His name was Daniel Sheets Dye. And he was obsessed.

In 1909, the 25-year-old college grad signed on with a Baptist missionary society to help establish a medical college in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, western China. Sichuan in those days was literally beyond the edge of our world; civilized, but alien. Western influence hadn’t made the slightest dent.

I can’t tell you what made Daniel Dye, a square-jawed Ohio farm boy, make a long-term commitment to teach science in Chengdu, a 2000-year-old city he’d probably never heard of.

But as he packed his bags, Dye’s old professors urged him to get a hobby — something to stave off homesickness and culture shock ten thousand miles from home in a land that probably never heard of Cleveland or Columbus, either.

And after Dye settled in, he got his hobby.

One day he was touring a shrine to a famous poet when he saw some Chinese lattice windows of unusual design. In traditional Chinese architecture, windows are made of a decorative wooden lattice with a sheet of rice paper glued to the inside to block the draft. Lattice windows let in the light, if not the sights; glass windows hadn’t made it to Sichuan yet.

Dye had noticed simple lattice windows before — grids and so forth — but these were special. He immediately copied down 20 designs and took them back to the university. Something about the intricate lattices — perhaps the underlying maths and geometries that informed their design — zapped Dye’s systematic Baptist brain. He took his copies home and set out to research the history of Chinese lattice windows.

But there wasn’t any. Lattice windows weren’t considered art; they were simply something that carpenters created using folk designs that were passed down through the generations. Dye found just one book on the subject, 300 years old and “with a limited commentary.”

But now he noticed lattice windows everywhere he went; he saw similar designs and motifs from place to place, and others that were wildly different than anything else.

But even as he began to study the lattice, it began to go away.

The Manchu Dynasty was collapsing, China sank into turmoil. Everywhere, old buildings burned down or blew up in insurrections, riots, clashes between rival warlords. Lattice windows began to disappear; in the new buildings, glass windows replaced them.

So Dye decided that he would be the scholar of Chinese lattice wherever he found it — in windows, on the side of buildings, carved into wooden boxes. Before it vanished forever.

He made hundreds, maybe thousands of drawings and rubbings and measurements in the street and on the road, where he traveled by sedan chair in convoys with other notables. Dye said that you could always tell which sedan chair he was in because it was likely to pull over unexpectedly so he could jump out to sketch an interesting window. And of course curious locals would invariably crowd around the odd-looking foreigner. It wasn’t always easy to get those drawings made.

Dye even taught one of his Chinese assisting teachers to use a mechanical drawing set and transcribe Dye’s rough sketches into permanent, precise drawings in his spare time. (It’s unclear precisely how “spare” that time was to the Chinese gentleman, though Dye kept him at it for 20 years.)

Where certain lattice designs had Chinese names, Dye identified and recorded them; where there were no names, he made his own. He devised a complete classification system for Chinese lattice design based on the basic motifs he identified, and placed each and every one of his designs in it, along with the precise location of the original and what he could find out of its age and background.

Dye figured out the principles behind each type of lattice design in his classification scheme and developed procedures for replicating every single one of them. And he never stopped trying to figure out What it All Meant. Some of the designs had themes he could figure out from Chinese cultural references, but the rest — Where did they come from? How old were they? Who invented them?

All the swastikas that recurred over and over — religious, or just a folk motif? And then he started looking at patterns woven into the belts of Tibetan herdsmen and saw many of the same patterns he saw in his windows. And he went to Japan, and Korea and even back to the states and saw lattice everywhere and noticed similarities everywhere. What came from what? Who influenced who?

Daniel Sheets Dye never did figure “it” all out. Maybe there was nothing there, or maybe too much. His lattice designs could have come from a hundred places, and moved on to a hundred places and mutated along the way; folk art is like that, especially in a cultural crossroads like western China.

But after he’d spent 25 years in China — where did the time go — Dye took his mass of material and published an awkwardly-written book with an extensive collection of drawings arranged according to his new classification system. And thus appeared the first treatise on Chinese lattice design in 300 years. There have been no others, since. There may never be. Who else would care that much? And even if they did, how many lattice windows are left?

Dye stayed in China until the Communists rolled into Chengdu in ’49, and then went home to the States — though I suspect it wasn’t “home” anymore. The medical school he taught at is still operating, by the way.

Daniel Sheets Dye lived on for many years and never gave up on lattices — and never achieved the “Big Picture” synthesis he’d been hoping for, either. Before he died, though, he apparently sold the rights to his works to Dover Publications, that eccentric reissuer of obscure and forgotten reference books and literature. And Dover has kept it in print ever since.

After Dye died, Dover even published additional lattice patterns from Dye’s papers as an artists’ design book.

Which is why both books were here for me to find — at a ridiculously low price — on the “New Arrivals” cart at Logos used bookstore in Santa Cruz some time back. I marveled at the odd patterns and strange geometries, unlike any I’d seen. I found them curiously satisfying on some visceral, non-intellectual level. Perhaps I felt what Dye had felt as he hopped from his sedan chair on a bustling street in Sichuan, pencil and paper and measuring tape in hand, at the sight of a mesmerizing lattice window. I bought them both; I see at least a couple of good stained glass projects in Dye’s collection.

Yes, Dye was obsessed. But obsession, though not always the most pleasant of personality traits, often leaves something behind for the rest of us to enjoy. And if you troll the Internet you will find artists and craftspeople and even mathematicians and programmers whose work, they will gladly confess, was influenced by a Baptist science teacher’s book on Chinese lattice designs. Designs which might never have made it out of China — or survived at all — if Dye had decided to take up cooking instead.

All hail to the obsessed! And thank you, Mr. Dye.

Maude Frickert died last week. I’ll miss her. Even though she inhabited the body of a comedian named Jonathan Winters.

Winters passed away last Friday at 89: a guy who was more comfortable at being someone else than he ever was at being himself.

Luckily, he had lots of other selves to be; Winters was a crowd on two feet, an inexhaustible cast of crazy characters. And he could improvise endlessly.

But it’s Maude Frickert that I remember: an old woman in a bulky black dress with wire-frame glasses and a cap of silver hair – and the sharpest tongue on the planet. Winters as Maude was outrageous, shameless, and bluntly honest: all the things that proper older women aren’t supposed to be.

Only, they are. A lot of them, anyway. You aren’t supposed to know that. It contravenes the cultural script.

I learned the truth at my grandmother’s knee. Gramma was large, elderly, and Portuguese, with an accent as thick and rich as linguica sausage. She liked to tell me elderly Portuguese jokes. Because I was young and her accent was so thick, it took awhile to figure out that Gramma’s old jokes were off-color.  Wandering sailors, snooty priests, foul-mouthed parrots, not-so-innocent women: this was Gramma’s cast of characters.

“What were you talking to Gramma about?” Mom would ask my seven-year-old self.

“She told me a joke about the priest, the widow, and the sailor’s parrot.”

“She told you THAT one?” Mom would hiss in dismay. But she never had “a word” with Gramma. No one did. It was no use. Gramma had got through a tough life by being a live wire, a character who knew what she wanted and didn’t care what other people thought.

Back when I was a teenager Uncle Caesar, 65 if he was a day, ran off to get married without telling anyone. He’d just buried his second wife – he buried the first one, too – and the guy couldn’t stand being single. Six in the morning, inn the dawn following the wedding night, the phone rings.

“Yur?” Uncle Caesar answered. It was early.

“So what’s this about you getting married?” It was an old woman.

“Who’s this?” Caesar demanded groggily.

“Nosy Rosy!” It was Gramma, of course. Her network of spies had just gotten the word to her – I’m not sure she ever slept – and she didn’t care what time of day it was or who he was in bed with. By Uncle Caesar’s report, she gave him an earful.

Some of my aunts were practically Gramma’s clone: Aunt Lupe, for example. As a girl she’d been pushed into a bad marriage by Gramma; she got out of that and decided, later on, that it was more fun to live in sin and drink beer – especially other people’s beer.

And Aunt Amelia. She and Gramma fought like cats in a sack, because both of them wanted their own way and neither would ever yield.

After Gramma died, Aunt Amelia let her hair go gray and restyled it, so that she looked – just like Gramma. She acted like her, too, as she always had: did what she wanted, said what she felt like, and never looked back. Aunt Amelia was actually very easy to get along with: you could say absolutely anything to her, because she never listened.

After church service last week I charged to the men’s room – they’d baptized somebody’s spawn, and it took a while. As I zipped up at the urinal, after, a prim old woman strode into the men’s room. “My, isn’t church busy today,” she remarked, smiling, as if discussing the weather. She didn’t break step for a moment – just moved confidently into the toilet stall and shut the door.

Wow. Bold old women are alive and well. Maude Frickert could not have excelled her. I could tell you other stories, but that’s for another time.

There was once a very wise women who kept her eyes wide open all her life, and wrote very interesting novels about people and the things that they do – to themselves, and to others. From her work a couple of quotes stay with me: “Pain is the great teacher of mankind. Under its breath, human souls grow.” And she also said, “Old age transfigures – or petrifies.”

One thing that I can say about the bold, old women in my life is that they’ve all been through the mill, one way or another. And they survived, and figured out who they were, and accepted it. Even Jonathan Winters based the Maude Frickert character on his Aunt Lou, a large woman with lifelong physical handicaps – and a lightning wit, and a taste for apple brandy. And it seemed to me that as they got older these women seasoned liked old wood, knots and blemishes and all.

As a not-terribly-assertive man in late middle age, I still do ask myself sometimes what I’m going to be when I grow up. I can aspire to nothing better, I think, than to accept myself as I am and stop making excuses for not being what others want me to be. And just move forward from there. The bold, old ladies show the path forward. As did Jonathan Winters, the guy who became himself by becoming others. Rest in peace, sir. And Maude with you.

It’s a nice restaurant. But the kitchen misplaced our order. Our eggs and potatoes were long in coming.

On the plus side, the waitress kept the coffee flowing. Rhumba and I had much to chat about, and the surroundings were delightful.

But as time passed I became restless. Out of boredom, I fiddled with my place setting.

This proved to be instructive.

I rearranged the spoon, knife and fork until they were fanned out from each other, just barely touching at the handles. There’s a bit of the obsessive-compulsive in me.

Then I moved the knife to one side. The spoon moved with it.

I moved the knife even further.  The spoon continued to cling to the knife.

I repeated the operation several times. Both the spoon and fork followed the fork as is it were –

“Rhumba,” I said, “My table knife is magnetized.” I demonstrated.

Stout scientist that she is, Rhumba recreated the experiment. “So is mine,” she replied with some wonder.

I turned over the knife. The word “stainless” had been stamped on the blade. I frowned. Stainless steel was not magnetic, they’d always told me.

We soon found that only the knives were magnetized. They attracted the knife and fork, but not vice versa. I hauled out a camera and snapped pictures of the amorous tableware. I even used the flash. The waitress trotted over and examined us dubiously. When the two of us get bored, anything might happen.

“I’ll see what’s holding up your order,” she said, and fled to the kitchen. We continued to amuse ourself, and speculated.

Some long time later, she returned with the food.

“I noticed,” I had to say, “that our knives are magnetized. Look….” I demonstrated. “Is that normal around here?”

She was evasive. Maybe someone had mentioned it, once. She comped our meals because of the long wait. That was nice.

But I went home and looked up magnetic tableware on the Internet. Oh my.

I learned that some formulations of stainless steel include iron and thus can be magnetized. Restaurant tableware is commonly made of stainless that contains iron.

As for how it happened… when the busboy clears your table, he takes the dirty dishes to the scullery and scrapes the debris of your meal off the plate and into a garage can. If he’s in a hurry, a knife or fork may slide into the trash, too. And they cost money.

So cost-conscious restaurants put a chute lined with magnets on top of the garbage can. The magnets will stop any tableware that might otherwise fall into the trash. Eventually, some dishwasher retrieves it.

If the busboys are careless enough often enough, a restaurant’s tableware can become magnetic. Magnetic knives are most often reported, probably because they have more mass than forks or spoons.

Restaurants have every reason to stay mum about this arrangement. Even if she did know, our waitress was never going to say, “Oh, yes, that’s because our tableware routinely ends up in the garbage can, where we retrieve it with powerful magnets. But don’t worry, it’s been well-washed! Are you enjoying your Eggs Benedict?”

Well… maybe not as much as I was. But I’ll live.

And if you have time on your hands in a very nice restaurant, you might consider finding out what your table knife is capable of. Or, you can keep your illusions. They make the food taste better.