national interest, it’s hard to think well of the country, or at least of the country’s people. Nobody argues that earmarks, or farm subsidies for wealthy farmers who aren’t farming anymore are in the national interest, at least.

Oh, well, better to think today of all the war dead in all those endless wars, and of the thousands (some 300+ thousand already) of injured military men and women in our current wars. Sorry for their (and our) troubles, as my Irish-born great-grandfather’s family (the parents of the Andersonville survivor) would have said, and sorry for a lot else besides.

The Queens, the War Dead, the Summer

Today is Victoria Day here in rainy British Columbia. For many years, I thought Victoria Day was the day that the folks hereabouts celebrated the capital of the province, Victoria—over there on Vancouver Island--and, symbolically, the province itself. But not so: B.C. day is some other time, and today is the birthday celebration of Canada’s first monarch, Queen Victoria, born on May 24, 1819. So we’re just a decade away from her 200th birthday which, given that this is one of only two days that Canadians may legally set off fireworks, should be very bright and colorful and all that, unless it rains, of course.

You don’t hear much about Queen Victoria from the Canadians who are celebrating her birthday today by not going to school or work. (In Quebec, you don’t hear about Victoria Day at all as they understandably choose not to celebrate British Monarchs in French Canada.) As I have previously mentioned, nor do you hear all that much about Queen Elizabeth, despite the fact that she is running a very strong race, likely to beat out Vicky as the longest running monarch in the Commonwealth, the U.K., and Canada. Elizabeth is also being honored on Victoria Day, but it’s hard to see exactly how: I mean if it were about both of them, wouldn’t they call it Queens’ Day? But then, it’s not really about either of them, it is just named Victoria Day. Holidays are like that, I suppose. At one point, a lot of people think something is really a big deal and ought to have a holiday of its own in order to mark the level of importance. But time passes, and the big dealness dwindles and we are now at another point where it’s just a day you don’t have to go to work or school.

In the U.S., Columbus was once a big deal; now he’s just a holiday that some states sponsor and some don’t, largely a function of whether the state had, at the one time, enough of an Italian population to demand holiday status for him. When I was a small child, Decoration Day was still barely enough of a day that I knew you went to the cemetery and tidied up the graves; only later did I discover that the big deal part was the Civil War and the honoring of those dead (the U.S. South, like the Quebecois, weren't so much into honoring the other side, of course); and later yet, it became Memorial Day, a day for honoring all the war dead on our side or, in the case of the Civil War, on both sides. It then became that memorable Monday when you didn’t have to go to school or work and you could listen to the Indianapolis 500 on the radio, which I also used to do as a child. Well, somebody in my house listened to it, because I can remember the endless sound of motors whizzing around a track somewhere filling our very small house. What a remarkable thought: listening to a car race, but then how much different from listening to a horse race or a baseball game, I suppose: a visual experience transformed into an auditory experience. But now we have TV so you can, I suppose, watch those little cars whizzing around the track as well as listen to them. From the war dead to a car race; from the Queens to fireworks.

Maybe they could name those little racecars after the Queens or, better yet, after the war dead, all of them. That might dampen the celebratory nature of the day, I guess. And it would make for way too many racecars, I fear. Better yet, forget the war dead—as we already have for the most part--and just rename it Almost Summer Day, a name whose meaning everybody is likely to remember for a long, long time. It’s coming up, Almost Summer Day: be ready.