Tag Archives: Django

QUILTING MEMORIES AND MEMORY QUILTS

POSTED: APRIL 1, 2025

Regular readers of my little posts may recall that last August I did a post on Tulip, the Dutch Sheep Dog who was part of Janice and Jims family and who passed last summer.

Tuli had been a wonderful part of the family and at one point in the grieving process last August their daughter Jade came up with the idea of making quilts from Tuli’s scarves. To some this may sound like an ill-conceived plan, but not in this circumstance. You see as a very long-haired dog, grooming (brushing out that long hair) is necessary every week, so fifteen years ago when they decided to get another long haired type, Janice and Jim contracted with a local groomer to bring her in every week. Most weeks would just be a brush out and every two or three weeks would be the more complete “spa day”. LOL.

The groomer they chose had a policy that any dog in for grooming regardless of the type of service, would go home with a little scarf around their neck. A nice treat for a pup who occasionally goes to the groomer. But in Tulips case, even with them going south for a few months in the winter, where that Key West groomer did not put scarves on the dogs, fourteen years of weekly scarves creates a lot of fabric. And of course, its not just fabric, they were scarves that Tuli would wear and that family members would have memories of her.

But lots of fabric scarves don’t make a quilt without some effort. That pursuit is one that Janice, who studied fashion design, had her own fashion label and continues to have textile art as part of her art practice, has down. She had made many quilts in the past and vintage quilt patterns are ones that have been part of her inspiration for her painted pieces. She does abstractions of quilt patterns with acrylic paint on Baltic birch panels or vintage ironing boards.

So they set off to learn to make quilts with their mom. They both had a background in art and design but neither of them had ever used a sewing machine or learned any textile art techniques. From August to December 2024 they worked away on their quilts every Sunday with their mom while Jim would work on dinner and get them coffee and help out where needed. The process had much in common with an Irish Wake. As they would work on their quilts the stories of Tuli’s life would spill out, some with laughter, some with tears.

By late December when Janice and Jim packed up to go to Key West the quilt tops (the detailed part) of each of their quilts were finished and all that remained was for them to start up on the project in the spring when their parents would make it back to Toronto.

But parallel with this exercise Janice was doing one of her own. It started much later than Jade and Jason as in the early weeks she was teaching them techniques, but by the middle of autumn Janice was at it full time, hoping to finish in time to enter an art show in Key West.

That art show she has been in before, called From A Woman’s Hand. It is held at the Custom House Museum, a fine old brick structure that is home today to a lot of key west historical art and memorabilia including a significant collection of Mario Sanchez Intaglio wood carvings. I will do a piece on that at some point.

So the quilt was finished and lovingly packed up for the trip south and shortly after arriving she learned the judges had liked it and it would be in the show, running from Mid January into April. Here are some images from the show.

Custom House Museum, Key West

Django.

IMAGES FROM THE END OF THE ROAD

POSTED: March 1, 2023

In last months post I referenced the notion of some places being seemingly on the edge of the world, or at least at the extreme edge of a continent and the sense that the idea of isolation creates in people. At various times I have also chattered on about Key West. That stems largely from my buddy Jim and his partner Janice hiding out there each winter. Well today I am going to share some images of that place.

But first, a little background. I have been receiving an image or two a day from my buddy Jim. He has been walking around that little island (its about two miles by four miles in size) for about an hour every day since the beginning of January. While the island is beautiful and visually stimulating his walking is not just because he likes the scenery. Back in September of last year he had a similar diagnosis to the one I received recently for hypertension. So over the months last fall he really worked on his diet, and dialing back the wine. His blood pressure numbers improved but when he came back to Key West at the end of December, he decided to walk for about an hour a day. That really made the blood pressure numbers come into line.

Now just to go off on a bit of tangent here, the little piece I did on January 1^st MY DOCTOR DOES NOT KNOW JACK generated the most number of emails of any post I have written. Apparently both hypertension and the other issue referenced in that post are pretty common and the piece really struck a chord with people. By the way, while I don’t have a comments section on the website I am always pleased to get emails from readers. djangobisous@bell.net

So when he walks he takes his phone and then sends me a couple shots each day. The images below are not intended to be an intro to Key West or a comprehensive travelogue but just some random images that caught his eye.

I will put in a bit of commentary to try to add some context for those who have not been.

The foliage is full on. This place is exactly halfway between Toronto and the equator and has much more in common with the tropics than most of Florida. The issue is not as much what to plant but what to hack back as everything grows, and grows quickly. I saw an image of a small palm tree pup that was in Jim and Janice’s yard when they bought their place, and within a few years it was over three meters (forty feet) high!

Key West is also closer to Cuba than to Miami and before the embargo was created by the U.S. to try to destroy the Cuban economy the flow of goods and people between Havana and Key West was extensive. The image below is the White Street Pier that Flagler built after completing his railroad from Miami to Key West. That railway linked various keys or islands with causeways and bridges. The longest of those bridges is seven miles! The pier shown below was his start to the railway bridge he intended to build to Cuba so is a comment on both the ingenuity of Flagler but the hubris as well. Mother nature took out his railway from Miami to Key West with one significant hurricane.

That intertwined heritage of Americans and Cubans is quite common in many old Key West families. The success of wrecking (taking the cargo of ships wrecked on the shallow unmarked waters at the time) sponging, shrimping and cigar making has been replaced by tourism but in each phase many of the successful entrepreneurs have been from both cultures. All kinds of sponges thrive in these waters but are now protected. The water is clear enough that the shot below was just taken from above the water line in about two meters of water.

Today, because of American foreign policy Cuba of course is being starved and boats arrive each week carrying a few who have put together a very rough vessel (chug) to make the 90 mile crossing. They arrive on the various beaches in the night if not intercepted by the coast guard before making it to shore. Each week Jim sends me pictures of new chugs that have made it to the beach.

Antique cars abound. No salt on the roads, and limited mileage (where are you going to go on an island that’s two miles by four miles in size) makes for a great environment for cars to just keep going whether pampered like collector cars or just used as regular vehicles for driving every day.

And as so small a place and with the highest point on the island being less than three meters bicycles and scooters are much more common than cars.

This island has always been a location for writers, poets, musicians and dreamers and the houses reflect that, with various expressions of creativity. The first image below is a house made of stone and coral, while the second one is more typical. Most of the houses were built in the late 1800’s when Key West was one of the largest communities in Florida. Many of the smaller houses were actually barged over from the Bahamas.

Feral chickens and roosters are everywhere. It is illegal to kill them so they just run around the streets and yards and reproduce and poop and the roosters wake people up in the morning and often throughout the day. While locals hardly notice them if you stop and spend any time observing they really are quite beautiful creatures.

Various times of the year bring out the decorations – some traditional, like Christmas, but much more significant is Halloween, the Day of the Dead, Carnival. And once a nice decoration is up, well you might as well just leave it up as that celebration is sure to come up the following year!

Now by my calculations, while I am guilty of not putting pictures in many of my posts I am hoping this post redeems me.

Django

P.S. As always, no problem using images you have seen here but please acknowledge the source.

ONE ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE

Posted: April 1, 2021

A few weeks ago, I had nice email from my buddy Jim. He had included some pictures of his recent walks with Tuli their Shapendoes (Dutch sheepdog) in their local park. Toronto is the fifth largest city in North America but functions residentially as a collection of neighborhoods. Each one has its own little collection of retail storefront streets, and most feature a park as an important part of the community.

Where he and Janice live is close to the beach along lake Ontario so that beach and the two kilometers of boardwalk are the main park area but even with that they have another little park with some play areas, a bandshell and a couple of ponds. Those ponds are the home of ducks, turtles, frogs and birds in the warmer seasons and sit largely just as inactive frozen ice cubes in the winter. Not this winter.

Jim’s picture was of kids on the pond – skating, playing hockey, etc. The part that impressed him the most was that in these times with the conventional indoor ice facilities closed and most of the outdoor rinks closed as well, and no organized hockey or figure skating going on, this little pond had become a place for kids of all ages to just go, lace up and cut loose from their isolation inside with their parents. Young kids playing with older ones or adults in pick-up games of hockey. The scene of older kids teaching younger ones to skate and everyone just enjoying an unorganized bit of athletic fun could be an image from a small rural village in the 1930’s from any northern community around the world.

Yes, it’s true there are not a lot of masks to be seen but for being outdoors, with a bit of distance and for all the mental health advantages, it really does seem like a good solution.

The aspect of the older kids working with the younger ones really struck a chord with me. I am an only child so my experience with siblings is artificial -the odd older neighbour kid, or younger family friend experience is really not the same as a sibling. But recently I have been going to one of our local parks that’s adjacent to the marina where I live and bumping into a family from the marina I know a bit. They are from Norway and were away for a sailing trip in the Mediterranean when this Covid nonsense hit a year ago. The decision was made to hunker down and stay in Malta until the summer (last summer) when Covid would be over, and to teach the three kids their schoolwork on the boat, and then sail back to Norway. They have revised that by a year and are now planning on sailing home this summer. Over last spring and now through the fall and this winter they have been co-existing as a family on their liveaboard. What makes it work is the great climate Malta has. Their oldest, a teenager, “camps” in a large tent on the deck. When I was growing up in Canada it was the fashion for teenagers to move to the basement of their parents home to have more freedom and independence. Well, this is like living on the roof!

I know them all somewhat as all three of the kids have taken cooking classes with me. So when I saw them all working at a picnic table in the park, the mom came over to say hi and explain their school week. On Monday to Friday they all have school online in the morning and she and her husband try to get some of their own online work done. Then in the afternoon the kids work away on various school projects or assignments. The oldest one is getting a school credit for teaching the younger two – often being a resource really, more than teaching a class but at times teaching as well. By teaching you learn the subject yourself more comprehensively. Its sounds like the Norwegians have a handle on this online learning business.

She was also telling me how well it works for some subjects that are reading based or even some subjects like history and geography. The whole thing is based on the layers of understanding. So while the youngest one is learning the names of cities and regions in the world, the middle one is learning more about the general politics and culture of the places and the oldest one is focused more on the culture and evolution of those centres or regions. Similarly when they read a story geared to the youngest one who is just enjoying the story and trying to read along, the middle one is more focused on the grammar, and the oldest one is trying to pull out whether there is a more hidden message or metaphor from the piece to share with the middle child.

Most days they do it in the park just to get a change from the boat and to let their dad or mom have some zoom time with the office, but on rainy days they do it in the pilot house. Large old powersailers like mine have a pilot house that is on the top level for seeing where you are and navigating, while staying out of the elements. Newer boats like theirs have a similar but more luxurious bridge level with lots of windows but enclosed as well. One advantage is that the pilot house or enclosed bridge are the brightest inside place on the boat, so it lends itself to a nice learning environment. In smaller boats this area is usually only really big enough for one or two people but on older boats or really large ones like theirs it is big enough that they have moved their dining table up to that area as these days their enclosed pilot house is not needed for its designed purpose and it is their one room schoolhouse during the day and dining room at night.

I had never understood how a one room schoolhouse could work before. At times each of these kids needs to just work on their own material but on other occasions they can all benefit from working on the same material in different ways.

While we all can readily list off a string of negatives from Covid, I think in the hands of people who really put their minds to it, there are some real positives as well, particularly with focused and committed parents. My dad used to talk about growing up as a young person in the depression and how his parents, particularly his mom, my Odie, had made the whole experience something of an adventure. These kids may remember this time, despite all its terrible attributes, as the best of their school years.

Django

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM PETANQUE

Posted: August 1, 2020

Now it would be easy to think that I never leave En Plein Air, and that is largely true. But sometimes I do leave to get some exercise, and do some chores. During Covid 19 I am largely on the boat, on the marina slip or in the nearby park. I keep two really nifty and horrendously expensive fold up bikes on the boat, courtesy of a British couple who thought they could run out without paying their bill after a four-day weekend last year and forgot to take their bikes. I still smile at that bit of justice. So I get out on one of those sometimes.

Yesterday I was at the park beside the marina and playing Petanque with Ciera and it got me to reflecting how much that game is a metaphor for our current times. If you don’t know Petanque it is game played like the much better known ball game of Bocce. The scoring and many of the rules are the same but the key difference is that the Frenchman who came up with this fairly new (1910 ish) game thought of, in contrast to Bocce is that you don’t need a court. Bocce is played on a nice level court with little walls you can grace the ball off, and the predictable surface, and consistent width and length or court, makes playing it a skill. Watching talented Bocce players coax that ball around other balls on the way to its destination close to the little Cochonnet or Jack ball is a thing of beauty.

And just to stay with Bocce for a minute the image below is a bit whimsical. When I was in Key West visiting Janice and Jim last time we went out to their local Bocce court and played a game. In Key West, play is regularly interrupted for either the feral chickens running through or one of the huge iguanas sauntering across. Crazy place.

Iguanas at Southernmost Bocce Club, Key West

So Bocce, and British Lawn Bowling for that matter is this refined pastime played politely on tidy courts. Petanque in contrast was invented to be played wherever you have the space – on gravel, on grass, with a slope or even on sand. Steel balls about the size of tennis balls are used instead of the larger resin Bocce balls. Petanque is not as much a rolling game as an underhand throwing game to get close to that little Coche or Jack ball. There is significant skill involved of course in getting your ball to fly through the air to get close to the target, ideally with a little backspin to keep it from rolling too far, but because it is played on an irregular surface that irregularity is a great equalizer. Just a little bump in the ground from a root or stone can humble a good player. So in that regard if Bocce is chess, Petanque is backgammon with that roll of the die to add an element of chance.

Parenthetically I should add that I think to play Petanque according to true French tradition you must have a baguette, some cheese and wine also on hand. This also equalizes the quality of play!

The use of a beret and French sailors stripped shirt however will just get you laughed at.

So why do I think this is a metaphor for our current times? Well, Bocce is predictable. You do certain things in a disciplined way and the outcome is pretty easy to forecast, even if the chickens and iguanas have messed up the court a bit, because once they pass, things are largely back to a normal surface. So in life, you study or learn your trade, you work hard and employ good discipline and behavior and pretty regularly your career or life works out.

Petanque has that crazy bumpy surface with roots and stones that makes every throw a new adventure. I think that is where we are right now. Some have hit a nasty bump and lost their incomes, their jobs and in the extreme cases, their lives. Some have had their business fail that not only takes away their livelihood but their nest-egg and crippled their plans to sell the business and retire one day. Some have hardly noticed the effect of this pandemic financially and are just enjoying so much take out food. In general it has been very bad for the poor but randomly unpredictable for everyone. I see it here with some losing their boats, while others are excited by the buying opportunities, and for some a certain thinking that with the world at an end – anything goes.

OTTIMISTA

The only stocks I buy are stalks of celery, but when I hear people in the financial worlds talking I know that the conventional wisdom is that in a down market you buy to get your average cost per share down and your dividend yield up, and in an up market you sell to harvest the yield from your earlier good buying discipline. But this may well be a different time. Some will benefit I am sure from that old strategy and some of the “smart” money will do well but just as some people made money in the early days of tech and the early days of legalized cannabis, some lost everything in both of those sectors.

Certainly it is a time when lots of people are experiencing some changes in their lives that while not positive, have some positive elements and ones they never would have experienced voluntarily. Slowing down, spending more time together, evaluating what is important in life are all things we see happening all around us, and those are positive trends. The most common response I get when asked what someone will do when this is over? Hug a friend.

PESSIMISTA

I think any of us who chose to continue on the planet are at some level optimists. But I also think that most complex things are not as binary as that. We may be optimists on personal growth and pessimists on financial security. Or pessimists for the short term prospects and optimists for the longer term. And those of us who are on the wrong side of a certain age have seen enough to be cautiously optimistic, or pragmatically pessimistic. Experience counts, and some of us have the knowledge that we don’t have the time left to get some of this wrong so we may be quite positive in attitude but make decisions to protect ourselves if we are wrong.

This post has truly been a bit of ramble, but I think we can learn a lot from the game of Petanque.

Django

PHONES RING

Posted Nov 2, 2019

A woman I have known for some time confided in me recently. She was burdened by a lot of things. She is about my age which means that she has aging parents, at least one child with issues, and is dealing with the aging process herself and her husbands aging as well.

She is not really a person who gets down much but over time that’s not as true a statement as it once was. She was pretty down when we chatted. I hope our conversation helped. I think she really just needed to dump it all out.

This website I do is, for the most part, a pretty upbeat thing I think and while we all have reason to get down at times I try not to go there much. But my friend reads what I post here and I just wanted to share how deep she was down that day to say that some days it logical to feel down. She was, and remains, carrying a pretty heavy stress load and some of her friends and family need to understand that.

Anyway, here is the poem I wrote after chatting with her that day. Its not a happy poem and if your having a bad day, well, perhaps you should wait for my next post, but if your just cruising along perhaps reading it will bring into clear focus that the scratch on you new BMW really isn’t that big a deal, or not getting that promotion is not as important as the real issues in life.

PHONES RING

Phones ring.

They ring all the time.

At home, at work, in the car.

Sometimes I answer, most often I don’t.

News of my fathers death,

A confirmation after decades

Of estrangement.

Phones ring.

They ring all the time.

At home, at work, in the car.

Sometimes I answer, most often I don’t.

My son has died.

Finally succumbed to his demons.

My failure, but not mine alone.

Phones ring.

They ring all the time.

At home, at work, in the car.

Sometimes I answer, most often I don’t.

It will be a big stroke one day,

My husband of forty years.

He carries instructions for passersby.

I carry the weight of waiting.

Phones ring.

They ring all the time.

At home, at work, in the car.

Sometimes I answer, most often I don’t.

More tests, more results.

My doctor is inconclusive.

I don’t think it’s the cancer that kills you,

But fearing it’s return.

Phones ring.

They ring all the time.

At home, at work, in the car.

Sometimes I answer, most often I don’t.

——————————————————————————————————————–

A couple of final thoughts from Django:

I know that was not a fun poem to read. My goal was to capture how far down she was that day.

But after sharing how she felt that day and me sharing the poem with her she seems to be feeling a bit better able to cope. If you see her, give her a hug.