Wonders Untold

Look what I tripped over the other day when I was following a link from a friend's blog:

This is in my hometown of Kansas City, Missouri. I read it's the wall around the parking lot of the Main Branch of the KC Public Library.

I had no idea. I was back there last July, and didn't see this. I have a friend who goes to see classic films at the Public Library's new location in a renovated historic bank building, and while she's told me they show the movies in the former vault, she's never told me about this.

Amazing.

The irony is that Kansas City's in a real financial tsimmes right now and will be cutting all sorts of services and jobs to balance the budget. So while my homefolks suffer from their leadership's recent bad decisions, the Wisdom of the Ages will look down on them in their struggles and offer a Word of Hope.

Or else snigger, "We told you so!!"

Sidetracked?

Last July, when I was back in Kansas City, I bought a few yards of some beautiful off-white wool fabric from Kaplan's Fabrics on the Country Club Plaza.

My intention was to make myself a new preaching outfit from it, for those weeks from Easter on when it's too cold and early to wear white linen, but just wrong--liturgically, in particular--to wear black.

Not that I don't already own a winter white suit; it's just that I bought it back in 1997 and I've, well, kind of outgrown the skirt since then.

Yes.

Anyway, this weekend it hit me how close it's getting to Easter. So Sunday I found the fabric and the pattern, and preshrunk the material in the washer because there's no way I'm paying for dry cleaning every time a speck of dirt falls on it. Monday, I cleared and extended my dining room table, and started cutting the skirt pieces out.

This morning I attached the three front and the three back sections (it's a six-gore skirt), using French seams.

I'm debating whether I'll put a pocket in it; the pattern doesn't have one, but it's handy in case a church wants me to use a radio mike. Trouble is, when I made this skirt before, the seam over the pocket didn't sit straight. That skirt is black, so there I can kind of get away with it.

In white, not so much. But a pocket is so useful. I'm still trying to decide.

One thing that's not up for debate: The skirt needs to be lined. The wool fabric is too fine and lightweight not to. Last evening, I drove over to JoAnn Fabrics and got some matching lining material. Preshrunk it last night, and this afternoon I cut it out and started attaching the pieces.

But what on earth--? My sewing machine will not let me sew a straight seam on that lining! The feeddog catches it (or maybe, doesn't catch it) and the needle inexorably veers in a mindless diagonal off to the edge. I tried completing one seam, then another. Hopeless. They both look like a work of a crazy drunken fool: meandering all over the place, starting and stopping and restarting again, the stitch length long to tiny to back again, the tension too loose or too puckering tight.

I just can't make that machine sew my lining evenly and straight!

Why now, Lord, why now?

And why, at all?

. . . Well, yes, I did notice this morning that the sewing machine presser foot isn't dropping smartly into place. Rather, it sort of moseys its way down onto the fabric, like it hasn't quite made up its mind whether it wants to get to work or not . . . And this afternoon it was so slow and lacksidaisical about it, I thought it would never descend at all.

My theory is that it's just not holding the fabric down to the feeddog the way it should. The wool was just thick enough to make do with the pressure it gave, but the lining acrylic, no.

All very nice to have an idea of what's wrong. But I could have gotten so much more done on this skirt tonight! And now I've been sidetracked. There's no point in doing anything more until I can borrow or rent another sewing machine until mine can be fixed. Or until I can figure out how to clean up my old machine, a 1951 Singer, so it won't get oil and crud all over my nice cream-colored fabric.

How am I ever going to get my new suit done for Easter Sunday!? I'm as sidetracked as my crookedy lining seams!

Unless-- Unless this is God's way of telling me to work on my sermon for Easter Sunday before I work on my clothes? Like, maybe, this is His way of getting me-- maintracked?

Looking at Liberty

I'm back in my home town of Kansas City, Missouri, for this year's mass choir call for the North American Welsh Choir. Final rehearsals for our Saturday night concert begin tomorrow morning, most choristers having arrived this afternoon. I came a little earlier, to allow me to see people and places I hadn't since I moved east four years ago.

Some of these places didn't actually exist four years ago.

One such is the new Liberty Memorial Museum. Oh, it was in the planning stages in 2003. And the fundraising stages. And the arguing stages, with those who thought it was a desecration of the 1926 design of the building to build a large-scale exhibit space under the deck of the nation's officially-designated World War I memorial. And the preconstruction stages, when it came to the rough structure and the entry doors.

But the museum was not officially opened until last December 2nd. And today was my first opportunity to see it.

Architecturally, it's impressive. You approach down a great ramped walkway past grassy terraces and an oval reflecting pool and enter through monumental bronze doors. The entry to the exhibit space is across a glass-floored bridge, one storey beneath which are 900 field poppies, suspended in a clear medium; each poppy represents 1,000 people killed in the course of the war.

The exhibits take you through the background and causes of the Great War, its mode of fighting, its armaments, equipment, and artifacts. But especially they seek to make the visitor understand what it was like for the average soldier, slogging away in the trenches for months on end, enduring the mud, disease, and vermin that were in their way worse than the firefights that punctuated the seemingly endless stalemate. This is shown especially in the trench exhibit.

I remember when the trench exhibit was proposed. There were complaints because, some said, it would glorify war. They must have been out of their minds. How can a representati0n of a dank, fetid hellhole glorify anything?

My only complaint is that the exhibit designers chose to have these tableaux viewed either through openings about a foot square or through three inch diameter holes, both punched in a wall about what? Nine to twelve inches thick? Wouldn't be a problem, if the openings were splayed on the inside. But they're angled, so you don't get a straight shot in. And often, what you can't see is exactly what you most want to make out. I found my digital camera (set to 'natural light') was an indispensible tool. That's the only way I was able to see what was really going on inside. This needs to be rethought. Not just because it doesn't communicate fully, but more because it commits the artistic crime of making the viewer step outside his experience of the work of art and say, "Why on earth did the artist do that??" And the World War I presentation at the Liberty Memorial is a work of art.
As to the artifacts, there are wonderful things, most of them donated by WWI participants or their survivors as far back as 1919. I especially liked the long German pipes with their ornamented ceramic bowls. Then there are the ominous pieces, like the torpedo you can touch, that so like the ones that sunk so many civilian vessels, including the Lusitania itself.

In many cases, seeing various objects was like greeting old friends who've come up in the world. I remembered many of them from when they were on display in the overcrowded little Museum built in the the original 1926 campaign.I don't know what's in the old Museum space now. I had a ticket to it, and also to Memorial Hall (be prepared to weep, especially as you consider the Gold Star Mothers of then and now). But the new Liberty Memorial Museum needs at least three hours to visit by itself, and I only had an hour and a half to give.

Three hours for that, another hour at least for the old Museum and Memorial Hall, half an hour at least to go up the tower, then another half hour to take in the limestone composition of the Memorial as a whole-- you could spend the best part of a day there and not exhaust what the complex has to offer.
And you come away with a salutary sense of the continuing impact of the Great War and a deep appreciation of the sacrifice of those who fought to stop old tyrannies and bring in new hope.

No, it wasn't the War to End All Wars. It was the war of its time. These battles have to be fought again and again, literally and figuratively. And it's good to count the cost-- and give the credit, for then and for now.

Anyway, I recommend that any visitor to Kansas City make time to go. It's more than worth the $8 adult admission.