Saturday morning was unusual; it was the first Saturday morning without a
basketball practice since late October.  To fill the time, we made a family
outing to midtown KC, picked up a few things at Wild Oats, an organic grocer,
then headed over to Waldo on a whim.  See, we got a certificate for a
Persian rug from A.–a good friend who runs a gallery in south-central Kansas
City, just beyond the Plaza and the campus of UMKC.  We don’t get over
there often; in fact, we hadn’t been in at least a year.  Originally from
Persia, just before it switched to Iran in ’35, A., now 80-something, gifted us
a generous certificate for a 3×5 carpet from his shop; we’ve put off the visit
for the past seven months because of the chaos of our incongruent
schedules.  

A life-long chemist by trade, A. wasn’t at the shop.  His son-in-law,
J., was filling in.  He called A. on the phone, handed it off to me. 
A. and I visited for a few minutes, much like we used to, back when I was an
undergraduate ghostwriting monthly letters to antique dealers on his
behalf.  We met because he and his late wife, P., were alums of my alma
mater; I was the recipient of the first award named for his wife, the first
recipient after her passing.  And I thanked him with a letter.  He
invited me to lunch at the Kabob House, and so on.  Over the phone, A. said
he was disappointed to miss us Saturday, but he hoped we would return this week
to have lunch with him.  He was giving a talk on chemistry to a group of
boy scouts in the afternoon.  Couldn’t be at the gallery Saturday for that
reason.

J. showed us the 3×5 rugs in the shop.  A new shipment is scheduled for
tomorrow–A. already encouraged me to come back then–but J. wanted to
familiarize us with the inventory, with the factors that might affect our
choice.  And nobody else was in the place; we had time.  I don’t have
a strong handle on the discourse surrounding Persian rugs.  They are named
by region, and the regions are subtle, varying from town to town.  The rugs
signify an incredibly rich range of details–about the makers, the pace and
process of making, the quality of wool, the colors of die, the age of the piece,
the elevation and climate of the environment in which it was made, and the
disposition of the maker(s) to symmetry and structure, both in art, and as J.
suggested, in civic ideology (where regional variation might be best polled
through knot patterns).  I know this last bit seems like a stretch, but as
D. and I listened to J. talk for twenty or thirty minutes on Saturday morning, I
thought about the importance of reading Middle Eastern (as in East-Turkish,
Armenia, Iranian, Afghani, Pakistani, Iraqi) cultures through art-objects such
as knotted wool rugs. This seemed like a promising, humanistic alternative to
the predictable, often villainizing droll sent through major Western news
media.  

So we just listened about the rugs as J. told us that Western buyers
generally preferred tidy symmetries, neat symbolic systems (depictions of
leaves, flowers, balanced shapes), and complimentary color schemes.  He
said it was a European notion to hang a rug as a piece of art, and that rugs
were commonly collaborative household or neighborhood projects produced for
short-term economic reward (spare money for this or that).  He compared
these dynamics to manufactured rugs coming from India and China.  These
rugs ship in batches that often follow an identical pattern.  They’re all
hand-made, but the wool is a lower quality (again, in J.’s opinion), which is
why A.’s gallery doesn’t carry any such items.  A couple of examples he
showed us were really peculiar; one was 35 inches on one end and 42 inches on
the other end.  It had a broken border and different colored
dies–evidence, J. said, that it was probably a training rug where younger
makers were learning to knot or where the rug sat idle for long interruptions,
long breaks. 

We left Saturday and headed to the Kabob House (it’s on Wornall and 87th or
so), filled up on Kansas City’s best joojeh kabob, barg, and tardig (crusted
rice, bottom of the pot) topped with vegetable stew.  And the house
dressing is simply dill weed, olive oil and lemon juice.  I could drink
it.  But then I wouldn’t need the tea, which is best taken with an occasional
sugar cube.  Oh, and the ground sumac peppered generously on top of it
all.  That’s it.  I’m going to call A. and go back tomorrow.