Georgia O’Keeffe once said that her first memory was of being an infant lying on her parents’ quilt, mesmorised by the brilliant colours of the patchwork. My own first remembered experience is similar, except mine took place in a bowling alley. I was nine months old. It must have been a frigid day in February. My mother must have been bored. She left me in the nursery of the local lanes. I sat on a carpeted floor, surrounded by building blocks of bright reds, blues and yellows. In my memory, the blocks are more like blobs. (I don’t think babies can focus their eyes too well.) I was lost in the colours. I can still conjour up the feeling that being with those wooden blocks gave me. It is the feeling of floating in a strange, new world—a synesthetic world, where colours have textures, scents and tastes.
I have a quilt, too. On Easter Sunday, a cherished, long-time friend presented me with an astonishing one that she had designed and carefully stitched together over the last two years. To sleep beneath this quilt is to be wrapped up in a shifting kaleidoscope, to be suspended in a stained glass window, immersed in something that touches every fibre of your being in a transformative way. I can feel the love and light and life and breath of it..
It is a cherished thing to be a part of the fabric of another’s life. Yet, it can hurt fiercely to be torn or excluded from someone else’s quilt. The drum major I had a mad crush on in high school never looked at me once, let alone twice. I’ve had friends who’ve decided not to remain friends or to ever be friends in the first place. But I have left out or cut others from my life, too. Why? The answer may be as simple as the matching or mismatching of colours.
What is it that keeps some relationships firmly stitched and what is that splits others at the seams? Why do some friendships fray at the edges and fade to black, while others remain vibrant and inspired? Maybe it is the quality of the thread with which they are sewn together.
Piece by piece, our lives assemble into a patchwork created from the memories we filter through the prism of experience. Are my memories made of the same stuff as Georgia O’Keeffe’s? I would say yes. (Though I would wager that she never knew the difference between a ten and a duck pin or the thunderous cacophony of a bowling alley.) Perhaps the collective memory blankets all of us and the whole of human experience folds into one primordial, primary block of colour, much as the varying wavelengths of the spectrum converge to create one great, white beam of all-consuming light.