Many Ways to Skin a Cat
I don’t actually chase my cat around with the vacuum cleaner, but in a manner of speaking I do. I love my big black cat. However he sheds fur. It is the gathering of this fur, dust, breadcrumbs, lint, dry skin, gray human hair, popcorn, and additional random detritus that led me, upon emptying to the vacuum cleaner bag, to both imagine my cat being gathered in bits and pieces as well as my personal history with turning scraps of nothing into wonderful sheets of paper. Your name and contribution will come later.
My cat’s name is Puck. Later on in this narrative I will use the phrase: “There are many ways to skin a cat”. I love my cat and generally that phrase is offensive, but being a common expression, I will use it.
Historically, paper has been around as long as I can remember. I have memories of drawing upon sheets of paper as far back as the early 1950s, although there are those who insist paper existed even prior to my birth in 1947. The first specific recollection was in first grade when my teacher locked me in the classroom closet and did not let me go outside during recess. My sin was to refuse to outline the Crayola colored figures I had made on paper. All other first-graders had done so. This true story worked out for me. My drawings on paper stayed free of outlines. As an aside, an old friend, Kent Kirby, reported a similar artistic freedom issue. His first grade teacher sent him to the principal’s office for refusing to color his tomatoes red. Kent, too, was focused on the colored marking object, not on the flat, white surface he was placing his colors upon the characterless, generic sheet of machine-made paper, something unworthy of note.
Paper was just something to accept, like milk in a glass bottle. Sometimes it was chocolate, at other times like with buttermilk it tasted terrible. But it was milk and was to be found in glass bottles outside the front door. Bread, on the other hand, was different. That was only because my grandmother made bread daily. She made loaves of sandwich bread, raisin-cinnamon bread, pumpernickel, whole wheat. My understanding is Grandma sold some of her bread, as she did her cakes and pies. She baked these for sale, fostered a couple of orphans, took in staff and entertainers from the nearby inn to make a living. I loved to smell the yeast that greeted my nose as I came home from school. Warm bread with a glob of peanut butter or raspberry jam was almost as wonderful as a fresh peanut butter cookie. I got to help make the peanut butter cookies. I flattened them with the backside of a fork, creating a grid design.
It is at this point you may have already figured out the connection my grandmother’s bread had with my eventual interest in making my own paper. From my earliest school years no other school student had a sandwich made with homemade bread. If other students noticed my bread was different, no one said anything. I did know a couple boys whose mother trimmed the crust from their Wonder bread. I liked my sandwiches on grandma’s bread, even the braunschweiger ones. Also, at school that I discovered chocolate and white milk in wax-coated paper boxes, not in glass.
The link between my grandmother’s bread and paper would not happen until I needed to make that connection. I was eighteen and in a graphic design class that visited a commercial papermill. The mill made Kraftpaper. As a matter of fact my hometown of Port Huron had several papermills. Each produced mass quantities of specialty wood pulp papers. The single thing I learned during the visit was it was possible to make a wide variety of papers, so long as they were produced in gigantic quantities. Colors and textures could be modified. Yet, the mill I was visiting had made nothing other than brown wrapping paper for the past forty years. They were stuck making whole wheat Wonder bread.
In art school I learned that there was better quality paper, paper that had a life expectancy of upwards of five hundred years. Any student who aspired to make serious ART would have to invest in this more expensive rag paper. Wood pulp paper was doomed to a brief, yellowing, brittle life. Sketch paper pads were cheap and self-destructive newsprint, bearers of the types of drawings best used to start a fire. Machine made rag paper was not that much more costly than newsprint. These sheets had cut edges. Still, this was more serious paper. Proper handmade rag paper had ragged, deckle edges, the indication of a single sheet being produced by a craftsman, one-at-a-time. These four edges were a mark of authenticity and value. Handmade paper, although premium, was still a relative bargain. It was as if one might pay a little bit more to have one of my grandmother’s crusty loaves instead of Wonder Bread.
It was not until I was Twenty-two that I was exposed to the equivalent of baking in my grandmother’s oven.
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