Beauty: The face you earn

I love the way faces age.

When looking at magazines and online lists about women celebrities who are "aging beautifully," I find myself wishing those selected would opt out of plastic surgery and let their real faces speak of the lives they've led.

Moments ago, I closed the window on another of those "beautiful after 50" posts — one that focused on Latinas, and included Charo, looking stretched, wrinkle-free and plumped by collagen, as if she'd submitted to this treatment from the movie Brazil:

I know Charo is a skilled guitarist and much smarter than her "Cuchi, Cuchi" image (imagine a Vegas-style entertainer version of Sofía Vergara) was made out to be during the height of her popularity in the 1970s but the truth is ... I don't want to look like she does when I turn her age (a mere decade away).

I know, Hollywood is tough on its celebrities and I can't begin to understand the pressure that must be exerted on beauties who age under its cruel gaze. But some of my favorite faces hold a roadmap of life in their folds and contours, and I can't imagine they'd be improved by having the markers of age ironed out.

Coco Chanel was right — you're given the face you have at 20, but you earn the face you have at 50 ... and beyond.

So here photos of some of my favorite activists and writers (most living, but a few who died as elders). They were beautiful when they were young, and even more beautiful in their age.

Dolores Huerta

(Labor leader and civil rights activist; b. April 10, 1930)

Then

Now

Yuri Kochiyama

(Human rights activist; b. May 19, 1921)

Then

Now

Dorothy Day

(Journalist, activist and Catholic Worker; Nov. 8, 1897 - Nov. 29, 1980)

Maya Angelou

(Poet and activist; b. April 4, 1928)

Then

Now

Paula Gunn Allen

(Poet, novelist and lesbian activist; Oct. 24, 1939 - May 29, 2008)

Now it's your turn. Fill my comments with the photos and names of women who wore, or wear, their beauty clear on their faces. 

Wordless Wednesday, Miercoles mudo: 'We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it'

"Christ on the bread-line" by Fritz Eichenberg. Eichenberg - a Quaker - often contributed his illustrations for publication in Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker newspaper. The title of this post is taken from a Dorothy Day essay in "By Little and By Little: Selected Writings from Dorothy Day," (Knopf).

How to make an immigrant quilt

Let’s be clear – I don’t sew.

I don’t own a sewing machine -- and even if I did I’m not sure I could figure out how to turn the thing on, much less get it to do what I’d want it to do.

I’m not a good candidate to be making a quilt.

But – God help me – I am making one, and have been, on and off, for the past 13 years.

Before you ask, no, I’m not finished yet.

I told you – I don’t sew.

Years ago, in Guatemala, I was forced to take sewing class – costura – at the Colegio Maya. It was one of the only classes I ever took that I came this close to failing. Sra. Alonzo hated me. God’s truth. I insisted on talking while I sewed. My stitches wandered, and I was indifferent to their meandering. And I think I once told her – more or less – that her class was an unwelcome remnant of musty 19th century educational thinking.

My brothers (taking handicrafts like all the other boys in those days of gender-segregated classes) were coming home with cool things like lamps and magazine racks they had made; I carted home samplers and twee crocheted doilies only my grandmother could love.

I tried to persuade my parents to get me out of the class. My father sat on the school’s board of directors and my mother was the hip young artist the school administrators consulted to determine just how many inches above the knee our miniskirts were allowed to be. But no dice. Even after the appeal and the sympathetic looks I still had to attend the stupid class. And mind my manners while I was at it.

Mrs. Alonzo glared at my hopeless cross stitch, pursed her lips at my imperfect chain stitch and cleared her throat every time I chose the fat crochet hooks and thick yarns that speeded the delivery of completed (if utterly graceless) projects.

As we sewed, outside the windows of our classroom a war of insurgency and counterinsurgency raged.

When I first moved to the States people didn’t believe me when I told them I’d never experienced a school fire drill. Our Colegio Maya drills prepared us for crossfire; for the military vs. guerilla shootouts that frequently took place in that part of Zone 10 during those years.

We watched our classmates’ fathers killed in front of the school during recess; saw one of our bus drivers go down in crossfire as he escorted us from the playground into the school; even witnessed one of our teachers collapse at the news that her son had been caught by the country’s politically-driven violence that left no family untouched.

Inside, we stitched in silence.

We never talked about what we saw outside the school’s door – not even the afternoon after C’s father was killed in front of our eyes. Instead, we focused on samplers that evoked a gentility long disappeared from the country.

I’ve come to think of that sewing class as emblematic of the country during those years – enforced silence and an obtuse pretense that everything was as it should be.

Still, I cried when my family had to move to the United States (see “Hope is the thing with feathers” blog post of Dec. 14, 2008 to read why we moved). Though I have been an American citizen from birth I had only visited the States on vacations every so often and I understood, even from those short visits, that I was an American without the slightest idea about how to feel or be American.

But when my mother took us one summer day to enroll in Downingtown High School (a huge school it would take me weeks to find my way around and which I’d never really understand how to navigate) I was gratified to learn that here, at least, sewing classes were not mandatory.

You could fast-forward through the next 15 or 20 years of my life (years in which every poem and story I wrote was about Guatemala’s bloody unfolding history and every political cause I embraced had at its heart a hope for justice in that country) and see very few moments in which I picked up needle and thread willingly.

Once, shortly before my daughter was born I crocheted just long enough to produce a small baby blanket for her. Another time, I managed to finish a short hooded capelet which she wore a handful of times as a toddler. That’s it. I even eschewed hemming pants – that’s what safety pins are for, isn’t it?

Strangely, some of my best friends turned out to be people unusually skilled with the needle.

Quilters.

I loved watching them work. For a couple of years running I spent nearly every morning at Robin’s house, watching him graph patterns, cut strips of fabric, piece them, and put together into quilts. Some carried well-known pattern names like Log Cabin and Tree of Life, others were original patterns. They were all exquisite (to see his work go to http://tristanrobinblakeman.com/ArtQuilts.html).

Irrationally, I found myself wanting to create a quilt too, and started collecting my daughter’s outgrown clothing to that purpose.

Robin was encouraging – after he got over his shock at the sheer folly of it.

I had no sewing machine and so proposed to make a crazy quilt – a type of quilt popular in the Victorian era in which the pieces of fabric were randomly placed and set off by decorative stitchery. I think he understood that it was the very randomness of the crazy quilt that appealed to me.

Still, he warned me, it's not as random as it seems.

Unheeding, I went ahead.

I chose absolutely the worst possible fabric to serve as the backing block, and within seconds of sewing the first piece on it, it went radically and permanently out of square.

I kept going anyway.

I added a piece of an antique woven Nepalese cap my mother had presented to me when my daughter was days old, then a piece from a very downtown-New-York toddler’s outfit one of my brothers had bought for her, followed by a scrap of organza collar from a ridiculously pouffy little girl’s dress only a mother would have the nerve to buy for her kid.

I sewed them on with satin stitch and chain stitch and blanket stitch, and stitches without proper names because they were really “make-betters” on stitches I had tried but mucked up.

I wasn’t producing art (or even straight seams) like Robin or another quilting friend, Donna – but I could live with that.

As I kept going with this first block, providence seemed to encourage me.

My brother-in-law went up to the attic of their family home and found a piece of a quilt that their deceased mother or grandmother or grand-aunt had started and abandoned years ago. Guess what? It was a piece of crazy quilt, with the old leaded silks and taffetas and shirting fabric simply basted on to a seed-bag backing block.

When I held it up to the square I was working on, it was almost exactly the same size. If my block had actually been square, that is.

For about two or three weeks after the discovery of the Saunders quilt piece I dreamt about the finished crazy quilt. I loved the idea of piecing together these bits of lives in cloth and putting them in a quilt for my daughter.

At that time I hadn’t yet seen the movie “How to Make an American Quilt,” which is, in essence, an extended riff on just that. I had heard about the movie however, from Robin, who railed at the last scene where Winona Ryder wraps herself in the lovely quilt just completed for her and literally drags it through the dirt.

Several more weeks passed after the discovery of the Saunders piece, and my usual sewing animus reemerged.

I wondered whether I should just sew the two blocks back-to-back into a crazy pillow and be done with it already.

I don’t remember when I officially laid the project aside.

My mother died suddenly of an aneurism we never knew she had.

My husband, daughter and I moved to Pennsylvania, where our lives, for a while, seemed like the miscarriage I had soon after moving – a promise so compromised it could not be sustained.

My father got pancreatic cancer, and died after two years of a battle that rent my heart.

Through it all, my daughter grew, and outgrew clothing. But instead of cutting them into pieces to incorporate into the crazy quilt, I carted the clothing to donation bins.

I didn’t know where I had put the two existing quilt blocks, or even whether I had packed them and brought them along with us on the move.

Providence seemed to have lost interest in this particular quilt –and anyway, I wasn’t sure I believed in providence anymore.

People vanish from our lives. Quickly, when a bullet or aneurism takes them. Or slow and excruciating, like the long dying of those who disappear during a dirty war, or in cancer. We train ourselves not to talk about these deaths – as in that long remembered sewing class of mine – for fear that our voices will tear.

Or that we will fray into nothingness as we consider our losses.

Each death is a piece out of a fabric that started out whole. What do we do when we are surrounded by the pieces?

People are fond of saying that God writes with crooked lines, I prefer to think He sews with them.

His grace sometimes punches through our lives with an unbearably sharp needle, but then, great generous blanket stitches bind our frayed edges. Backstitches advance us even as we seem to be going back. And His wandering, loopy chain stitches link us to the strong fabric that remains in our lives.

I found those two quilt blocks a few months ago.

My daughter didn’t remember them, and for an hour or so, I regaled her with the provenance of each piece on the block I had created. I mused about the sayings I had stitched-in back then – redes from a different religion, from the radically different life I had led.

And still, I recognize I had been searching then, like now, for recognition of the moments when the numinous touches our lives. For the moment we find ourselves in still center of the labyrinth, and look, there's no minotaur there but a pair of wings.

I speculated, as my daughter examined the two pieces, about the fabrics used in the block basted together by the Saunders women– onto which I had stitched the names of my daughter’s grandparents and great-grandparents.

Then, like now, family is the spine, the ribs, the invisible frame that enables us to stand. No matter that I had never met these members of my husband’s family, no matter that in my own extended family there is some scar tissue along with the supporting bone. I wanted those Welsh, Mexican, German, Guatemalan, Greek and American names all there where my daughter could run her fingers over them and know that, along with her unique gifts, this is the stuff she is made of.

A crazy quilt – light and dark, smooth and coarse, rich fabrics and poor, straight lines and crooked.

Random only on the surface.

“Are you ever going to finish the quilt for me?” she asked.

“Can’t I just make you a pillow?” I asked in answer.

“No,” she said. “You can’t.”

I don’t think I say yes to her, but in the next few days I start on a new block.

Then another. And another.

Each piece I add has history and memory: the salmon silk onto which I sewed the old blocks and on which I built the new is from a formal gown my mother wore in Thailand to meet the king. The rough yellow silk cut into leaf shapes was hand-woven in the San Marcos region of my mother’s homeland (the Guatemala that so shaped my youth).

The feather-shaped pieces of sophisticated Italian silk used faced and reversed in the wings of one of the birds on the end pieces is from my father’s tie, and the white-on-white cutwork feathers on the other bird are from handkerchiefs that once belonged to my grandmothers.

I think of a Dorothy Day quote as I sew the memories on: “We cannot live alone. We cannot go to heaven alone. Otherwise God will say to us ‘Where are the others?’”

Each piece I add has a present: my daughter’s school ribbons, a piece of the beaded Indian silk she wore for my older brother’s wedding, symbols from the manga she currently reads and loves. A machine-embroidered Virgin of Guadalupe from one of my pillowcases. Pieces from a scarf that belongs to my husband made into the trees of his woods in central New York. Milagros representing the prayers I’ve taught myself to remember, and the ones I’ve made up in gratitude.

Each piece I add has a future: I plan to take the quilt top to the aunt of one of my husband’s Mennonite co-workers who routinely adds batting and edging to finish pieces like this into proper quilts. I set aside yards of backing fabric for it (kente cloth my father bought years ago in Zaire for my mother) and conjure images of new faced with old, of a whole made from pieces.

I start to embroider on one of the blocks (an oblong, actually) the words of a William Stafford poem I’ve found by chance, by providence, recently: “There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change.”

How much a wayfarer I still am.

I’ve made an immigrant’s quilt for my daughter, and sewn into it the messiness, the incertitude, the striving and suffering and faith that pace every pilgrimage.

I don’t know when I’ll finish – I told you, I don’t sew.

But I have learned to piece together.

Band of fathers – A Memorial Day remembrance

As has become tradition in our household, my husband and I spent most of yesterday – the Sunday before Memorial Day – watching a marathon of HBO’s “Band of Brothers” miniseries. It is always either “Band of Brothers” or “Saving Private Ryan” in our household for Memorial Day – because it is my husband’s belief that nothing better conveys the service and sacrifice we honor on this day.
It also helps, I suppose, that my husband is fascinated by the people and stories in “Band of Brothers.” He waited patiently for the Catholic Standard & Times to run a piece – a year and a half in the making – about two of the Philadelphia members of Easy Company, “Wild Bill” Guarnere and Edward “Babe” Heffron. He wasn’t disappointed when Lou Baldwin’s story about the men finally saw print (read it at http://bit.ly/fyTjC). It merely confirmed what he already believed true – that the generation we’ve come to call “the Greatest Generation” exemplified a quality his father and mine had in abundance: you do what you have to and you don’t complain about it.
One of my brothers (I can’t remember which, since they are both equally brilliant and insightful) calls it the “Walk the Line” generation – after the Johnny Cash song – because that is what they exactly what they did, walked the line regardless of what that might entail.
My father served in two wars (that's him, on the right, in the photo at the top of this blog post, with his brother Alkis). He was U.S. Navy at the tail end of World War II, and U.S. Army during the Korean War. He was a pretty modest person, and not given to seeing himself painted in heroic strokes. He would have been uncomfortable reading about his kidnapping experience as I wrote about it in this blog, for example, or about his struggle with pancreatic cancer as I wrote about it in the print version of the CS&T years ago. All of what made my father heroic to me (and there is much, much more than what I’ve written about) would have elicited a particular look from him – puzzlement and skepticism combined – because to him his actions weren’t particularly praiseworthy, they just were.
His Korean War stories – the few he entrusted us with – were mostly matter-of-fact. That he taught himself to drive where he was stationed – in front of the front lines – and under fire. That his belief that you judge people by their actions not their race, social class or level of education was born in the war zone. In front of the front lines he served side by side with African Americans, Latinos and first-generation American sons of immigrants (as he was) and truly believed that a brotherhood of shared experience was forged there; a brotherhood that transcended the mores and prejudices of the day.
And then there were the not-so-matter-of-fact stories. The only thing that could reliably break my stoic father up was a recounting of how he had seen his best friend blown to bits beside him in Korea. He didn’t tell that story often.
My husband’s father, Frank Eugene Saunders – “Sandy” to those who knew him – never served in a war. He wanted desperately to enlist but his father refused to let him. Sandy was the only child and service in the armed forces would have meant that production at his parents’ farm would cease.
I never met my husband’s father (in the photo below with his wife and three sons), but my guess is that he didn’t feel particularly heroic acquiescing to this demand to stay stateside while war was waged overseas. But I read it differently – unselfishness is one of the defining characteristics of heroism, as is fortitude. Both qualities my future father-in-law had in spades. I remember reading through one his mother’s daily diaries and stumbling upon an entry in which she noted that Sandy’s father had come down with double pneumonia. She went on to write that the running of the farm (livestock, milking, every last chore and need) now fell to Sandy alone to perform – for however long his father was laid up. He was 12 at the time.
As I said – fortitude.
I admit to having mixed emotions about honoring war – I am of the Dorothy Day brand of Catholics who thinks the Biblical injunction against killing carries no asterisks to indicate exception – but have no such mixed feelings about honoring those who have served. In war zones and at home. In good wars and bad. Whether they have little American flags flying at their gravesites today – or not.
I have nothing to offer in honor but words:

For quiet heroism – heroism that hid in love and obligation and everyday sacrifice;
For heroic experience that I will never – hope never to have to – understand, writ big in blood and wounds that never truly heal;
For lives lived with honor that will never make it up to the big screen;

Thanks for walking the line.

Happy Memorial Day.