Three Feet by Six Feet
Donald's Panel
Donald Norwood
April 2, 1947 – June 30, 1993
My name is William Braunstein. I'm fifty-seven years old and I live in Denver, where I kept the books
for a lumber company for twenty-nine years until I retired last year. For sixteen years I shared my
life and my house with Donald Norwood, who taught French at a public high school here. He died of
AIDS in June of 1993. He was forty-six.
A year later I made a panel for him for the AIDS Memorial Quilt. I am not a sewing man, and it took
me four months of Tuesday nights. This page is about him, and about that piece of cloth, and about
the October weekend in 1996 when I found it again, lying on the grass in Washington among all the
others.
It has taken me a long while to write this. Please excuse the parts that ramble. Donald always said
I wrote like a ledger, and he was right, and I am trying to do better.
♦ ♦ ♦
Who he was
Donald grew up on a wheat farm in western Nebraska, the youngest of four, and the first in his family
to go to college. In 1967, when he was twenty, he spent a summer in Paris on a scholarship, and he
came home a different person. He said it was the first place he had ever been where nobody asked him
when he was going to get married. He taught French for twenty-two years, the last nineteen at the same
high school. He took students to France every other spring and brought every one of them back, which he
considered his greatest professional achievement.
He was tall and thin and losing his hair, and he did the newspaper crossword every morning in ink. He
graded papers at our kitchen table with a red felt-tip pen and his reading glasses down on the end of
his nose, and he sang along to old French records while he did it, badly. He could not parallel park.
He made a quiche every Sunday. He was the kindest person I have ever known, and he could also be a
terrible snob about cheese.
His students adored him. When he got too sick to teach, in the spring of 1992, they sent him so many
cards that we kept them in a laundry basket. There were letters from students he had taught in 1974.
How we met
It was the Fourth of July, 1977, at a friend's picnic in City Park. I was thirty-five and had more or
less decided I would be alone. Donald brought a quiche, at a picnic, in July, in Colorado, and nobody
would eat it but me. I had two pieces to be polite and a third because it was good. He asked me if I
liked French food and I said I didn't know any. He said that was a tragedy he could fix.
That fall I moved into his little brick house with its terrible furnace, and that's where I still live.
We had sixteen years. We were not allowed to marry, of course, and his family took some time to come
around, though his sister Rosanne came around right away and never left. We never had a big ceremony.
We had a kitchen table.
His illness
Donald learned he had the virus in 1987, and he stayed well for a long time. In 1991 he became sick
with AIDS, and he taught for one more year because he would not stop. He died at home, in our bed, in
June 1993, with Rosanne and me beside him. That is all I'm going to say about that. He would not want
to be remembered for the last year. He would want to be remembered for the other forty-five.
♦ ♦ ♦
The sewing bee
For a year after he died I didn't do much of anything. Then a friend of ours, Gary, took me by the elbow
to a church near Capitol Hill where a group met on Tuesday nights to help people make panels for the
Quilt. It was run by a retired home economics teacher named Barbara Turbeville, who was seventy if she
was a day and had taught half of Denver how to hem a skirt. There were about a dozen of us, most of us
men, most of us grieving, and most of us had never threaded a needle. She taught us anyway. She had
endless patience with grown men crying over a sewing machine. She'd hand you a tissue and say,
"Now, backstitch."
Every panel in the Quilt is the same size: three feet by six feet. That is roughly the size of a grave.
You make it however you want, with whatever means something, so long as it's sturdy enough to be
folded and unfolded and walked beside for years. Then you send it in with a letter about the person, and
it is sewn together with seven others into a big square block, twelve feet by twelve, and it travels.
The panel, piece by piece
Here is a rough drawing of the layout. The letters match the descriptions below.
| A name |
| B dates |
C
shirt |
D
tower |
E
glasses |
| F chalkboard |
G
puzzle |
| H farewell |
(not to scale; I'm a bookkeeper, not an artist)
The background is a heavy dark blue cotton, the color of the sky over Paris about an hour after
sunset. Donald and I went to Paris together only once, in 1985, and that was the color the sky turned
every night while we walked along the river. The border is a strip of burgundy corduroy from
the jacket he wore every winter for fifteen years, which had leather patches on the elbows and chalk
dust in the pockets that I never could wash out. I stopped trying.
A. His name. DONALD NORWOOD, in capital letters six inches high, cut from our kitchen tablecloth.
It was yellow and white checked cotton, and every paper he ever graded at home was graded on top of it.
There's a faint red ink stain on the second O of NORWOOD. I put it there on purpose. Barbara asked me
twice if I was sure, and then she helped me center it.
B. The dates, 1947 – 1993, in small white felt numbers. I kept them small. The dates are
the least interesting thing about him.
C. A pocket made from his blue oxford shirt, the button-down he wore to every parent-teacher
conference he ever had. I cut out the front, with the pocket and three buttons still on it, and sewed it
on so the pocket is a real pocket. Inside the pocket is a letter I wrote to him. The pocket is sewn
shut. Nobody gets to read it but him.
D. The Eiffel Tower, thirty inches tall, cut from black felt, with the crossbars outlined in
gold thread and a scatter of tiny gold sequins for the lights. When we were in Paris he dragged me out
at night to see it lit up, and stood there with his hands in his pockets grinning like he'd built it
himself. It took me three Tuesday nights just to get the legs even. The sequins took two more. Barbara
said sequins are how you know a man really loved somebody.
E. His reading glasses, traced in outline and embroidered in black thread. I laid his actual
glasses down on the cloth and drew around them with tailor's chalk, then stitched over the line. Beside
them is a red felt-tip pen, in red thread, with the cap off, because the cap was always off.
F. A chalkboard, a rectangle of dark green felt, with the words Bonjour, la classe stitched
across it in white, the way he greeted every class every morning for twenty-two years. His students wrote
to me later that they could still hear him saying it.
G. A crossword, nine little squares of black and white cotton in a grid, with a D and an N
stitched in two of the white ones. That was my idea of a joke. He would have groaned.
H. At the bottom, in white embroidered script, À bientôt, which means "see
you soon." It's what he wrote at the bottom of every note he ever left on the refrigerator. I think
it's what I'd like to say to him.
I sent it in with a long letter in the fall of 1994. I folded it the way Barbara showed us and put it in
the box and didn't open the box again. I couldn't have.
♦ ♦ ♦
October 11–13, 1996
In October of 1996 the whole Quilt was laid out together on the National Mall in Washington, every panel
at once. Gary and Rosanne and I flew out together. I want to try to describe it for anyone who wasn't
there, but I'm not sure I can.
It covered the Mall. From the steps of the Capitol, on the grass, all the way down toward the Washington
Monument, block after block after block of cloth, with canvas walkways in between. Tens of thousands of
panels. From the high ground it looked like an enormous patchwork bedspread laid over the whole city, and
when you got down onto the walkways you could not see the end of it in any direction. All weekend, from a
stage, people took turns reading the names aloud, one after another, without stopping. You could hear the
names wherever you walked. People cried in public, and nobody minded, and strangers held each other up.
At the information tents there were directories where you could look up a name and find its block number.
Donald's was there. I wrote the number on the back of my hand in pen, and on Saturday morning the three of
us went looking. It took us almost an hour to find the right section. Rosanne saw it first. She took my arm
and pointed, and there it was, in a block with seven strangers, between a panel made by somebody's mother
covered in baseball cards and a panel for a woman from Ohio with a hundred hand-sewn butterflies.
The tablecloth letters were faded a little from two years of traveling. The pocket was still shut. Somebody
had laid a single white carnation on the felt chalkboard. I don't know who. I like to think it was one of his
students, but it might just have been someone who stopped, the way people did all weekend, and read his name,
and wanted him to have a flower.
I sat down on the canvas walkway beside him for most of an hour. I told him about the furnace, which still
doesn't work, and about Rosanne's grandchildren, and that I'd finally learned to make his quiche. People walked
around us very quietly. Before we left I wrote his name on one of the big signature squares where visitors
could write messages, and under it I wrote À bientôt.
The ones who are still here
In 1993, when Donald died, most of the men we knew who had the virus were dying too. I went to more funerals
in the early nineties than in all the rest of my life put together. Our friend Timothy died in January 1996,
at twenty-nine, a few months too soon.
Because in 1996 things began to change. The new drugs came, the protease inhibitors, taken together with the
older ones in a combination the papers call the cocktail. They are not a cure. They are hard to take, a
handful of pills on a strict schedule, with side effects that are no fun at all, and they don't work for
everyone. But they have kept people alive who would not have lived. The number of people dying of AIDS in
this country has fallen sharply since then.
Gary, who took me to the sewing bee, was planning his own funeral in the spring of 1996. He had picked out
the music. Now he carries a pill box with an alarm on it, complains about it constantly, and went back to
work full time last year. Our friend Paul, who was so sick in 1995 that I sat with him at night so his partner
could sleep, rode his bicycle to the mountains this August. I don't know how long it will last for them. Nobody
does. But I didn't think I would ever write a sentence like that, and I wanted to write it here, beside Donald,
because I think he would want to know.
I wish he'd had three more years. That's all. Just three.
If you are thinking about making a panel
Do it. You don't need to know how to sew. Find a group, if there's one near you; if not, a friend with a
sewing machine and some patience will do. Use something that belonged to them. Make it sturdy, hem the edges,
and make sure their name is on it. Then let it go. It's the hardest and best thing I've ever done with my hands.
And if you knew Donald, as a student or a friend or a fellow teacher, I would be very glad to hear from you.
Visitors since June 30, 1998:
   
[email protected]
William Braunstein, Denver, Colorado
Last updated August 29, 1999
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