Grass Writing*

This scroll was made for us by an elderly gentleman in a park in Shanghai in 1980. It is a transcription of a poem which we chose from a collection he had on small pieces of paper, in English. The smaller writing down the left side of the page contains the name of the poet, my name and the calligrapher's, with his "chop", the red stamp at the bottom.

We watched in fascination as he wrote it all out, then decided that he had made a mistake and wrote it all out again a second time. We, of course, would never have known that a mistake was made, but his pride in his work would not allow him to put his mane on something that wasn't perfect. The interesting thing is that the second "copy" didn't look anything like the first one….

We had it framed when we got home, and it has hung in our house ever since. The English version of the poem, which the old gentleman gave us,  was taped to the back of the picture, but, sadly, was lost when we replaced the frame. Perhaps someone out there can read Mandarin "grass writing" which is what this beautiful calligraphy is called.

At the request of our insurance agent, I have been photographing the contents of our house. A thankless task, but we know so many people who  lost everything in the Oakland/Berkeley Hills firestorm and have heard their stories of the hoops they had to jump through to be compensated by their insurance companies that it seemed worth the effort.

At least I didn't make you look at the contents of one of our kitchen drawers….

* I was going to provide a link to a definition of Chinese grass writing, but when the first thing on the top of the Google list was "artificial turf",  I decided even Google has its limitations. Instead of the more traditional, blocky kanji , grass writing is a running script that varies according to the calligrapher, who is considered an artist in his own right.