Meg Cox

NJ08540-001

Meg Cox

Karen Musgrave

2007-08-03

Asheville, North Carolina

Tomme Fent

Karen Musgrave (KM): This is Karen Musgrave. I'm doing a Quilters' S.O.S. - Save Our Stories interview with Meg Cox. We're in Asheville, North Carolina. It is August 3rd, and it is 10:40 [a.m.]. And thank you, Meg, for doing this interview with me. I'm really excited about it. So let's start out by having you tell me about the quilt that you selected for this interview.

Meg Cox (MC): This quilt is my homage to The Wall Street Journal, where I worked for seventeen years. And I call it "Black and White and Read All Over" because "The Wall Street Journal" didn't have any color, at least in the years that I was there, and red is my favorite color. So this is a quilt that's all black and white except there's some little red triangles on the side and there is red thread across it, so there's just a little bit of red. And I realized I'd been collecting black-and-white fabric for years, and I ended up using it in a pattern that I got from a Kaffe Fassett book. And it's a little pattern that--from vintage quilts that he calls "Two by Two," so there's two darks and two lights in each Four Patch. And I just thought it would be fun to do that with the black and white and then some shades of grey because I thought it would be dramatic and I just love black and white. And what was really amusing to me is that I actually had an opportunity to show it to Kaffe Fassett. I was interviewing him for a book and I brought the quilt top with me and I told him it was inspired by his quilt and I held it up for him and he just burst out laughing. It was a great moment. He said, 'I love it when my students do something that I taught them and take it in a completely different direction,' because he's "Mr. Color." He would never do that. But he was really nice about it.

KM: Did you select the quilting motifs?

MC: Yes, I did. The quilting was done by a woman in my quilt guild, the Hopewell Valley Quilters in Pennington, New Jersey, and she did it with a longarm pattern that we did – selected together. It's a very swirly pattern to sort of contrast with the very blocky look, the very square look of the rest of it. And the red really shows up, the red swirls against the-- particularly against the white, but also against the black.

KM: Tell me a little more about your book.

MC: My book, which is going to be called "The Quilter's Catalog," will be published early in 2008, by Workman Publishing. And it will be a comprehensive resource guide for quilters including profiles of the top twenty quilt teachers, and enormous amounts of material about fabric and tools and technology, and the recent history, a lot about the quilt renaissance, and just a lot of tools for people, tools and tutorials and tips and--lots of T's, I guess. [laughs.] All of that together, so it's everything, how to buy a sewing machine and all of the quilt museums are listed and all the retreats, and insiders' tips on getting the most out of Houston and Paducah, including finding hotel rooms and that sort of thing. So it's an enormous amount of information wrapped into one book, plus twelve projects.

KM: Tell me how you got started with quiltmaking?

MC: Well, my mother taught me. My mother taught me about 1989, I think it was. She was an artist and a very creative person and an amazing seamstress. She had sewn all my clothes and even my stuffed animals when I was a kid. And when she was in her early sixties, she took up quilting. She and my father had retired to the coast of North Carolina, and she had an older sister who was very crafty who had been telling her for years that she should quilt, that it was such a joy. And so my mother finally took root in the right place and she started doing it and just loved it immediately. The first quilt she made, she made for me, and it won a blue ribbon in her local quilt guild, and she was off and running. And I think I just saw this incredible pleasure that she was getting from it and I asked her to teach me. And I think she thought at first I was just doing that because I wanted to make her happy, and then she realized I really wanted to learn.

And so I only saw her a couple of times a year, including always at Christmastime. I was living in New York City. I was a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal, and I was a single, divorced, career obsessed person in a fifth floor walkup, 400 square feet. No sewing machine. But I just-- something about it seemed appealing and she did it in such a loving way. I went down for a Christmas trip, either right before or right after Christmas, and she had made this beautiful basket for me with all the tools I would need. She knew I had nothing, and it had a beautiful pair of Gingher scissors in a little leather sleeve, and she had designed this quilt. It was a simple crib quilt with three-inch squares, alternating white and colors, plain colors, and she had every single row in a little bundle and the border, and it was tied to a little piece of paper that had a row number. Plus she had made this perfect little guide with Magic Marker and everything that showed me what it would look like so I could see what the pattern was and I could see where to put the orange right next to this, you know, what the progression was. So it was a total no-brainer. I had everything I needed. I didn't have to cut. I missed the fun of selecting the fabrics but I really could just sit down and do it. And I just sat down and started making the quilt. And weirdly enough, there was a freak snowstorm in coastal North Carolina, which was very unusual. And all the roads were closed and I couldn't fly out, and I just sat there, and the quilt top got bigger and bigger and bigger, and I was just hooked. It was such a great experience. And here I was making this baby quilt and I wasn't married. I didn't think I'd ever have kids. I just was making this beautiful thing.

And to finish it, when I left, the top was almost done, but there was this wonderful collaboration, it was before e-mail, of my mother and I back and forth on the phone, trying to get me started and helping me through the process. And I quilted for a number of years after that, the only person in the world I knew who quilted was my mother. It was just us, and it was a thing that was back and forth. She would send me little diagrams and letters of ideas and little pictures, hand-drawn pictures about how to do various things and how to turn the corner on the binding and whatever it might be. So it was like this special tie. It was like this wonderful, isolated sisterhood. It was just this thing that we had together. So I think part of the joy was in that, but that was the beginning of my quilting.

KM: So how does this graft into writing a book on quilting?

MC: Well, I then was sort of a closet quilter. I didn't know anybody in New York who quilted. Most of my friends didn't know I quilted unless they had a baby, and then I would make them a baby quilt, and those got elaborate and I would design my own, and it was a lot of fun. And then a couple of things happened. I had a baby. I had a baby to give the crib quilt to. And he slept with it every night until he was almost 10 years old and it was a patched rag. I was having these experiences with quilts, and I was then married and I had an infant, and I was working on a book about family traditions and I had a big house in Princeton, New Jersey, so my life was constructed differently. I wrote a couple of books about family traditions and I was looking for another topic. And for awhile, I wanted to do a series of books about women's passions, and I wanted it to be kind of little, cute, gifty books about why we quilt and why we dance and why we cook and so forth. And I had this wonderful concept of these beautiful little books. And I wanted to do the 'why we dance' book. I had gone back to taking modern dance classes, and my teacher was going to be doing a book and she felt threatened by the whole thing and I thought, 'Well, I'll do the quilt book first.'

And I thought, 'What am I going to put in this little gift book?' And I had done a lot of--for my family traditions book; I had gathered traditions from 300 families all over the country. So I had sort of figured out ways for getting out the word, getting out questionnaires and getting out the word that I was looking for things by doing the traditions book. And so using such tools as the Internet, I put out on bulletin boards and chat boards and everything I could think of that I was a quilter and writing a book and looking for other quilters to talk about their own quilting and why they were so passionate about it. So these started getting out, and then Keepsake Quilting helped me out. They ran a little ad in their catalogue, for which they didn't charge me, saying that I was looking for this information. And I'd go to quilt shows and leave little cards around. And pretty soon, I had a couple hundred of the responses and people were writing in some detail and it was, I thought, just poignant and exciting and interesting, and the personal stories were amazing, and there was such variety to them, I felt. So I gathered some of these together.

I made an appointment with Peter Workman, the head of Workman Publishing, who I knew because I covered publishing for The Wall Street Journal for five years, and in 1990, I did a profile on Workman. So I knew him and I knew how they worked. And I had stayed in touch with him after I left the paper. So I made a date to have lunch with Peter, and I made a little mock book. I had some of my favorite quotes from these women about why they quilted. I put it on nice paper. And then I made a little mock book with an actual patchwork block in fabric on the front. And I made this and it was tied together with ribbon, and I took it to lunch with me and I gave it to Peter. And he said, 'No.' He said, 'That is not a book.' He said, 'I love golf but I could care less why anybody else loves it.' And he said, 'A Workman book is not this. A Workman book is stuffed with practical information. It's comprehensive. It is information that people can use. It's not just gifty.' And he said, 'I bet that a book like that could be done on quilts. I bet there are lots of things that quilters would like to know that they don't get enough of and that aren't in a format they can use. But this is not a book.'

So I was really crushed because here I had this whole idea for a whole series and now I was getting nowhere. But it just sent me back to the drawing board. You know, one of the things I've learned in my career is that if there's something I can't stop doing, even though I'm not getting much money for it, that it must be important to me. And if I'm getting other kinds of compensation and I'm finding great joy in it, then I follow that journey a little farther. So, in this case, even though Peter Workman had said, 'No,' to me, I started deepening my search. I started thinking, 'What other information can I provide? I am not a designer. I am not a quilt artist. I don't want to do a block book, of which there are many already. So what can I find out? What do quilters want and what kind of information is out there?' And one of the first things I did was I went to Paducah in 2002, because I wanted to really get a sense of what the quilt world was. That's one of the things that I felt I wasn't seeing and didn't read about or didn't know about. And I had the time of my life. I just never stopped interviewing people. I interviewed women in lines at the ladies' room. I would interview them in parking lots. People were so incredibly nice to me. I snagged an interview with Caryl Bryer Fallert right away and I got – they let me sit in on one of her classes for a couple of hours, and then when she was packing up at the end of the day, she said, 'Oh, just come back to my room. I have some wine in my room and we can--." And we talked for an hour. And she was so generous and so forthcoming, and it was just one thing after another during those couple of days. I was in the hotel from hell. I was in the hotel from the movie "Memento." But I had this incredible experience because I was meeting these quilters who were every kind of quilter. I was just seeing the intensity. I went from Caryl Fallert's class to Eleanor Burns's tent show, and I was like, 'Whoa! This is a woman with more books in print than Martha Stewart. Why is she not a household name? Why do people not know that this quilt world is out here, and it is so sophisticated and it is so interesting, and there is this passion?' And I just became fascinated by that.

So I started doing more reporting and sending out more questionnaires and targeting more and more, figuring it as, 'What would it be as a book?' And it's sort of like a joke, summing up this whole period starting in 2001, when I first started gathering information, because it's like every time Peter said, 'No' to me, I did another year of research. And my agent couldn't handle it. I lost my--my agent said, 'I think that there's a good book in here somewhere but I don't know how to sell it, and I think you should find another agent.' And I was heartbroken. I did find another agent. And by the time she went out to sell the book, the proposal was a hundred pages long. And I had very detailed ideas of what I wanted. I wanted to talk about these women and who they were, but I wanted to talk about the tools and technology, I wanted to talk about--but I wanted to really provide the nitty gritty. So Workman bought the book. Other publishers competed for it. I chose Workman for less money because I knew they would do a better job. And it finally was a Workman book. And even though I turned in the manuscript a year ago, I am still writing sidebars. The editing process goes on. I just finished revising and updating the fabric chapter, and I wrote thirteen more sidebars. So it's becoming a Workman book. I mean, there is so much information. But the picture of the quilt world just fascinates me. I am in awe of the quilters that I see, and I go month after month to my own guild and see the diversity and see the intensity and see the patience. And I--once again taking it back to my mother, I am grateful to her every day because she brought this into my life, and just sad that she is not alive and can't see that she would be proud of this and she'd be so happy. The book is dedicated to her.

KM: All right, so how often do you quilt?

MC: My husband and son would say I'm obsessed and it's too much, and they actually call my quilt guild when I go to meetings, they say, 'She's going to her cult.' But the thing is, I always say I'm going to do it faster and I'm going to do more machine work and I'm going to do this and that. For me, I sit at a machine all day. I sit at my computer and I work and I do my writing, which is my work. Quilting is my hobby. It's my fun. I do have some deadlines for charity quilts and occasions, but I'm not fulfilling a quota. I don't have to get to some magic number. I want to enjoy doing it. And so I always do it in my chair. My husband got me a great light so I can do it at night, and almost every night, I would say out of a week four or five nights, I sit in there and quilt.

KM: Do you do it by hand?

MC: I do it by hand, mostly. There are times when I have no choice, and sometimes when I have a deadline, including for the book, some of the projects I created for the book--I went to this wonderful longarm quilter who's in my guild, Sandy Meritt. So I may send it out to her. I had a crazy deadline for a quilt I did for my son's fifth grade class last year, a photo quilt, and I had other moms--actually some of them with sewing machines came to my house to have a little sew-a-thon to finish to get that finished. But an awful lot is hand done, and the women in my guild don't believe it. I mean, look at this, and I don't even know how many squares I did, but this took me a couple of years, off and on. I was doing things in between. But anytime we went on a long car trip to Vermont for summer vacation or whatever, I had a bag full of squares and I was sitting here doing it on my lap. And I just love watching it grow in my lap. There's just something about that that I really love.

KM: So do you own a sewing machine?

MC: I do. My wonderful husband, a couple of years back for Christmas, bought me a sewing machine. And of course he didn't know anything about brands, and so he went to a local sew-and-vac and they said, 'Get her a Quilter's Dream. It says "quilts" right on it.' So I have an Elna Quilter's Dream, and it's a fine sewing machine. I have used it and I hope to use it more and all that. I actually took a machine sewing class, but it was a real quickie class, just a couple hours just to get you started. So that is one of the things for my future goals as a quiltmaker. I love doing it by hand but I would like to have my options wider and I'd like to try all kinds of things. But I do have a machine; it's just not permanently set up.

KM: So you don't have a studio?

MC: I do not have a studio. I have the third floor of my house. I have a big office, but it's also the family gym. There's a treadmill up there that my son and husband use pretty much every day. And it could be rearranged and I could have the sewing machine set up there, and eventually that's what I want to do.

KM: Where do you keep your stash?

MC: My stash--a lot of my stash is in the bathroom. [laughs.] I have my own bathroom on the third floor and I have these big bins. I'm trying to get more organized about it because I also inherited my mother's stash.

KM: Was it large?

MC: Well, you know, I think this is so funny, I think it's like a quilter's longevity thing is they think if they buy enough fabric, they'll have to live long enough to use it up. So my mother, who hardly ever used patterns, she really used a lot of solids in her work, but she--shortly before she died and it took her awhile, she had emphysema for ten years, the last ten years of her life. But less than a year before she died, she bought 99 yards of fabric from Keepsake. She loved Keepsake Quilting's catalogue, and she had a lovely little shop near her too, within walking distance of her apartment. And a lot of it was not my style and I've given a lot of it away, but I also had a lot of solids, solid colors from her. That's in a separate trunk. But I've now started getting [hanging shelf.] things that they sell in the Keepsake catalogue or one of the catalogues that are actually, I think, for shoes. They have Velcro and you put them over the bar in your closet because I also have a pretty big closet in my third floor office. And now I'm getting more organized. I have all my flannels together, I have all my fat quarters together, and the novelty prints that are--my son is interested in anything with lizards. So it's sort of getting more organized. As it gets bigger, you have to. Otherwise, you just can't find anything.

KM: Do you sleep under a quilt?

MC: I do. I sleep--sometimes I sleep under more than one, and I change them. I have a quilt on my bed right now that I bought in Amish country when I was pregnant with my son. I went up there with my husband and we went to the home of an Amish couple and bought a very traditional pattern in blue and green and red in big squares. I also have a quilt that--my mother only worked by hand, even though she was a whiz at making clothes on the sewing machine. She came from that era, that early part of the quilt renaissance, where if you owned a sewing machine, you never touched any of that. And I also got all of the lecture about that with that first quilt from her. 'You must never sit on the quilt. You can never have sex on a quilt.' [laughs.] 'You could never do this to the quilt.' And it was horrifying, you know, I was afraid to touch it. And I got over that. I like the new sort of more relaxed era, the attitudes about that. So she was just a strict person in those things. And I have, the first quilt is in my closet right now, but there's a quilt that she made for my father that just grabs me. It is just white and navy and it's got these--with white hand quilting on the navy blue with a big sort of Celtic kind of knot in the middle, and it's so stunning. And I showed it to the ladies in my guild, and the hand work on it would just blow your mind. It's just beautiful. And I sleep under that.

KM: Do you collect quilts?

MC: Not per se. I have a few. I have an Amish crib quilt that I'd given to my mother as a Christmas present that's now mine, since she died. That's hanging in my office. And I love making quilts for my son. I haven't really collected. I would love to collect them. And it always seems like whenever I'm trying to hang one of my own for display, there's always something that doesn't work. I had this quilt that I made with all these teacups. It was a Jan Mullen pattern with wild colors. And then it clashed with my sofa and I had to remove it. And I wanted to put it in my kitchen but I have a kitchen that's like all windows. There's no place to hang a quilt. There are a lot of people whose quilts I would love to collect, who are making quilts. I think if I did collect, I wouldn't collect antique quilts.

KM: And why is that?

MC: I just think the work today is stunning and I'm interested in something to put on the wall, and I love the quality of the work and the artistry of what is being made now is just so exciting, and I would love to have it around me. I would love to look at it and touch it and hang it. And the big, old, bed quilts, I might admire a crazy quilt that is exquisite, but where would I put it? I think it fits better with my life and my sensibilities, as well.

KM: So you do a lot of photo transfer?

MC: I do some. I'm starting to get into that and I love it, and I think that's going to be real exciting. I had dinner last night with Barbara Webster who does amazing work with photographs in quilts, and I just feel like I'm just getting my feet wet at this point. I did a quilt for my sister for her fiftieth birthday a couple of years ago, and that was the first photo transfer I did. And there was a deadline, I had to put it together quickly, but she had her house burn down when her children were young and lost a lot of her photographs, so it seemed even more precious. So they're photographs of us together from our childhood and then photographs of her children and her passions and our parents, who are both now dead. And that was so much fun to do. And then when I was looking for some theme to tie it together, I came to the fact that her favorite color is purple and my favorite color is red and our mother, who was an art teacher, always said to us, 'Purple and red don't go together.' And we just grew up hearing that, and it just seemed like such a metaphor for us because we could not be more different. We love each other desperately and we were very close as kids, but we could not be more different. And so the quilt is, without the photographs, it's all purple and red with a fabric that features both colors instead of joins the two for the borders. And the actual title of the quilt is "Purple and Red Don't Go Together." My sister loved it! She just wept when she saw it.

KM: And where does she have it?

MC: She has it in her bedroom and she just moved to Florida this week, so it went with her to her new place that she hasn't moved into yet, but it will, I'm sure, be there. But that was fun. And then I did an even simpler photo quilt for my book because I think that that's so compelling and it's a first step for one of the things that quilters go into, thinking, 'Well, isn't this wonderful new technology?' So, again, it was very new to me but I did make a quilt for the book that is--it's á la Warhol. It's four pictures of my husband and I, the same picture four times, of us kissing on our wedding day. It's my kiss quilt. And originally, I was going to present this as a model and I was going to do pictures of us kissing through the years, four different pictures of us kissing, and I thought that would be really cool because we take a picture as a ritual now. We take a picture of ourselves kissing every year, usually on New Year's Eve. But I wanted it to--since I was presenting it in the book as a project, I wanted it to inspire other people, but I was sad to find I don't know a single other person that takes pictures of themselves kissing their husband every year. I think it's not a good idea to put something out and say, 'Here, I think this is really a fun idea,' if it's something that they can't relate to because they don't do it. But I loved doing it, and then I did a photo quilt for my son's fifth grade class where I scanned in all of the kids' class pictures, and then sewed next to the picture a school bus yellow fabric and each of them wrote something that they were going to miss from the school, because they were all graduating to middle school, and then sewed that into the pictures. And it just came out great. And I know these are such elementary things. I see the much more advanced, much more integrated kinds of things people are doing, less sort of the scrapbook approach to using photos and more as a design element like an art quilter will do, and I just can't wait to start playing with that because I just think there are so many possibilities. But just even dabbling in it, it's just fun. I did the quilt of the fifth grade class and in the corners--I had taken photographs of the principal and the school mascot, this big, stuffed gorilla. So that's what's in the four corners is the gorilla and the principal. [laughs.]

KM: How funny.

MC: Yes, it is. And it was just really fun. It just really came out good.

KM: Photo transfer's kind of instant gratification.

MC: It really is, and it just instantly personalizes it and makes it so exciting to people.

KM: All right, so what do you think is the biggest challenge for quiltmakers today?

MC: I think being overwhelmed is the biggest challenge. I think that you go to the fabric store and you're a kid in a candy shop. I mean, there's so many choices and there's so many patterns that you want to try. And I think it's one of the reasons why the high-tech stuff is a good idea because you can do it faster. But you can also get frantic, and that's kind of a hard thing, is you can get overwhelmed. You see things that other people are doing and think, 'Oh, I can never be that good,' and you can also get discouraged. But I also had this wonderful experience with my sister. I made her go to Quilt National with me last summer, and my sister, who mostly needlepoints and is not particularly crafty other than that, a lot of people, you go to Quilt National and you see these great quilts by these artists and you just walk out thinking, 'Why am I even bothering?' Some people, it will have that effect on. And I'm happy to say that when we walked out of the Dairy Barn, my sister turned to me and said, 'teach me.' And it was so emotional and such a great moment because she was not having that reaction. She was saying, 'This is exciting and this is fun, and I wouldn't do it that way but I know I want to do this. It's for me.' And, you know, I think probably this is also subsequent to her getting the fiftieth birthday quilt, so that may have helped, too, and also thinking about our mother and her passion for it.

But I do think that there is this and the other thing I think is, for drawing in new quilters, is that sense that it's, next to knitting, it's going to be too much. And I hope that there's an outreach to people on an elemental level, showing that you don't need to have a $2,000 sewing machine that there can be the equivalent of going to the knit shop, getting--picking a yarn, getting your needles, and making that first scarf. And we have to look for all of that. You can do it by hand, you can do it. You don't have to finish the quilting, you can tie it, you can send it out. But I think that getting that information out and opening up the quilt world is what I want to see.

KM: So where do you see quiltmaking going in the future?

MC: I'm very encouraged about that. I had somebody say to me that the quilt world today is like NASCAR was ten years ago. It is this secret parallel universe that the people who are in it are having a heck of a good time, but the rest of the world doesn't know it exists, and if they do know, they know the Gee's Bend exhibit or something like that. They think those quilts are stunning but they're not relevant to their lives. They think that the universe is this sort of unfortunate stereotype, I think, that quilting is being done exclusively by people who do not have a lot of resources, who are living in isolated places, and making quilts from their husbands' overalls. And they have no concept that it's this high-tech, sophisticated, exciting thing where you have a lot of choices, where you can make something beautiful right away but there is something else to aspire to. The thing I say to knitters is that knitting is wonderful but I don't know about any sweater museums. I mean, when you're quilting at whatever level you're at, you can be making this little crib quilt that is just the easiest thing on earth but with the knowledge in the back of your mind that there are quilts in museums and they build quilt museums all the time and that is an aspiration and that is a sense that you can go deeper, you can go farther, and that's exciting. And coupled with that is the sense that you are in a line of history. You are doing something that women have done for a long, long time. And I think when you take all of that together and you can get that into people's hands and they can see how it relates to them and how doable it is, that there really is a chance for expanding.

I see two big groups, too, that are related to that. I know there's some concern in the quilt world that it's an aging population, but look at it this way. The Baby Boomers are just starting to turn sixty. This is a group of people, we all had to learn how to sew in Home Ec, so you still have that and yet these people are suddenly going to have a lot more leisure time and they're going to be looking for things to do with it. And I think quilting can really get into that, and it makes me a little bit sad when you hear people in the quilt world say, 'Oh, well, we've got to work on the thirty-somethings and the twenty-somethings,' because what's wrong with this group of women? I mean, they've got money, they're going to have time, and I hear this all the time when I'm out just talking with people. They say, 'I'm interested in quilting, but I didn't know--.' They don't know how to take the first step. They don't know they need a little help.

The other group is, however, the thirty-somethings. This whole generation of young women who are changing their lives, who are making them whole, they sort of are starting to figure out the career piece. Knitting is cool but will it stay cool? Once they've made a certain number of sweaters and scarves, what is that next thing for them? If they can be appealed to, if they can be brought into it as they're starting their families, as they get this urge, they don't know where it comes from, to make a crib quilt for that baby that they're about to have or that their best friend is about to have, they can be brought in and just feel this incredible sense of satisfaction that's there. But I think that they need help finding this.

KM: How much do you think longevity plays into it, leaving something behind?

MC: Oh, huge. You know what, I asked this a lot on my questionnaires. And I've now gotten 400, 500 of these back and I've read them all and I've saved them all, and I'm going to tell all of this when the book comes out. It was huge. I mean I had so many say to me, 'What else am I leaving behind?' And there's a sense of accomplishment, too. I had one woman say to me, 'I make the bed. I have to make the bed tomorrow. I do the dishes. I have to do the dishes again tomorrow. There are all these things that as soon as I do them, they get erased. I make a quilt, it doesn't get erased. It is treasured. It is honored. It is passed on through the family.' And that is huge. And I've had women tell me that they started into quilting and they had a really serious illness, and they realized that their time was going to be limited, and that came up again and again and again. And I think it's very much on their minds.

KM: Well, unfortunately, we're going to have to end because we have to run to a meeting. [laughs.] But I want to think Meg Cox for taking the time to do this interview with me. We really appreciate it, Meg. And our interview ended at 11:18 [a.m.].