Friday, September 10 was the opening day of the Puyallup Fair, the 8th largest fair in the world. Between 10 a.m. and noon, admittance is free if you bring a can of food for the food bank. They make sure to tell you this when you enter a quilt.
John had a meeting at work that morning scheduled to end at 11, so I figured I’d be able to work out, shower, meet him, and make it to the fair by noon. I gave him a can of beans as he left for work in case we had to go in separate cars. At 11:35, he called to say he was running a little late, but was 5 minutes from home. He'd underestimated how heavy traffic could get on Meridian on opening day.
We took our secret route back downtown to the fair only to discover a few thousand other people had the same “secret” route. Time was ticking closer and closer to noon as we crept along. Everyone else was aiming for an official parking lot. We parked in the backyard of the first house that had a homeowner flagging us in.
Eight minutes and several blocks to go. I should have kept my workout shoes on. I was jogging in 3 inch heels, hanging onto John’s arm to avoid a twisted ankle. At 11:59, we stood across the street from the Gold Gate, canned goods in hand, willing the sign to blink, “Walk, walk, walk.” The crowd carried us along, through the turnstiles, and we were in! How close could we cut it?
Our first stop would be The Pavilion, to see my quilts. On our way, I told John, “Don’t expect to see a ribbon on either of them.” He gave me a questioning look. I explained, “The quilting on them isn’t the greatest.”
We got off the escalator, and walked through the doors, craning our necks, looking through the hundreds of quilts for mine. It didn’t take long to spot the pink and brown “Walled Garden” just inside the doors; no ribbon.
If you look closely, you can see my blue and yellow quilt on the next row, to the right.
Almost directly behind it on the next row, was the blue and yellow quilt, “Spring at Last!” Pinned to the lower right corner, was a shiny, white, 3rd place ribbon! I was stunned!
I had been pleased to finally finish this quilt since I started it in 2004! Then I was happy to enter it in the fair, with hours to spare. To win a ribbon definitely added some very sweet frosting to the cake!
Laura Keolanui Stark is still grinning. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.
Last semester, my daughter was in a class that invited several international professors to talk about their impressions of America. She said that the professors from Asia, for the most part had positive things to say about their experiences while living here. But, the European ones were very critical. One from Denmark remarked (along with other snide comments) that America doesn’t really have a culture.
It raised my daughter’s hackles. Probably because my husband has traveled extensively for his job, and we’ve had many European visitors come and stay at our house. It’s always the same story with them. For some reason, Europeans are always lecturing us about what’s wrong with America. We had an Englishman who was moving to the U.S., tell us his plans for making the U.S. more like the U.K. I didn’t say it, but I thought, “Good luck with that!” It’s irritating and rude. I’ve never gone to another country, and pointed out what I thought their shortcomings were. As an “ugly American,” I enjoyed the things I liked, and overlooked what I didn’t. I’m not arrogant enough to think I’m going to change a country to meet my expectations. So, I return home, to the U.S., where I like it best.
Nobody asked, but here’s my answer to his snobby observation that America doesn’t have a culture. If we don’t have a culture, why does everyone in the world know who the U.S. is? And why does everybody criticize our nonexistent culture? Does he know what a cowboy is? Has he heard of Hollywood? New York? Rock ‘n roll? Country music? Football? Baseball? The richest farmland in the world? The interstate highway system? The internet? Universities that students from all over the world strive to be admitted to? Blue jeans?
Our culture isn’t tied to national costumes, or one dance that we’ve done for hundreds of years. Our culture is many different cultures. Drive through any town in America and you’ll find Mexican, Italian, Thai, Chinese, and “American” restaurants. Our culture is forward thinking, not mired in the past. That’s why we don’t have many ancient buildings, particularly out here in the West since it’s fairly new. We like to renovate and renew rather than preserve. American culture is not pretentious. Sometimes it’s downright tacky. We don’t take ourselves so seriously that we can’t laugh at ourselves. And I think it would be hard to find an American who would proclaim that we’re perfect.
Yesterday I spent the day at the Puyallup Fair, one of the top ten largest fairs held in the world. We stood in line for forty-five minutes for scones. Most of the time, I chatted with a Hispanic woman in front of me. Her husband looked Samoan. The group in front of us included a Caucasian couple who were introducing a Filipino man to scones. An African couple sat nearby on a bench. When we finally placed our order for a dozen, the cashier introduced us to the exchange students making the scones. The six of them were from various European and Asian countries. They couldn’t believe how long we were willing to stand in line for the puffy triangles of dough stuffed with raspberry jam. But they hadn’t had a chance to taste them yet.
We walked past hundreds of booths with tempting foods from around the world, and around the U.S.: bratwurst, pirogis, burgers, teriyaki, shave ice, barbecue, corn on the cob, funnel cakes, elephant ears, corn dogs, etc. before we settled on Philly steak sandwiches for lunch. We paused to let rodeo horses clomp past us with cowboys in the saddle on their way into the stadium. We admired all the photos taken by international shutterbugs. We were on our way to the hobby hall to check out the collections ranging from Beatles memorabilia to thimbles, when we stopped dead in our tracks.
Was that Elvis we heard singing? We u-turned and joined the crowd, peering over their heads to spot Elvis singing to packed bleachers of fans. He was dressed in his 70s Vegas white outfit with the cape and wide, sparkling, gemstone-studded belt. The audience was clapping and singing along. When he finished the show with “An American Trilogy,” everyone rose to their feet, and there were some teary eyes in the house. Elvis was back in the building, and reminded me of what America’s about. We can have opposing views intense enough to fight a Civil War over them. We can be flashy and outrageous. We like being able to become anything we want “when we grow up.” We hate taxes. We can be fiercely independent, stubborn, generous, tender hearted, and strong all at the same time.
Which leads to my thoughts about 9-11, and the latest controversy about a mosque being built in the shadow of Ground Zero. Our country is founded on constitutional rights. No other country on earth has come up with a better system of government. No Muslim country has the rights that our country has. It’s interesting that they take our strength and turn it against us. The Muslims have a right to build a mosque where the Twin Towers were destroyed by them. But does the word “right” mean the same thing as “obligation?” Do they understand that our tolerance has limits?
Anyone can become an American. But based on what I saw at an Elvis impersonator concert, we won’t be changing into Europeans, or submitting to Sharia law any time soon.
Laura Keolanui Stark can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.
All summer long, almost every time I left the house, I drove past the neighborhood elementary school, and the reader board flashed the message, “Read 5 books this summer.” The not-so-subliminal message worked. Two weeks ago, I started counting the books I’d read since school let out.
First, a friend gave me her copy of The Girls from Ames by Jeffrey Zaslow. It is the true story a group of girls who grew up together in Ames, Iowa, and have kept a 40 year friendship going. It was interesting to compare how girls’ friendships were when I was growing up to how they are now. It was also fun to look at their yearbook pictures and see how they look now. The main appeal though, was that they were close to my age, so reading it was almost like going to my high school reunion.
The second book of my summer was Griffin & Sabine by Nick Bantock. It’s an “old” book, published in 1991. If I was still in school and had to read a certain amount of books, this book would be perfect to meet the quota because it’s pretty much a picture book. It’s a book that I’ve already read. I was at a used book store and it was in the clearance section for only $3! I picked it up vaguely remembering that I’d liked it, and that it had a lot of cool artwork in it. It was still intriguing. As the jacket says, “It’s the correspondence between Griffin and Sabine. It is a story that is partly a romance, partly a mystery, and completely a work of art. Each page contains a new card or letter, rich with lush colors, brilliant drawing, and wildly imaginative creatures and landscapes.” It was definitely something different, and well worth $3.
I confess that I didn’t read every single page of the third book I am claiming for my summer reading list. It was The Best American Non-Required Reading 2007, edited by Dave Eggers. My son Johnny bought it for a college English class he took his sophomore year. For some reason one night, he told me about a graduation speech made by Conan O’Brian. That speech is included in this book, so I read it and had to agree that it’s hilarious, as well as insightful. Short stories are great to have on hand when you’re running errands or have to kill time in waiting rooms. I carried this collection around with me, picking and choosing the pieces that appealed to me. It kept me entertained for a couple of weeks.
Number four was Summer People by Brian Groh, chosen because even though you aren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover, I really liked the cover: a series of oars hanging inside a rustic shed painted blue. The main character, Nathan, accepts a summer job as a caretaker of the eccentric matriarch of an exclusive New England coastal community. He interacts with some quirky characters, falls in love with a girl who doesn’t feel the same way, and ends up being the butt of all the rich people’s problems. Somehow, that summary sounds better than the actual book. Something was lacking. Nathan was a pathetic character, and the big “secrets” that were revealed didn’t live up to the vague suspense.
I just finished the fifth book of summer, a mere 13 hours before school begins once again in Puyallup. It was an easy, fast read, The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein. For some reason, I thought it was about dog racing, but it’s not. It’s about a race car driver from Seattle. The story is told by his dog, Enzo. It’s a very interesting point of view; after all, pet dogs probably see humans at our most unvarnished, honest selves. It was a sad book, but I should’ve seen that coming. Don’t all books with or about dogs end up being sad? But I don’t regret reading it. I liked the characters, it did have lots of good driving tips, and it got me to my goal of five.
I hope that the kids starting school tomorrow have their five books lined up, or better yet, read more books than I did, so they’ll be ready with the teacher asks, “What did you read this summer?”
Laura Keolanui Stark is shuffling through her stacks of books to find the next one to read. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.
My eyes swept slowly over the pink, burgundy, brown, and green squares looking for loose threads that needed to be clipped. The quilting on it didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped, but it’s finally finished (I’d started making it in 2006). And, I am pleased with the piecing and overall look. The colors and blocks play well together. The zig-zagged brown border, representing a garden wall, was something I’d never tried before. With every quilt, I try to learn a new technique. I folded it up carefully, and went to get the other quilt.
This summer I finally turned both of these queen-sized quilt tops into quilts, sandwiching them with batting and backs. I rented time on a longarm quilting machine at Trains, Fabrics, Etc. quilt shop in Tacoma and made a major dent in my stack of unfinished projects.
This afternoon, I walked through the Gold Gate of the Puyallup Fair holding both quilts. Upstairs in the Pavilion, I filled out the paperwork to enter both of them, and glowed a little when the two ladies checking them in ooohed and aahhed over them. They joined the stacks of quilts that will soon be hanging for thousands to admire.
Another quilter and I rode the elevator downstairs and walked out through the dark, empty, cabinets strewn around the ground floor. We marveled over the way the fair is magically transformed each year from the haphazard skeleton that we were seeing, to the carefully arranged exhibits that we know we will see when it opens. Of course, we’ve both seen something similar before when we’ve taken hundreds of tiny squares of fabric and sewn them into beautiful quilts, each with its own personality.
We agreed that we weren’t entering our quilts expecting to win (although that would be great), but just to see them hanging in the fair, and to be able to tell our friends to go and see them. Nevertheless, as we walked back out through the gate and parted ways, we wished each other, “Good luck!”
Lately, our heater has been kicking on before we get out of bed. When we slide the door open to let the dogs out, there’s a chill in the air whispering that fall is just around the corner.
All summer, we’ve been watching our blueberries. Noting when they first appeared. Watering the bush by hand during rare hot spells. Scratching my head because I could’ve sworn we used to have ripe blueberries for the 4th of July. Watching them plump up and at last, this week, they blushed from green to full-blown, deep blue.
This morning I asked John to take the colander out, and pick some. Muffins or scones? We were impatient, so it was muffins. Steaming hot from the oven and slathered with rapidly melting butter, it’s surprising there were any left for a picture.
I’ll keep picking them as they ripen and bake them into scones and coffee cakes. If there are still any left, I’ll freeze them for a taste of August in deep winter. What a nice way to say good-bye to summer.
Blueberry Muffins
2 cups Bisquick
1/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup milk
2 Tblsp vegetable oil
1 egg
¾ cup fresh blueberries
Heat oven to 400°. Line muffin cups with paper baking cups. Stir all ingredients except blueberries together until just moistened. Fold in blueberries. Divide batter evenly among cups. Bake 13 to 18 minutes until golden brown. Cool slightly; remove from pan.
Laura Keolanui Stark is savoring the last days of summer. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.
Last week just before 2:00 pm, I was working, scoring standardized tests, when I felt a jolt, followed a few seconds later by a second jolt. Earthquake?! While I was ready to dive under the table, my eyes darted around the room, but nobody else seemed to notice anything. I shrugged. I’ve always had a more sensitive sensory system than most people, always been a little more jumpy. If something scary happens in a movie, I usually jump about a half a second before anyone else. An electrician had been working in our area earlier. Maybe he was working on the wiring in the ceiling.
On my 2:00 break, I walked out to my car and called home. Cameras (and therefore cell phones) aren’t allowed on the floor at my job because of strict confidentiality, so I leave my phone in my car. The kids were packing to go back to college. I was calling to see if they needed to know where the extra boxes, tape, etc. were.
Johnny answered, and in an excited voice, asked me if I’d just heard two big explosions. I told him I’d felt two jolts. He said that he heard two huge explosions, big enough to set off house and car alarms in our Puyallup neighborhood. He’d run upstairs from the basement out onto the front porch expecting to see a truck crashed into our house.
He’d called John and Sarah who were in the waiting room at a chiropractor in Tacoma. They had been on westbound Highway 512, and John said he thought something went wrong with his car, maybe a blown tire? Everybody in the lobby listening in on this phone conversation asked, astounded, if the explosion had been felt 11 miles away in Puyallup. Everyone was abuzz.
This was definitely bigger than the guns that rumble regularly from Ft. Lewis maneuvers. There had been a huge natural gas explosion in Tacoma in October 2007 that John and I had felt at our house. Then there was the time they blew up some old dynamite that a construction crew found when they were building a Rite Aid a few miles from our house, over a decade ago. But, this time I’d felt a shock in Auburn, 12 miles north of Puyallup. Puyallup-Auburn-Tacoma: that’s a pretty big, 12-miles-on-each-side, equilateral triangle.
Johnny and I speculated that President Obama was in Seattle. Maybe it had something to do with him. Maybe something happened, and they had to get fighter jets up in the air from McChord Air Force Base and there was a sonic boom. Johnny said there wasn’t anything on T.V. I told him to go online to see what he could find. With that, my 15-minute break was up, and I headed back into the building.
I made what I hoped was a casual announcement to my group, and asked if they’d heard anything about an explosion or anything unusual while they were on break. Nobody had felt or heard anything. I started scoring and tried to concentrate.
What if Mt. Rainier had blown? Aren’t we in a valley? If a lahar of ice and mud was gushing down from Mt. Rainier, I tried to remember how deep it would be. Two stories? Three stories? Would the overpass over Highway 167 be high enough to be safe? They always said that it would be faster to go on foot than everybody getting in their cars and creating a traffic jam. (Maybe that was advice for tsunamis in Hawaii. Oh well!) I’d better try to run up the hill, to Highway 18. I was calculating in my head how long it would take me to run there. Ten minutes, fifteen? Puyallup had sirens to warn everybody. Did Auburn? How long would it take a lahar to reach Auburn?
Tom, who sits next to me, interrupted my mental evacuation planning. He suggested I ask the secretary to get online and see what she could find out. I hesitated. He assured me that if the Site Manager was there, she’d check it out. I agreed, and added that she’d make a big announcement about it. She was good at ferreting out information and making announcements. But I still hesitated. I didn’t want to be Chicken Little running around clucking about the sky falling, especially since nobody else had felt or heard anything. What if it wasn’t anything? Then I’d be flagged as a hysterical nutcase.
There are other businesses in the building. I was pretty sure that someone in one of those offices was online, and if anything big happened, they’d let us know. If worse came to worst, Johnny had the main number here and would call to sound the alarm, wouldn’t he? I spent the rest of the afternoon scoring papers, and in the back of my mind, wondering what had happened, feeling a little on edge.
At 4:30 I hurried out to my car, and called home. As I asked Johnny what had happened, my phone beeped that I had a text message simultaneously with Johnny asking why I hadn’t checked his text message. Here’s what it said:
Mom, KOMO 4 news reports that an unknown aircraft breached Presidential restricted airspace and that two F-15 fighter jets were scrambled from Portland, OR. Apparently they flew well above supersonic to Seattle, and created sonic booms that were heard throughout the region. No news yet on whether they shot down the other aircraft or what. –Johnny
Apparently while I was estimating how long it would take me to run up the hill to Hwy. 18 to avoid a volcanic mudflow, Johnny was calculating how long it would take a jet traveling at Mach 2.5 (about 1900 mph) to fly from Portland to Seattle (145 miles), an impressive 10 minutes, about the same time for me to get out of a lahar’s path.
The wayward float plane was flying from the east side of Washington. The pilot didn’t file a flight plan, and didn’t realize that Obama’s visit created a 10-mile, no-fly airspace. The jets intercepted him. The Secret Service questioned and released him.
The headine the next day in The News Tribune was “Boom. Boom. Rrrring. Scrambled fighter jets in turn scramble South Sound 911 network.” It reported that residents from Olympia to Federal Way (40 miles apart) streamed into the streets when the thunderous booms shook the region about 1:50 p.m., and so many people in Pierce County dialed 911 the switchboard couldn’t keep up.
And so the mystery was solved. It’s kind of interesting that it even was a mystery with an Air Force base and Boeing in the region, and a basketball team named the Seattle SuperSonics. But, it’s nice to know that people are paying attention, and it’s even more reassuring to know that our military is ever vigilant, and the best in the world. On Tuesday, August 18, 2010, throughout the Puget Sound, we all got to experience “the sound of freedom.”
Laura Keolanui Stark tries to live by the Girl Scout motto, “Be prepared.” She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.
“Better late than never!” That seems to be the theme for me this summer. To start with, summer took forever to arrive. While the rest of the country swelters, we’ve been waiting for the temperatures to rise into the 80s. It’s August, and wake up temperatures here have still been in the 50s. I can’t complain too much though, it’s great sleeping weather, and by the afternoon, it’s warm enough for shorts.
In June, my friend Carol called to plan the details of this year’s quilt shop hop. We talked for twenty minutes before she gave me a calendar reality check. I kept talking about where we were going to go on Thursday. She finally said, “You do realize that Thursday, the first day of shop hop, is tomorrow.” Yikes! I thought shop hop was the following week!
Following the surprise announcement to my family, frenzied searches on Mapquest, a late-night trip to the ATM machine, and general panic and mayhem on my part, I managed to pull it together and start shop hopping on about 12 hours notice. And a very good shop hop it was, complete with ferry rides and crepes, and the accidental discovery of one the best Italian restaurants I’ve ever eaten in: Il Lucano, tucked humbly in beside a kayak store in Gig Harbor.
In keeping with my weird summer time warp, a week after Independence Day, I finished up two Americana quilt tops that Carol and I started two years ago. They weren’t the full size quilts we’d initially planned. I figured they’d get more use in our houses as wall hangings. They didn’t hang in our homes this 4th of July, but maybe they’ll be quilted and ready to hang next year.
What inspired the get-those-quilts-done burst? Our friends from Louisiana were coming to visit, so of course I dedicated much valuable time cleaning my sewing area because visitors always head right to that area of the house! Not! John and Johnny usually decide to clean the garage, because that’s also an area where we entertain guests. Who knows why our brains work this way?
When we moved into this house, 10-1/2 years ago, I wanted to fix up the swing set in the backyard. It had one lonely, decrepit swing, but space for two. I’d bought another swing to join the solo one. Our friends have three young kids, so, once again, I asked if John or Johnny could put the “new” swing up. Johnny took me up on it, but we couldn’t find the first swing I’d bought. I think I’d given up, and donated it to Goodwill, so we ended up buying two new ones. My “babies” are now 18 and 22, but when the new swings went up, they were happy to test them out. Our friends’ kids spent a lot of fun time on them too, and it was nice to hear little ones playing in our backyard again.
On the last day of their visit, before anyone else in the house was up, John woke me up saying in a hushed voice, “Laura, we have a big problem.” I followed him out into the hallway where a gagging smell hit me. John answered my unspoken question, “T-Bone had diarrhea all over the house.”
We don’t usually steam clean the carpets until the beginning of September, but due to what we now call Poopfest 2010, there was a whole lot of steam cleaning and mopping going on. After a trip to the vet and a round of antibiotics that he’s just finishing up, T-Bone’s feeling better. So is Suzie. She caught the same bacterial infection. The carpet cleaning is the only case this summer of better earlier than never.
On a more pleasant and certainly better smelling topic, I wanted to make strawberry jam again this summer, but with all that was going on, I missed the fresh Puyallup valley strawberries. When the raspberries came out, I was too busy to make jam, so I froze the berries that kept mysteriously appearing on my kitchen counter courtesy of WSU farmland. (They will probably become sorbet). Finally, when I got a free day, I assembled the jars and other jam-making equipment. Apricots were the fruit that was ripe and available, so apricot jam is what I’ve been savoring on toasted Costco croissants.
I didn’t feel guilty eating those croissants because at Zumba we were learning a new routine for the National Day of Dance 2010 from the TV program, “So You Think You Can Dance.” I watched the video on You Tube Thursday, and practiced it in class on Friday. Saturday was the day that we rolled it out. I managed to keep up with most of it; not bad considering I was relying on last minute cramming to learn the routine.
Tuesday I spent the day quilting a pink, brown, and green quilt top that I started in 2006. I drove to a quilt shop in Tacoma to quilt it on a longarm machine. The shop owner suggested a quilting pattern that stretched my abilities, but it’s done and ready for a binding.
That night a close friend from John’s University of Hawaii days flew in from Texas on business. We got to spend a few hours together reminiscing over dinner. He was one of the big encouragers of me writing this blog. Thanks Ed!
Wednesday, we met some other friends for lunch. It was a lunch spent remembering good times, but with a little sadness mixed in. They’re moving out of state. On Monday I found out that they were leaving on Friday. Another "Yikes!" moment. Liz and Steve are the parents of Johnny’s best friend, Dave. We’ve spent the last 11 years growing these boys into men, shuttling them back and forth to each others’ houses when they were little, standing beside each other watching them play roller hockey, comparing notes on colleges when they were choosing where to go. There’s a special bond between parents who’ve raised their kids together. We wish them all the best.
All of the above are my excuses for not writing a single blog during the month of July. But, I’m writing now. Better late than never!
Laura Keolanui Stark is probably dealing with some other unplanned, unforeseen surprise event or emergency. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@ gmail.com
