Quilting life

by Phil Houseal as published in the Kerrville TX Community Journal & Boerne TX Hill Country Weekly - 12/1/2010


You can’t go home again, but I was able to get back to my native Iowa over the holidays. And I wasn’t able to escape Texas. There, on the living room wall of my mother’s home, hung a small quilt she had made using quilt blocks from Kerrville.

This story began a few years back when Kerrville resident Lois Charter was a show where I mentioned that my mother made quilts for all of her nine children. Lois was a quilter herself, as well as a native of Iowa. She corresponded with my mother a few times, and when Mom came to visit, we were invited to spend some time at Lois’s home.

Sometime after that, Lois sent me 1000 one-square-inch quilt blocks she had accumulated, with instructions to pass them along to my mother. I did so, and did not think much more about it (I have many hobbies - quilting is not one of them).

So it was a special joy to walk into the farmhouse and see those 1000 quilt blocks transformed from piles in a shoebox into a one-of-a-kind wall hanging.

I cannot imagine the patience and skill required to work on such a project. My mom has been doing it since 1958, when she got her first Singer sewing machine. While modern moms learn by taking classes, Mom learned by watching her grandmother. She sews pieces together with the sewing machine, then hand stitches them to the batting and backing.

She has no idea how many quilts she has constructed. She made at least one for each of her nine children (“some have more than one”), plus lots of baby quilts for her 25 grandchildren and 16 great grandchildren.

I tried to interview her, but she didn’t have much to say. In her life, quilting and sewing are simply what you did. Along with making clothes, canning vegetables, and baking bread - which she still does.

She can’t even say how long it takes to make a quilt, but acknowledged that one of the more elaborate creations took a year. Of course that is in between regular chores of running a home. Her work became more efficient when the last of the children left home, as she could use one of the bedrooms as a quilting room, complete with quilt frame to keep the working pieces organized.

Like quilters everywhere, Mom uses whatever material comes her way, from old jeans and flannel shirts to pieces of polyester to the thousand quilt blocks from Texas.

Mom’s quilts are elaborate. Mine features the Texas star. My brother’s quilt has the actual notes of “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” quilted around the edge.

“I look at that now and think, wow, I really did a good job!” she told me.

Why do you do it, Mom?

“I like to create things,” she said, adding, “and the kids love them.”

xxx

Where the sidewalk goes

by Phil Houseal as published in the Kerrville TX Community Journal & Boerne TX Hill Country Weekly - Nov 24, 2010


A school I used to drive by every day built a beautiful new auditorium. In front, they installed sweeping sidewalks tracing a graceful arc from the parking lot to the wide front doors.

The problem was students did not like walking in a sweeping arc when rushing from class to class. They preferred taking the direct route, meaning they bisected the arc.

The school made efforts to corral students on the sidewalks - announcements, “keep off the grass” signs, ads in the school newspaper, orange cones (my favorite was a simple sign that read “Let It Be” - hey, it was the 1970s). Still, students walked straight, and literally beat a path in the grass.

Years later I drove by and noticed the school was trying a new attack. Workmen were installing blocks of limestone around the edges of the sidewalks. They were massive - 2 foot by 2 foot by 4-foot blocks. It seemed they were turning the house of learning into a mighty fortress.

My prediction? Students will still find a way to cut corners.

Guiding pedestrians is like herding cats. No matter which way you want them to go, they will seek the shortest path that offers the least resistance.

I knew one superintendent who understood this tendency and exploited it in building a school. He followed the advice of an architect who suggested putting up the buildings, then waiting one year to install the sidewalks. Then you simply paved where all the paths were.

Predicting paths is the most challenging part of planning anything, including a Club Ed session.

As a young director, I fell into the trap of expecting equal results from unequal input. In a typical session, 20% of classes are extremely popular, and 20% struggle to attract students. For years, I would put all my promotional efforts into getting people to sign up for the less attended classes. It seemed logical - the popular courses were filling on their own. So I should try to get more students into the less popular courses.

I finally realized that made no sense. If students are signing up for Underwater Basketweaving, I should be adding more sessions of Underwater Basketweaving and dropping Left Handed Piano. I still catch myself trying to force students down a path they just don’t want to take.

George Burns, the ageless radio comedian, once wrote, “Your audience will tell you what’s funny.” That’s why he smoked a cigar. That’s why Jack Benny pretended to be stingy. The comedians did not start out using those gimmicks. But they noticed when the audiences laughed, then stuck with it.

In Community Education, we know that our customers tell us what is popular. So now I’ve learned to watch where people are walking - and that’s where you build the sidewalk.

xxx

Cousin Nancy’s Bucket List

by Phil Houseal as published in the Kerrville TX Community Journal & Boerne TX Hill Country Weekly - 11/17/10


PHOTO: Cousin Nancy uses Club Ed to whittle down her personal “bucket list.”

What’s on your bucket list?

You know about the bucket list - that term made popular by the movie of the same name. It’s a list of things you want to do in life before you “kick the bucket.”

Cousin Nancy has one. And Club Ed is helping her cross off many items. At the top of her list? Playing drums.

“I was always fascinated by drumming,” she admitted. “It was on my bucket list. I just turned 59, so I said, ‘I’m going to do it!’”

Not that she didn’t have second thoughts.

“When I got ready to take the class, I thought if it’s all 15-year-old boys I’m walking out,” she said. “Fortunately, there were folks my age and the class was a blast.”

Of course she did drumming - like she does everything in life - in her own style. She brought her own drum pad, which she had painted lavender with pink bows, and her own drumsticks, which she had “Nancy-ized” by painting bright pink and adding glitter and feathers. (Visit her blog to see a photo: cousinnancy.blogspot.com/2010/02/donna-drummer-schloss.html)

“I looked like an absolute idiot when I walked into class with my little outfit,” she said. “It was great. I told everybody, look, it’s a bucket list deal.” She laughed.

Cousin Nancy laughs a lot.

Cousin Nancy’s real name and role is Nancy Parker-Simons, Executive Director of Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch. She, husband Tony Simons, and the uncategorizable Kinky Friedman started the organization to “rescue every animal we can.”

They primarily save dogs on death row. They spay, neuter and give them shots, then keep them at the Rescue Ranch until they find a home. The facility averages 50 dogs in residence. (“Ask everyone to come to the Rescue Ranch and adopt a dog... we have fabulous dogs.”)

Back to that bucket list. It doesn’t take long being around Cousin Nancy to figure out she has a heck of a huge bucket. In addition to working as a business owner and executive director, the Texas native plays spoons, sandblocks, and guitar, was in drumming circle, and played in a jug band. She has rubbed ribs with celebrities from Dwight Yoakum to Willie Nelson to Martha Stewart. She blogs and has written two books - The Road to Utopia: How Kinky, Tony & I Saved More Animals Than Noah, and Meanwhile, Back At The Rescue Ranch: The Dog Days of Cousin Nancy. Yet she is that elusive combination of down to earth and upbeat.

Her affinity for Club Ed goes back a few years. The first course she ever took was our popular Instant Piano for Hopelessly Busy People.

“I really enjoyed that class. I always liked learning how to do stuff. I think I am a jack-of-all-trades but not that ‘skilled.’”

Not that that holds her back. Recently someone gave her a book that featured watercolor. Cousin Nancy couldn’t stop staring at it, so she decided to go to the craft store, buy painting supplies, and create her own art.

“My first painting sold for $57.77 on eBay,” she said. “So I decided I’ve got to go see how they do portraits.” So she signed up for the class. “It said ‘no skills required,’ so that was a selling point.” She laughed again.

“I wish I could come to a bunch of your classes,” she said. “I’d like to learn how to weld, and would take any of your art courses. I am a major fan. I love Club Ed.”

And Club Ed loves Cousin Nancy.

xxx

Visit Cousin Nancy’s blog at cousinnancy.blogspot.com. For information on Club Ed, click www.clubed.net, or call 830-895-4386.

Paint dreams

by Phil Houseal as published in the Kerrville TX Community Journal & Boerne TX Hill Country Weekly - Nov 10, 2010


I remember the year my dad took a painting class.

It changed the way I looked at grownups.

This happened around my sixth grade year. My dad would have been in his early 40s then... a very old person in my worldview. At dinner one evening, he mentioned that he had signed up for a painting class at the nearby university’s community education program.

Up to that point, I couldn’t envision my parents doing anything outside their roles of breadwinners and caregivers. We had grown up in a large family on a farm. As one of nine kids, my main interaction with my parents was when I needed discipline or a haircut.

For kids, parents were nebulous bodies that orbited around our fantasy universe, like Neptune or the Orion constellation. We knew they were there, and were comforted by their presence, but we never really looked at them as individuals distinct from other celestial mysteries.

So when my dad told us he was taking an art class, it made me see him as something else... a person.

School and learning was for kids. I knew that as a fact based on all my worldly experience. Getting out of high school - which to a 6th grader seemed an impossibly long way in the future - was emancipation.  I was not really sure what lay on the other side of graduation, but I knew it did not involve going back into a classroom. Especially for 40-something fathers.

For the next several weeks we watched as this new person in our family dutifully went to art class every Thursday evening. That in itself was unsettling, as dad was always, always home in the evening. For him to be out on a weeknight left us all a bit off balance. We looked on with interest as he brought home sketchbooks filled with his exercises. He really was quite good at drawing, a fact that made me proud for some reason.

The culmination of the class was to complete a landscape in oil. He chose to paint our family farm, a fitting subject that perhaps made his foray into the art world less avant garde.

When he brought home the finished piece, we were duly impressed. It was a painting that looked like our farm. And it was painted by our dad. The old dog had learned a new trick. At some childish level, that gave me hope that we could learn new things forever, even in our dotage.

The painting was hung with pride above the Lowry organ, which represented another new skill our dad picked up in middle age. Some 50 years later, the painting still hangs on the wall of the family farmhouse.

For me, now past the age my father was when he painted that picture, I try to master the violin, along with tap dancing, and twittering. It is interesting that the young boy who couldn’t envision school past the 12th grade now works with lifelong learning programs that accommodate 3000 local adult students and touch half a million Texans throughout the state.

So if you have always wanted to learn to dance, or paint, or weld, but just haven’t got around to it, please reconsider. Do it for yourself, of course. But do it for someone else, too.

You never know who might be paying attention.

XXX

A hard life

by Phil Houseal as published in the Kerrville TX Community Journal & Boerne TX Hill Country Weekly Nov 3, 2010


Where do you turn if your stock pens need welding, your drywall needs plastering, you are a retired widow, you live on a ranch 15 miles from the nearest town, and that town has a population of 25?

Loudell Eudaly called Club Ed.

Eudaly lives by herself on the home place - a working ranch somewhere along the Llano River. The house was built in 1930, and the barn went up in 1878. “You have to hold your mouth the right way to make things work,” she said of her historic place. “And when a cow kicks something off, I need to put it back on.”

The native Texan is anything but helpless. “I’ve been helping my daddy know what to beat on since I was a child,” she insisted. “And my daddy was pretty picky how things were taken care of.”

But with her daddy and her husband gone, and she needed some minor repairs done, she was stymied. Her cousin was farming peanuts, her neighbors were busy, and hired help? “Oh, Lord! They are so expensive there is nothing left for me at the end of the year,” she said. “I’m a nurse, and they shouldn’t make more than I do!”

But her daddy had left her a good welding rig. So, like the independent Texan she is, Eudaly decided to call Club Ed and learn to weld for herself.

She was also interested in learning more from our other classes, from how to use a computer to how to fix some broken drywall.

Apparently one of her helpers was too eager when working in the attic. “He had a ‘whoops’ and put a foot through the ceiling,” she said. “He was going to fix it, but that was three years ago and I don’t think it’s going to happen now.”

Eudaly has other small repairs on her “To Do” list. “I live in a museum - a house full of antiques,” she said. She read a book on repairing drywall, but is not quite ready to attack it. “Besides,” she said, “no one looks at walls: they aren’t dangerous; just ugly.”

So when Eudaly heard about Club Ed on her radio, she called up and started signing up for classes. Even though it’s a bit of a drive, she is willing to make the investment.

“I don’t want to have to pay others to do it,” she said of the work facing her. “I lead a hard life, but I want to be able to fix little things like drywall and fence. And,” she added, “I don’t want to live in town.”

xxx