Three feet by six. That's the size of a grave, and it's the size of every panel laid out on the Mall in 1987 — 1,920 of them, sewn at kitchen tables by people who had never called themselves makers: a shirt collar, denim, buttons, a name cut from felt. Volunteers in white unfolded them without speaking while the names were read aloud.
They laid it between the Capitol and the Washington Monument, which is the stretch of grass every march in that city has to cross; the weekend's crowd was put at roughly 750,000. The reading of names went on for hours.
The reading of the names has gone with the Quilt everywhere since, and it takes hours — readers in shifts, each one given a page. A list is the oldest kind of writing we have, and the hardest to abbreviate without someone noticing who's missing.