Quilt No. 118
March 2017
This is one for the doodle addicted. You know who you are. You embarrass yourself at meetings as the
doodle that began as a few innocent marks in the margin of your notes becomes cultivated into
pages of swirls and triangles and leaves with veins and warts. Harry Potter is defeating a Lord of the Rings
dragon, and both are wearing top hats. Suddenly,
you snap back to reality in a quiet room.
All the faces around the meeting table are now turned to the bloom on
your page. The question the chairperson
has directed at your deaf and doodling ears is a complete unknown. You dredge up your best all-situation answer
- “It could be possible.” I’ve learned this
the hard way. Corporations frown on doodling.
The other circumstance that fosters doodling is the
telephone call. Meetings held on the
phone are the worst. At the end I must
tease out my notes from the grip of butterflies. Fish with large eyes muddle the key points
and bubbles obscure the phone number of the key person I’ve been assigned to
contact. I’m also a home doodler. I was talking to my sister on the phone when Finding Mankind found me. She is unaware of my doodling ways, and I
find it best to keep it that way. At the
end of the phone call I look over the doodles and then throw them away. However, in this particular one I spotted a
man. He was difficult to distinguish
from the background, just like mankind cannot easily be extracted from his
environment - despite lofty thoughts to the contrary. In this quilt you must look carefully.
Eventually you too will find mankind.
