The Possibility of Love After War

Everyone Brave is Forgiven, set in London, begins the day war is declared. Nineteen-year-old Mary, wealthy and beautiful, rushes to volunteer. She is assigned to teach, and meets Tom, who falls for Mary. Tom's friend and flatmate Alastair's work evacuating art to safety had ended and he enlists.

The characters endure the Blitz, starvation, maiming, near drownings, and all the horrors of war. I pondered how a writer could put these lovely young men and women, beautiful and witty and charming, through such travails without his heart breaking.

Of course the author's heart broke. Chris Cleave was writing a novel inspired by his own grandparents experiences during WWII. Not that they oft told the stories. Sitting in a movie theater when it is hit by a German bomb and watching your fiance' die is not the kind of memory one willingly returns to.

Cleave visited Malta where his grandfather spent three grueling years slowly starving and watching German attacks kill one friend after another. Cleave was overwhelmed by the sadness of the war. And that emotion carried through in this novel.

There is no nostalgia casting a pretty haze over London during the years of 1939 through 1942. The British are not elevated to an idealized civilization. The pretentiousness of the rich and racism are portrayed. The country folk won't take in evacuated children who are less than perfect. The bureaucracy evacuates the zoo animals before the school children.

We do see the bravery of those at home and in harm's way.

You can read a synopsis of the plot anywhere online. I really don't want to go there. But perhaps if you understand how emotionally this novel has affected me you will understand why you should read it. Scenes haunt me, the beauty of how Cleaves uses words to convey experience is amazing. The story line and characters will catch your attention, you won't want to put the book down. But it is the way Cleave writes scenes that make them memorable.

I will tell you one incident from the book.

At the beginning of the book Tom makes a jar of jam and when his flatmate and friend Alastair enlists Tom gives him the jam. Alastair hoards it hoping to share it with Tom when the war is over. Even when starving on besieged Malta Alastair keeps that jam, a symbol of what life had been and will, hopefully, be again, a concoction of summer and joy and friendship and beauty and all the things that war has removed from life. Alastair's CO Simonson is concerned about Alastair's physical and psychological wounds and sneaks him off Malta.  Alastair give the jam to Simonson.

Malta has been besieged for years. The men are starving in a barren, dry land with scant, foul water. They have no ammunition. Simonson wishes the Germans would just make an end of it all. He stares at the paperwork on his desk when his eyes are drawn to the jam, a deep ruby color in the moonlight. Simonson was to keep the jam to share with Alastair at war's end. If only he could just smell the jam; he opens the jar but could smell nothing. Have his senses become dulled by the dust?He dips the nub of his pen in and tries the jam. He is transported. Suddenly the dry and dessicated island is filled with sweet water and green growing plants, stamens shaking with laughter, finches landed on the stems, and Simonson sees his lover's eyes. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever tasted.

We understand everything. We understand that war takes away our memory of the simple joys life can offer. We understand that the war wounded must find their way through the dark waters that have sucked them under and nearly downed them, find the way back to life and love. Everyone forgiven must also be brave, Mary thinks at the end.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair an unbiased review.

Everyone Brave is Forgiven
Chris Cleave
Simon & Schuster
Publication May 2016
$26.00 hard cover
ISBN: 9781501124372

For Will

I woke up and saw William Shakespeare died on this day--April 23, 1616. A quilt image came to me and I was suddenly inspired...ran out to buy fabric...got started. Here's day one's work...

Joe the Quilter, Returned to Michigan

Joe Cunningham with his quilt honoring his ancestral line

CAMEO quilt guild hosted Joe Cunningham this week. Joe is a 'local boy' from Swartz Creek, MI. He admits to a life long love of books, writing, art, and music.

Joe Cunningham's spoof on state bird quilts

He had a ten year music career when he met Gwen Marston. She was documenting the quilts of quilt historian and quilter Mary Schafer of Flushing, MI. Joe offered to assist Gwen by contributing  the quilt catalog copy. To educate himself Joe read extensively about quilts and even learned how to make quilts. He went professional, writing books and creating quilts with Gwen.

Memories of Italy and Flint MI inspired this quilt by Joe Cunningham

Joe Cunningham's take on Michigan Winters

Honoring the standards set by traditional quilt maker Mary Schafer became limiting to Joe's creativity and he allowed himself to leap off the path into a new style. His quilts often have a sense of humor. Some are abstract, others are naturalistic but using flat planes of color in the images. Joe often uses large pieces of fabric, or cuts a patterned fabric and repieces it. He has mastered computer quilting.

Joe Cunningham used photos of tar road repair for the embroidered designs

Joe's presentation was a blend of songs, the story of his artistic development, and a trunk show.

Rock the Block, Joe Cunningham's workshop quilt

Everyone had a wonderful time. Joe is personable and down-to-earth, funny, and a natural entertainer. We even learned some new tricks, like how to fold quilts to prevent creasing and a new way of finishing quilt edges.

Joe Cunningham

Joe has authored 11 books, including Men and the Art of Quiltmaking.

Read about Joe the Quilter at
http://www.flintexpats.com/2009/09/joe-quilter.html
See Joe's quilts at
http://www.joethequilter.com/gallery.html

Joe's brother Jeff attended a quilt display I helped create in Pentwater, MI. He was involved with the Coopersville Farm Museum show, Quilts and Their Stories. Jeff was excited to see Ann Sole's Gee Bend quilt.

Jeff and Ann looking at the Pentwater quilts

Southwest China Quilts at Michigan State University

Phoenix appliqué detail. Some of the fabrics were twill, others looked like handkerchiefs

My weekly quilt group went on a field trip to the Michigan State Museum in East Lansing to see Quilts of Southwest China on the last day of the exhibit.

In southwest China traditional bed coverings are made of small pieces of appliquéd fabric. MSU and the Yunnan Nationalities Museum in Kuning documented this folk tradition. 

 The traditional motifs include fish, scorpion, birds, crabs and other animals.

Fish appliqué detail

Piece work in a potholder style construction, individually constructed blocks sewn together

 

Several quilts included appliqué outlined in embroidery.

A traditional Chinese bed with bed coverings

Paper pattern templates on the right

 

Some of the bed coverings had large additional borders to hang over the side of modern beds. The flanges are limp as these bed coverings had no batting. The appliqué made the centers stiffer.

The exhibit will travel nationally after its debut at the MSU Museum.  Hear curator Dr. Marsha McDowell talk about the exhibit:
http://wkar.org/post/msu-s-china-experience-also-covers-art-quilts#stream/0

67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence

On May 4, 1970 the Ohio National Guard and student protesters engaged in a conflict that resulted in four students dead and nine wounded. It was the culmination of days of increased emotional conflict that began when President Nixon announced that American troops were going into Cambodia to cut off supplies to the Viet Cong. He thought it would help end the war. Students at Kent State University did not see it that way.

Fueled by 3.2 beer, the fine spring weather, high emotions, and a culture of idealism, students began protesting. They burned down the campus ROTC building. The Ohio governor called in the National Guard and the campus was put under a military take-over. Students protested the military presence, attacking the Guard with curses, throwing stones and bricks and bags of human feces and urine. And at some point the Guard felt vulnerable, and either were instructed or emotionally reacted with use of force. And 67 shots from military grade rifles splattered the crowds--the innocent and the threatening, and those walking to class and the merely curious.

In May of 1970 I was a senior in high school and the heady last weeks of school activities and parties betrayed my inner life, my deep sense of loneliness, self doubt, and a longing for connection. My diary pages are filled with everyone I talked to, joked with, every event I attended, poetry, dreams, mentions of books I read. But the greater world is not present.

I was aware of the cultural and political climate, but I resented the confusing conflicts of the world; I was a girl still trying to figure myself out. The body counts, protests, generational war, violence, hate, distrust, drugs--these were scary. While the events of May 4, 1970 at Kent State University occurred I was avoiding television news and hoping someone, any one, would ask me to the senior prom. It was as big a problem as I could handle. I was seventeen years old.

I have never had any illusions about the 1960s being the 'best of times' to grow up. For years I avoided thinking about those days. Starting with the Cuban Missile Crisis to The Ballad of the Green Berets, the War on Poverty to Hell No, We Won't Go, and sit-ins and Hippies and Earth Day-- it seemed I grew up in one long arc of culture and political wars. There were the assassinations and the brutal response to Civil Rights workers. We went from the bubble gum silliness of I Want To Hold Your Hand to Hey! Look! What's that Sound! and the drop out idealism of The Age of Aquarius. On May 6 anti-war protesters at Memorial Park in my home town of Royal Oak, MI marched to the local draft board; it turned into a melee. In August the park was the scene of riots between thousands of youth and the police. The national discord had come to my hometown.

I requested 67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence by Howard Means because, nearly fifty years later, it was past time I dealt with those days and understood what had happened. It was a painful trip, like witnessing a horrible accident you can't look away from.

Howard Means' book is thorough and detailed, including newly available oral histories. He recreates the events that escalated fear and high emotions, politicizing students who reacted in visceral hate against the overwhelming military presence on the campus: 1,317 Guardsmen with bayonets on their powerful M1 rifles, hundreds of trucks including armored personnel carriers, mortar launchers, and helicopters. Rumors spread fear. Town residents boarded up businesses and family men kept armed watch over their homes.

Human beings, young men and women in their late teens and early twenties, lost their identity and became bums, pigs, commies, traitors, hoodlums, hippies. The students were no longer 'our children', they were the enemy. Rational thought was lost. Compassion was dead. The opposing forces were just a bunch of kids, really, scared armed boys and angry kids yet to understand the deadly earnestness of this escalating local war.

After the shootings the students could have easily been sucked into the moment, charging the Guardsmen, resulting in more deaths. Thankfully, four men stepped in. A highway patrolman, Major Don Manley, convinced General Canterbury of the National Guards to give students time to disperse before further action. Graduate student Steven Sharoff meet with Gen. Canterbury and was told to move the students off. Sharoff told the students to sit down and popular geology professor Glenn Frank, an ex-Marine with a flat-top haircut, addressed the students with anguished voice and in tears, pleading for them to disperse before there was a slaughter. He convinced them, saving lives. The Guard who had surrounded the students made exits and the students slowly left.

The aftershock rocked the country. Protests and student strikes rocked the country. People tried to understand what had happened and how it had happened, who was to blame. The President for taking the war into Cambodia? The Ohio governor for sending in the National Guard? The Kent State leadership for it's 'appeasement' when the students burned down the ROTC? The protesting students who threatened and cajoled the Guardsmen? The Guard for ordering fire? Guardsmen who were scared and reacted viscerally in self-protection?

Here's the kicker. There is no resolution. No PI, detective, policeman, rounds up the usual suspects, details the series of events, and IDs the murderer. No court case judge found a guilty party. We do not know exactly how the National Guards came to shoot at the protesters.

The great divisions in America have changed but survive. The dehumanization of people who do not fit our world view or philosophy is rampant. I see comments on social media from individuals who have no compunction in announcing they hate so-and-so. When will we learn to talk and listen? To seek common ground? To build bridges and not walls?

Means ends the book with a quote stating that without forgiveness there is no healing and "the murder goes on forever." That does not mean to forget what had happened; the deaths of the four students must serve as a reminder and lesson.

I received a free ARC through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

"Using the university's recently available oral history collection, Howard means delivers a book that tracks events still shrouded in misunderstanding, positions them in the context of a tumultuous era in American History, and shows how the shootings reverberate still in our national life."

67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence
Howard Means
DeCapo Press
Publication Date: April 12, 2016
$25.99 hard cover
ISBN 9780306823794

Ta-Da! Some Finished Quilt Tops

Sometimes it seems I never finish anything I start. I need fabric or batting or time. I need to tear out or remake. I despair and walk away. So I am very satisfied to have actually finished a quilt top.

The Fox Kit quilt from Sew Fresh Quilts is done. This is more complicated to assemble than I usually attempt. Thankfully, Lorna's instructions are amazing with step by step colored illustrations.

Next up is my process on the Vintage Baseball quilt from Northwater Quilts.

I have already altered the original pattern with the use of the Tigers fabric. I want to turn this into a lap quilt. Instead of adding pennants in the corners I will add them in an additional border, one for each pennant year.

I am also planning on --gasp-- not hand quilting these quilts. I will have them machine quilted. I have hand quilted 95% of my quilts since 1991. I machine quilted smaller artsy pieces. 

I am getting into the 21st c. of quiltmaking.

I have a few corners to clean up with additional appliqué, but am thrilled to have finessed the last border on Love Entwined!

I still can't face the next border, so will set it aside for a bit. This quilt will be hand quilted, when I decide it is finished.

No Easy Answers: Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

Hurricane Katrina reminded us that disaster preparedness is fundamental and imperative, especially for New Orleans.

New Orleans for-profit Memorial Hospital owners were unwilling to invest money in moving generators from the basement. They neglected to arrange for emergency transportation of patients. Staff lacked sufficient training.  When levees broke after Katrina, flooding the hospital, the result was five days of dysfunction, chaos, and horrific decisions made by ad hoc leadership.

And deaths. Lots of deaths. 45 patients died in those five days.

When I joined Blogging for Books I was given choices of books to request. I decided on Five Days at Memorial based on the numerous awards and commendations Sheri Fink's book has earned.

Fink's story The Deadly Choices at Memorial appeared in the New York Times Magazine and won a 2010 Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award. Her six years of research culminated in a 500+ page book that cogently presents a complex and unsettling account of medical professionals under unusual stress and raises ethical questions.

Fink reconstructs the events during the disaster in narrative with vividly drawn portraits of patients and health professionals. The conditions inside the hospital were hellish. Generators were flooded and power was lost. Ventilators stopped and so did air conditioning. The heat was stifling. Communication to the outside was lost and unreliable information was being passed. Toilets were overflowing. Patients were moved into the lobby. Patient families were evacuated first. As conditions worsened, and staff suffered from lack of sleep and shock, things spun out of control.

Triage ordained those in good health evacuated first, then those who needed some assistance, and those most ill were to be last. Evacuation of patients involved carrying them carried down unlit stairs, pushing them through a whole in a wall into a parking lot, then carrying them up open metal steps to the helipad. Helicopters arrived sporadicly. Waiting patients died.

Respected surgeon Dr. Anna Pou had assumed leadership. When the staff was told to evacuate a decision had to be reached about what to do with the remaining patients--the most seriously ill, many with DNR orders. Dr. Pou and several others injected these patients with a potent mix; they all died. No patients were left behind when the last nurse and doctor left.

When it became apparent that these patients had not died a 'natural' death Pou and two nurses were arrested. The public was outraged: the nurses and doctors of Memorial were seen as heroic and no one wanted to see them charged with manslaughter. The jury acquitted them.

Patients who were airlifted out ended up languishing in open air while waiting for ambulances to reach them. Doctors watched them die. Had Dr. Pou's decision saved the patients from a painful death? Is euthanasia, or putting patients to 'sleep' ever an ethical choice? At least one patient was injected because he was too obese to move although mentally alert and viable. Do conditions of war or disaster alter moral prerogatives. and should we condemn people in untenable circumstances for not behaving as if conditions were normal?

There are some things we do not want to think about. They are the most important things we need to address. Fink's book is a warning and offers a vehicle for conversation about complex and frightening situations.

I received a free book through Blogging for Books in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Five Days at Memorial
Sheri Fink
Broadway Books
$17.00 paperback
ISBN: 978-0-307-71897-6