Microwunderkammer

 Parental Artifact #17–a batik shirt.

Here I am, all gussied up and “out on the town”—farmer-speak for at the co-op getting a load of feed. The next stop was the grocery store, where a random stranger approached me and said “I don’t know if there is a shirt of the week competition going on, but if there is, you totally win!” I now own a few shirts like this, all beautiful if not aesthetically restrained. As is the style, they are not to be tucked in, and they have a pair of pockets just above the waist, which are quite handy.

On the one hand, there is nothing mysterious about this shirt. It loudly states what it is, and again more quietly, on the label, that it is batik made by BuKarli in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. On the other hand, this shirt and its companions are a little mysterious to me. They are practically new, unworn, and fit me perfectly. When my parents purchased them, they fit nobody in my family at all.

The batik shirts were bought where they were made, when my family visited Java in 1981. We were traveling from Canberra, where we had lived while my father was on sabbatical at the Australian National University, back home to Los Angeles. We stopped for a week or so each in Indonesia, Malaysia (and Singapore), and Japan. Our stays in Malaysia and Japan could be justified by visits to my dad’s former colleagues and students. I am not positive why we visited Java, but I’m pretty sure it was my mom’s suggestion.

There are many reasons to want to visit Java. If I were in charge, I would go there to experience a gamelan orchestra and “wayang” shadow puppet plays, along with some of the other cultural sights, as I am motivated by such things. My mom, on the other hand, was always strongly motivated by botany. If one is in Southeast Asia, then the place to go for botanists is Bogor, Java, home of the world’s premier tropical botanical garden. I am pretty sure this flower of the botanical world attracted my mom the way the way Rafflesia (the plant with the world’s largest single flower, which smells like carrion; native to Java, and grown in Bogor) attracts flies.

(As an aside, I can’t recall how many expeditions we made as a family to see a particular plant that grows only in a particular place: Kennedy’s mariposa lily, fire poppy, elephant tree, antarctic beech, the southernmost mangrove, coco de mer, ironwood, Panamint daisy, various Banksias, a hybrid cholla cactus…the list is very long. In considering my parents’ long marriage, it is worth noting that my dad, though not at all botanically motivated, pretty much always put in the work to make these jaunts happen. I suspect that the reasons we were in Australia in the first place were as much biochemical as they were botanical, although I will never know for sure.)

Visiting Bogor had historical precedent in my mom’s family. In the 1920’s her grandfather made a world tour. He was a botanist, professionally, and while traveling from South Africa and Japan, he stopped at Bogor (then, under Dutch rule, known as Buitenzorg). The gardens were world famous even then, having been on the forefront of tropical botany for a hundred years. His visit was professional, not touristic. We have some postcards from that trip, and though I don’t recall my mom mentioning it, I’m pretty sure that retracing her grandfather’s footsteps was an attraction.

I wish I remembered more of Bogor. I do remember Victoria amazonica (the Victoria Water Lily from the Amazon, with leaves over a meter across), Rafflesia (it wasn’t blooming, so it wasn’t much to look at) and a few other plants. I remember more vividly other things from Indonesia—the Buddhist temple complex at Borobudur made a big impression on me, as did the hour-long near death experience of a taxi ride through Jakarta, and the batik workshops of Jogjakarta.

While Bogor was probably the main reason for my mom’s interest in Java, it’s possible that batik was a secondary reason. My mom had a lifelong interest in fabric arts, and batik was part of that. She had tried it herself, and on earlier trips had acquired some pretty examples of batik from other areas, and a Javanese batik her grandfather had bought decorated a wall in her parents’ house. However, these paled in comparison with what we saw in Jogjakarta. My parents went on a shopping spree. My brothers and I now have a large number of framed and un-framed batik artworks from Java. One of us has a tjanting, the tool for drawing with wax for batik, and another has an intricate copper form for printing a wayang figure in wax upon cotton. And, since they fit me well, I have these nice shirts, which are art as much as anything in a frame.

I’m 6’1”, the tallest in my family; in 1981, I was maybe 5 feet something, and nobody in the family was anywhere near six feet. My dad, maybe 5’6”, was also rather chunky, and while his arms weren’t long enough for the sleeves of one of these shirts, his trunk wouldn’t have fit inside any of them. As near as I can tell, the shirts were bought “on spec” for us. How did my parents know that they’d fit me? A mystery, and a happy one. At any rate, once we returned to Los Angeles, the shirts went into a trunk, where they slept, folded up, for nigh on forty years, until my brothers and I allocated them.

These beauties have been sleeping in my closet until recently, nestled among my oxfords and neckties from my teaching days. Too fancy to wear, I thought. However, I looked at them recently, and thought again.

These shirts are art, and art is meant to be seen. There’s no penalty for wearing them to town: unlike the many nice neckties I own, they are comfortable, and the extra pockets are useful. But mainly, they are beautiful! There is absolutely nothing wrong with inflicting a little beauty onto the world. And so I do. Mayhap I will win the shirt of the week contest. Or maybe, I will just brighten somebody’s day; and, as a bonus, I’ll wear them, and rub shoulders with 13-year-old me in a crowded and sweaty market in Java, and with my mom’s adventurous spirit, my dad haggling in pidgin with a craftsman, and with my great-grandfather traveling around the world a hundred years ago.