GregMercer.ca Newspapering and other adventures

Sooo… you like quilts?

The Guelph Mercury, 1/3/2009

Wanted: One good wife. Willing to pay in quilts.

That’s what the classified ad would look like, at least, if a certain doting grandmother concerned about the unmarried state of yours truly had her way. Because what’s the point of making a matrimonial quilt if you can’t give it away?

In India, they have dowries of cattle, cash and appliances.

In my family, we’ve got quilts.

As far back as anyone in the clan can remember, the rule has always been such — get ye married, and ye shall have a quilt made by the grandmother.

It’s a matter of ensuring procreation. Without those handmade, heavy blankets to sweeten the deal for prospective spouses, the Mercer line would have died off generations ago, so the theory goes. We’d have gone the way of the woolly mammoth and the Betamax video system.

It makes for one heck of a pickup line, too: “So . . . you like quilts?”

Without it, what’s left? “So . . . you like newspapers?” To which, if the receiver is under 30, the usual answer is: “What’s a newspaper?”

So it was on the recent Christmas holiday, drowning my bachelor’s sorrows in leftover turkey and rings — shrimp rings, that is — that I was reminded by my grandmother of my nonmarried status. And that those quilts weren’t getting any younger.

I was informed that if I reach 40 without having walked down the aisle, I’ll get a quilt for one, which is the saddest of all the quilts — seven feet long but just three feet wide.

The offer is void, though, if I’m beaten to the punch by some amorous great-grandchild who might get carried away in Las Vegas. All of which means your hero has maybe a dozen years to get his act together.

My grandmother has a vaultful of the things in the basement of her bungalow, waiting to be doled out upon news of engagements.

She’s got the other ladies in her Legion women’s auxiliary in on the act, producing enough dowry quilts to marry off the town of Fergus three times over. These grey-haired quilters would put a shop full of sweating Filipino kids to shame.

I suspect if it became known the quantity of quilts could be increased to, say, 20 a head, we could have all us singletons married within the year. But my grandmother is a woman of tradition, and it’s one grandchild, one quilt.

There are some rare nights, even I will admit, that the prospect of marriage does not seem quite as bad as contracting the Ebola virus. No one wants to be a lonely old man, shuffling into a bar to ask college girls if they have ever seen anyone do the Macarena in a walker.

And women can be nice to have around for the long run, even if they sometimes make us talk about our . . . you know . . . umm . . . feelings.

Marriage as an institution, though, has taken its lumps. I’m from a generation that picks which parent’s home to go to for Christmas dinner, and which one to go to for Christmas Eve. Years of divorce and remarriage have left our family trees looking more like tangled shrubs than tall, linear maples.

It’s easy to be cynical about an arrangement that so often ends badly. People are always rushing into it, rushing out of it. It’s like we expect a few aborted missions before finally getting to the moon. What the heck, just file some paperwork and try it all again.

But then again, what’s with those old couples who have made it work? You see them there, finishing each other’s stories and conveying whole thoughts to each other without talking. Actually smiling at each other, like they’re two of a kind, intricately linked.

Maybe they’re on to something. What do they know that the rest of us don’t?

So. You like quilts?