Knitters-Knitters

The First Three Notes

Let's start at the very beginning
A very good place to start
when you read you begin with a, b, c
when you sing you begin with do re mi

The women in my life have been having babies at an astounding rate, and this is giving me a chance to make many baby blankets. They may be my favorite thing to knit because almost anything goes. For example, I really wanted to knit a blanket using the discontinued yarn Jo Sharp Classic DK wool. The problem is, it's not a very soft yarn.

I prefer to knit yarns that have a little "bite" to them, but that's not necessarily what a baby wants to feel next to his skin.

So we introduce the lining, in this case knit from Dale of Norway Harlequin.

I like a firm edge, and in my experience, an older baby likes to chew on a nice, dense piece of knitting. The mitered borders are knit from St. Denis Nordique in pale yellow.

Right now I'm keeping the live stitches on waste yarn, but will eventually add a little red stripe of reverse stockinette in Dale of Norway Heilo to each border. When I sew the borders down, the reverse stockinette will look like raised piping. One side is complete:

If you've never knit a baby blanket before and are now daunted by the process I've described, don't worry. A baby blanket does not require mitered edges, piping, lining, or the use of discontinued wool. The baby and mom will still feel loved without them. I've made many respectable blankets -- for my own children -- using none of these added details.

If you knit baby blankets regularly, you may be a bit Concerned. Concerned as if you've come across me sitting in the middle of a five-acre lot, trying to remove dandelions one by one with that tool that looks like a forked screwdriver.

This blanket? It's not really about the baby. It's about the comfort about going back to basic steps, back to the beginning. Back to do re mi. It's about focusing on the foreground and ignoring the Big Picture, at least for the time being.

Today when I was watching Live! with Kelly, I correctly answered the daily trivia question (which is always based on the previous day's show). The question was, What was the working title of the Beatles hit, "Yesterday?"

Scrambled eggs! I thought to myself, and then said it aloud because we all know it doesn't count if you just think it. Scrambled eggs! I only planned to say the words, but apparently I shouted. Pam Spaniel, lying on the spine of the couch behind me, was so startled that she yelped and whacked me on the top of my head with her paw.

Yes, I'm still Disappointed. But I can knit and I can purl, and I can enjoy the tiny victory of getting a trivia question right.

There's another small pleasure I've been enjoying. As background: one of my children is a Reluctant Reader (We'll just call this child RR). Part of RR's homework is reading for enjoyment for at least twenty minutes a day, regardless of other homework. RR had been reading aloud to me in the afternoons when Olive was out with Beata, but we had gotten out of the habit during the winter. We are back on track, and now that it's warm, we do our reading outside.

I was delighted when RR approved of my most recent suggestion: These Happy Golden Years. It's my favorite book in the Little House series, but when I read it for the first time I was too young to appreciate it as a love story. I didn't understand what it meant that Almanzo was willing to drive his cutter twenty-four miles every Friday and Sunday, just so Laura could spend the weekends with her family instead of the depressing trio she boarded with during her weeks of teaching.

If you know the novel you remember that halfway into the very coldest drive, Almanzo stops the horses and gets out of the cutter. I was gratified to hear RR begin reading faster at this point, as curious as Laura to find out why Almanzo would stop when it was so cold that they were in real danger of freezing to death:

...Dimly through the black veil she saw him going to their drooping heads, and she heard him say, "Just a minute, Lady," as he laid his mittened hands on Prince's nose. After a moment he took his hands away and Prince tossed his head high and shook music from his bells. Quickly Almanzo did the same thing to Lady's nose, and she too, tossed up her head. Almanzo tucked himself into the cutter and they sped on...

I stopped RR and asked, "What does this tell you about Almanzo?"

RR thought a moment and said, "That he is very kind."

If you wanted to (which I didn't) you could argue that Almanzo was just being practical. No one gets home alive if the horses' noses freeze over and they can't breathe. But of course, nothing Almanzo has done that day has been practical: not taking the cutter out to the Brewster house, not retrieving Laura, and not rejecting the offer to spend the night at the Brewster's and set out fresh the next morning. Almanzo's travel that Friday was especially impractical because Laura had told him the week before that he should stop giving her rides if he was assuming that there was something in it for him.

Laura taught the children of that settlement for eight weeks, and every Friday, Almanzo showed up at the schoolhouse to drive her the twelve miles to her parents' home. Almanzo never did address her protestations, nor did he defend himself from her suggestion that he expected something in return for transport. If his feelings were hurt by her rudeness, he didn't mention it.

Almanzo just kept showing up. And as it turned out, there was something in it for him.

Yesterday was LB and my wedding anniversary. We have been married for nineteen years.

This Space Intentionally Left Blank

I used to hold a special sort of contempt for bloggers who wrote things like, "Something terrible/wonderful/frightening is going on in my life and I really can't discuss it because it involves other people/writing about it will jinx it/my lawyer feels it'll hurt my case/, but would you please congratulate me/send me good vibes/fly to New York and light a candle in St. Patrick's Cathedral for me?" I thought these bloggers were the worst sort of attention whores. I mean, I'll readily cop to being an attention whore, but I've always seen myself as the very best kind of attention whore.

Until now. I get it now, why a blogger would bring up an issue she cannot discuss. This Unmentionable is so much on the blogger's mind that no other words come to her when she sits at the screen. She tries to write about experimenting with knitting linen or hemp, or compose a post from the point of view of one of her spaniels, but the Thing blocks the connection between her brain and her fingertips. And since she can't say what's on her mind, she wants her readers to know that there is a reason she's uncharacteristically silent. She hopes that maybe if she mentions the Unmentionable, even in the most vague and cryptic of ways, she'll be free again to write about other things.

Why not just post pictures, you may ask?

I'm not a gifted photographer, I rarely travel, and the slowness of knitting means I have no finished project to share and won't for a few more weeks. Also, and this is important: no chickens. I think we can all agree that bloggers who raise chickens have an unfair advantage and they exploit it shamelessly, with all those lovely instagrams of speckled eggs in gingham-lined baskets, and children letting birds eat right from their chubby hands. A pox on you, you Araucana enthusiasts! May your Rhode Island Reds become broody. Yeah, I said it. Broody.

My Stuff I Can't Discuss is nothing life or death. I have not lost anything I already had. It's simply this: a couple of very good things were on the horizon, and it looked for a few precious days like these events would come to pass. And now we have learned that they will not.

What I'm experiencing is a lot like that scene in A Fish Called Wanda where Kevin Kline opens the safe expecting to see the bag of diamonds he'd stolen, and they are not there. Nothing was taken from me that was rightfully mine; really, nothing has changed at all. But I am bitterly DisaPPOINTed! When disappointment is extreme, it feels a lot like grief.

And maybe it is a sort of grief: I had not realized how much the hope for those things was sustaining me.

The Same - The Same

The Beautiful Changes

- Richard Wilbur

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides

The Queen Anne's Lace lying like lilies

On water; it glides

So from the walker, it turns

Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you

Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

 

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed

By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it;

As a mantis, arranged

On a green leaf, grows

Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves

Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

 

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says

They are not only yours; the beautiful changes

In such kind ways,

Wishing ever to sunder

Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose

For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

***

I have a poetry repertoire of around five: there's Prufrock, The Art of Losing, I Move to Keep Things Whole, The Soul Selects Her Own Society, and the poem transcribed above. These poems can be applied to just about any situation I may find myself in, and to learn any more poems would overflow the very small section of my brain relegated to poetry. To put it another way, this is all I know on earth, and all I need to know.

Ye already know that I dislike change. My need for things to be the same-the same borders on neurosis, and I blame this in large part to face-blindness and place-blindness.

For example: When I was a freshman in college, I lived in a dorm. My dorm was at the bottom of a hill, and if you went to the top of that hill and turned left, you were on campus. Turning right would lead you into Collegetown, where there was a very handy convenience store. This store had an ice cream counter in the front where they sold Purity ice cream, which I adored. Now, my sophomore year, I lived in a Collegetown apartment with five other young ladies. As luck would have it, our apartment was also very near a convenience store where, oddly enough, they also had a Purity ice cream counter in the front of the store.

You see where this is headed, don't you?

I'm not sure how many trips I made to the convenience store to get ice cream during my sophomore year before I realized that it was the same convenience store, simply approached from a different angle.

At any rate, change frightens and confuses me. So when I'm faced with it, I think of this Richard Wilbur poem and it makes change slightly more bearable. Those roses? Not all mine to begin with. This house? Not mine, either. We are all of us tenants, really, but to put it in Orwellian terms -- some of us are more tenant than others.

Disliking change isn't such a bad thing. When I learn that something I care about is going to stay the same, I'm that much more grateful.

Leah and Larry don't want their house back for at least another year: no packing and moving for the Sullivans this summer! Dieter and his family are staying in the Chicago house -- no need to seach for new renters.

Olive just had her IEP and three-year review at Keshet. It went very well, even though the occupational therapist changed her seat at the beginning of the meeting, thus sending me into a state of confusion that temporarily erased my brain.

Olive will be able to return next year. (Private school is expensive, and our ability to keep her at Keshet is something we can never take for granted). All of this sameness-sameness is excellent news, because if there's anyone who likes change less than I do, it's my little Miss O.

I did indeed finish my rainbow shawl in time for teacher appreciation week!

This is the "North Sea Shawl" from Folk Shawls by Cheryl Oberle. My main change was to cast on invisibly beginning with the center panel, then knit both ends starting from the center out instead of from the shawl edges.

This way I avoided any grafting, and the pattern points towards the center of the shawl instead of all going in one direction.More info and the chance to pepper me with hearts here:

Spring Screed

Spring is overrated.

It's a convenient season to dislike if you live in the Great Lakes since we tend to skip it altogether and go straight from 13" of snow to unbearably hot and humid. This year, we're getting the dubious honor of true spring and all that comes with it for me: allergies. Panic about preparations for the summer and next fall. That feeling of having the covers yanked off the sky and exposing everyone, pale-legged and black-socked, in the harsh light of the unfamiliar sun. And just as I am about to enjoy some amusement over the pasty natives, I look down and see that I, too, am exposed.

I know I'm not alone in this hurry up and wait discomfort of spring, that sense that I'm supposed to be doing something. I'm late for something. I forgot something. It comes to this: I don't like transitions. Olive expresses her dislike of transitions with vomiting, tears and occasionally, dropping to the floor and refusing to move. I express it with morning jitters, an overwhelming sense that everything I have done up until the moment has been capricious and poorly planned, and a dull ache in the right lower quadrant.

There was a time when I liked Spring. When I was younger, I remember spring restlessness felt more like joyous anticipation, an I am Sixteen going on Seventeen sort of perspective on the future. But now I know it all ends up in whistle-blowing Nazis and an uncomfortable mountain hike in the wrong footwear.

Anyways.

Let's think of something cheery, like a game of $16,000 pyramid. The clues are Salted caramel popcorn, Close-Face, a Shetland Rainbow, and Dapper Sullivans. Answer? Photos not yet downloaded from Jen's camera.

First, the salted caramel popcorn: the recipe was given to me by Miss Susan. Do not make this popcorn because once you do you won't be able to stop. The next thing you know, you'll have eaten three batches: one with m&m's, ones with the fake m&m's that contain no peanuts, and one with Hershey's Hugs. You will also hate yourself with the passion of a thousand suns, and your dentist will natter at you in a language halfway between English and Korean. It is the caramel corn of self-loathing.

When I was a child, my mom would describe any food I wanted to try that was out of her comfort zone as, "what the Goyim eat." We're not talking about ham hocks, pork rinds and beer-battered shrimp: more like cheese curds, peanut butter and jelly that comes together in the same jar, or even crunchy peanut butter. Inexplicably, black beans, rice, picadillo and fried plantains was not Goyim food, nor was a Cuban sandwich made with both ham and pork. But a fluffer-nutter sandwich? Displeasing to God. Treif. As you can imagine, Mom's characterization of American staples in no way eased the religious confusion I felt as a child.

This caramel corn made with mini marshmallows, bits of pretzel and chocolate candies would have been dinged as Goyim Food, if my mother were aware that such a treat even existed. Interestingly enough, the only person in my household who wanted nothing to do with this delicacy was LB, the one true Goy among us.

Clover has never enjoyed being photographed, and has less patience with it in her delicate and aged condition. Pam, however, thrives on it. When we first got Pam I wondered why her breeder had not kept her as a show dog, given her perfect Blenheim splotch. Now I know why. Pam exceeds the breed standard in height and weight, and appears to be still growing. She weighs 22 pounds and our veterinarian insists she in not overweight. She's simply a massive Cavalier spaniel.

Pam, however, has no idea of this. She loves to lie along the spine of the couch in a cat-like manner just like thirteen-pound Clover, and then finds herself, inelegantly, collapsed between the back of the couch and the cushions.

If I sit on the couch to knit Pam comes up behinds me, sits along the back of the couch, puts her front paws on my shoulders and rests her head along the side of my neck. Sometimes she'll let her body sag until I'm wearing all twenty-two pounds of her around my neck, like an enormous fur stole.

If I turn and face her she will press her nose to mine and just stay that way: no licking, no sniffing, just extreme face to face contact, so close that if I keep my eyes open her eyes appear to blur into one giant eyeball. We call this doing "close face."

A work in progress, using just about every color Shetland I have in my stash. I hope to complete this shawl at some point during teacher appreciation week.

The handy thing about autism being described in terms of a "spectrum" and Keshet meaning "rainbow" in Hebrew is that I have a built-in excuse to indulge my love of color when knitting for folks on Team Olive.

Lasty, LB and Olive in their new grey suits. LB's is from Brooks Brothers...

... but Olive's is courtesy of her beloved Beata. As you can see Olive is very proud of her substantial -- if slightly pasty -- gams.

This Isn't Really About Knitting

A few days ago I began a thank-you shawl for yet another essential member of Team Olive. 

It occurred to me that for the past several years, the bulk of my knitting has been thank-you gifts for members of Team Olive, ranging from Keshet ladies to Teacher Em, Magical Realism Maria, and beyond.  They have also been my most rewarding projects and for a very practical reason: I know that any hand-knit gift I give to someone who works in Special Education is going to "land."  The very career choice of Special Education implies an appreciation for hard-won gains and the small victories that come after long periods of time in which nothing seems to progress.  The recipient understands that I am trying to show my gratitude with a physical manifestation of time and patience, and the recipient knows the value of time and patience.

Years ago I knit a blanket for a close friend of mine who was having a new baby.  I used a hand-spun, hand-dyed angora and merino blend, which is a lot like saying I knit the blanket out of twenty-dollar bills.  It was beautiful: the Elizabeth Zimmermann garter stitch pattern where you knit four triangles into a square and then graft the beginning to the end.  I also knit the baby a matching garter stitch surplice: another EZ pattern, the one with a row of eyelet buttonholes along the bottom of the sweater so that the button can be moved to new holes as the baby grows.

My friend made the appropriate oohing and ahhing sounds when I gave her the blanket and surplice at the hospital, but then I went to visit her and the baby at her home a few weeks later.  She said to me, "The funniest thing happened to that blanket you made!"  She went to her baby's closet and brought out what was now a potholder.  "I'd forgotten you said it needed to be hand-washed.  I don't suppose there's any way to fix that."

I didn't think it was all that funny.  Accidents happen, but why would she make a point of telling me about it?  And why would she present the accident as something amusing? 

Then she said, "We were at the park last week and I saw a little boy wearing a hooded sweatshirt with one big pocket in the front.  His mom told me her mother had knit it.  Could I commission you to make a sweatshirt like that, but in washable yarn so I can toss it in the machine and forget about it?  What would something like that cost?"

I said, "One million dollars."  I resisted the temptation to ask the location of the matching surplice so that I could confiscate it, or at the very least, contact Hand-Knit Garment Rescue Services to step in.

After I left her house, I sat in my car for a minute and thought about what had just happened.  Her behavior and her ensuing request felt like such a slam that it could not have been what she had intended.  It was simply too unkind to be deliberate. 

Then I remembered an incident that had happened between us years earlier: I was knitting and my friend asked, "When you're all done, doesn't it depress you to think of how many times you've made that same loop sequence (here she paused and pantomimed a slow and dramatic series of hand gestures which any knitter could see would not result in a stitch), and how you've touched every inch of that yarn?"

Another incident: not long prior to baby's birth, my friend had asked me what I was getting LB for Christmas.  I said I was knitting him a sweater, and she said, "It's good you can do that, because then you don't have to feel like you're just buying him a present with his own money."

I'd like to say I had an epiphany right then in the car: our friendship was over, and had been for some time.  But the only epiphany I had was that I probably shouldn't give her any more hand-knit gifts.

Several years later this friend had another baby.  I went online to a children's clothing boutique where I pointed and clicked.  Then I clicked a little extra for gift wrapping, and put my friend's address on the order form so that the gift would be mailed to her house directly from the shop with as little effort on my part as humanly possible.  Hah!  That'll show her!

My friend was absolutely thrilled with the gift.  It would not be exaggerating to say she was bowled over.  In fact, in all our years of friendship I don't think I've ever given her a gift that hit the spot the way that little outfit did.  Right or wrong, there are people who need to be able to ascribe a dollar value to the gift in order to appreciate it. There are also people who -- don't laugh, fellow knitters, I'm being serious here -- are under the erroneous impression that it is cheaper to knit a blanket than it is to buy one.

It wasn't until Olive was six or seven years old that I understood we were not friends anymore.  We would often talk on the phone about our children.  I liked hearing about hers and she seemed interested in mine, but I found myself unwilling to talk about Olive and her achievements.  When I was on the phone with my friend, even the most exciting passages in the Sacred Notebook sounded hollow and inconsequential.  Olive's progress, to the reluctant observer, could look like the repitition of a series of tedious loops.  And if said observer did not have the patience to watch and listen for long, her progress would not be visible at all.  

Some friendships end dramatically and some fade away with no animosity, but this friendship was like a box turtle who'd been sickly a long time: you don't realize it's dead until it starts to smell. 

You think back to the last time you fed the turtle.  She didn't wake up when you put food in the terrarium; maybe she hadn't been "just sleeping."  When was the last time you changed out the turtle's newspaper?  Did you fill her water bowl very recently, or is it full because the turtle is no longer drinking? 

Just when did that thing die, anyways?

 

 

 

In Which I Muse on Knitting with Plant Fibers

I've never liked the sound of the word mojo. While I appreciate its meaning in modern parlance, it feels like the speaker intended to say mole.  Saying I haven't had my usual blogging mojo sounds to me like I'm saying that I can't blog without taking a hefty swig of a Mexican sauce containing poblano peppers and in some cases, chocolate.  To my ears, the word ganja sounds like it should have the definition ascribed to mojo, but to call it such on Knitters-Knitters would no doubt cause confusion among my readers.  My last encounter with ganja took place in 1991, which makes it convenient that my blogging and knittting does not require it.  At any rate, for the past few weeks I have not had mole sauce, ganja or mojo.  The absence of one of these things has caused a sharp decline in my blogging and knitting, but it appears to be returning with the warm weather.

Moving right along.

I have finished the bamboo baby blanket!  My last bamboo project was, in my eyes, an abject failure.  I was worried that blocking the blanket would result in the same horrible droop that occurred with a baby sweater I made in 2009 (I was too ashamed to put it on Ravelry), but this particular yarn blend had enough wool to give the blanket elasticity.  It has the smooth feel of mercerized cotton, but without the weight.  And since Baby Julia lives in Southern California, the blanket doesn't need to be all that warm.

Since this blanket's edgings are knit from the top down, the pattern required me to cast on invisibly.  I'd been knitting for years before I'd heard of casting on invisibly, and the first time I read those words I assumed them to be an odd case of knitting pattern errata.  I searched the rest of the pattern to see if it contained other impossible instructions such as, "On completion of row five, levitate." 

It wasn't until I discovered Elizabeth Zimmermann that I learned "casting on invisibly" was a real thing, but her instructions and accompanying sketches were of no help to me. 

Eventually, Agatha came along in 1999.  In six short years she learned to knit, then read, and then she taught me how to cast on invisibly using the crochet chain method.  I'm hoping someday she'll teach me how to knit three-dimensional objects, as it seems I can't learn certain knitting techniques through text and schematics alone.

It must be all that mojo I smoked in the '80's.

Sanitized for Your Protection

About a week and a half ago, LB and I rented The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the American version.  I was so disturbed by two scenes in particular that I could not get this movie out of my head.  I had nightmares about these scenes.  It seemed the only thing to do was see another movie, so last Friday LB and I went to see The Hunger Games at The Pickwick.  Funny, how watching children hunt each other, suffer third degree burns, bury each other in flowers and keen in grief did very little to improve the quality of my dreams.  There's probably a lesson to be learned here: no doubt, something like, "Read the book first, or at least the reviews." 

It's too late for that, so I figured the next best thing would be for me to rewrite those two scenes from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  If you haven't seen the movie yet and are planning to, don't worry: these scenes were gratuitous and unearned.  Replacing them will not spoil the plot for you.  It may confuse you, but in a good way.

In the first disturbing scene our gal, who's been grossly mistreated by a person of authority in her life while visiting him at his office, decides to drop in on him at his home.  Despite the fact that she's been portrayed as street-savvy to a fault, our gal apparently never saw that episode of Oprah where the lecturing cop says, "Don't let yourself be taken to Crime Scene #2, even if it means dying at Crime Scene #1." 

She enters his apartment and is surprised to see that he has... laid out a picnic on the bed for her.  Some traditional Scandinavian snacks are served: cardamom rusks and lingonberry preserves.  

Personally, I felt too much was made of the cardamom rusks.  Even a non-Swede knows what a rusk is, and if the viewer didn't, one mere glimpse tells us it's something in the Melba toast/zwieback family.  We didn't need to hear all the crunching.  We didn't need to see that hail of crumbs falling.  And we certainly didn't need to hear that ham-handed, "I forgot to ask you if you like cardamom."

Later, our gal returns to Crime Scene #2 his apartment and this time the surprise is on the host: she has brought a picnic of her own.  She presents him with... a herring of vengeance, and boy, he does not like herring.  She admits to him that she had underestimated him, expecting only jam to be served at their previous encounter.

There's no doubt that this herring was well-deserved, but again, herring are cataclysmic scene-stealers.  You can't just go throwing them around in movies willy-nilly.  Their appearance must be earned by being instrumental to the plot, and this particular herring wasn't.  In fact, it's been less than two weeks since I saw the movie, and I could not tell you the main plot if I wanted to: my memory has been thoroughly gutted by those two scenes.

After the picnic, our gal makes a series of dire threats and gives her foe a new nickname.  The nickname really sticks. 

I admit, that part was satisfying.

Where Have I Been?

I've been quiet here recently, having gone to Milwaukee twice in the past two weeks.  The saga of Man vs. his Foley catheter has been so overplayed in literature that I won't go into poor OFD's trials here.  Instead, I'll show you pictures of Baby Henry, whom I had the pleasure of seeing for the first time in months.

Please ignore the fact that I look as if I haven't slept in months and focus instead on my bodacious tatas the precious drunken sailor that is Henry.

When he smiles he shows his two dimples, but he's awfully fond of his thumbie.

Henry is a very mellow dude, and a self-soother.

He feels just like my Sabina did as a baby: squishy and content.

In fact, he and Sabina are kindered spirits.   It's a good thing I got my hands on him early.  Once he found his way into Sabina's arms, there he stayed.

Baley is quite the young lady now. She and Agatha are two peas in a pod.

Knitting-wise, I've accomplished very little and have been in a deep, deep phase of acquisition.  It all started when I got an email from yarrmarket.com advertising their sale on Rowan.  As we all know, Rowan doesn't go on sale often, and it's only wise to purchase in bulk when this happens.  Sheep may not be on the endangered species list, but one can never predict the future.  Another baby boy is expected among the Keshet staff, and I thought a colorful sampling of my favorite Rowan yarn, Kidsilk Haze, would inspire me.  Isn't it beautiful?

But after I had filled my online cart with Haze, I noticed a Rowan I'd never seen before: Fine Lace.  I ordered some to make a lace stole as a gift for yet another Keshet lady.  She has been Olive's rock through times of puking, sea-gulling, and tears, and is long overdue for knitted recognition.

In the meantime I got a present in the mail from my pal Leslie, whom I've known since my Daisy and her eldest daughter were embryos.  It's nice to have a friend who owns a yarn store, but even better to have a friend who used to own a yarn store. 

I barely had time to contemplate what I should make (other than that of course, it would be for Olive) when I received another gift of yarn in the mail, this time from the Yarn Fairy.  Yes, Virginia, there is a Yarn Fairy, and it's my mother-in-law.

I may not know the future, but occasionally, I can read my mother-in-law's mind.  The selection of yarn -- four skeins of Noro Silk Garden and two skeins of Noro Silk Garden sock yarn in the same colorway -- makes me certain that my mother-in-law has something specific in mind for me to knit. 

Clearly, I am supposed to knit a gender-neutral baby gown with the sock-weight yarn, in the round and in stockinette stitch to show off the Noro color changes to their best advantage.  The heavier weight Silk Garden is for a matching baby blanket.  Maybe I'll make the one from Mason-Dixon knitting that I have knit several times before, using a contrasting Silk Garden that I already have in my stash for the polka dots.

Lo came to visit the folks recently and she took the train to Glenview last Friday to spend one night with us.  Although her stay was not long, she had the consummate Northbrook experience: while she and I were taking a walk through the neighborhood, we crossed paths with another couple.  We moved the requisite amount to the side leaving them slightly more than half the sidewalk, but the woman walking on the inside did not move one inch and she slammed shoulders with Lo. 

In Perlman fashion, Lo cried out, "Ow!" perhaps using slightly more emphasis and volume than the blow warranted.  We looked back at the other couple expecting at the very least a half-hearted, "Sorry!" or even a, "You okay?" but instead the woman shouted back at us, "Well, you should have moved to the side more!"

Over these past four years in Northbrook I have been honked at, cursed out or given the finger more times at the wheel than in all my preceding years of driving.  Many times I've been honked at when stopped at a red light because the driver of the car in back of me wanted to make absolutely sure I was alert and at the ready for when the light turned green.  But this was my first hostile encounter as a pedestrian.

When we drove to Milwaukee the next day we stopped at stopped at Ruhama's before going to my parents' house.  Yes, I already had tons of new yarn, but we needed the loving embrace of a yarn store to help us overcome the trauma of the walking incident of the day before.  Lo and I are very fragile, you know.

I don't usually care for bamboo yarn, but this felt so soft and yummy that I picked out several skeins for a blanket for the new baby of a friend of LB's from grad school.

You know how when you go yarn shopping, you grab as skein and carry it around with you while you shop?  Usually you don't end up buying this skein, but for some reason it speaks to you and gets you started toward the yarn you were really intended to buy: a yarn spokesperson of sorts, if you will.  This was that skein. 

And Lo, who had graciously offered to foot the bill for this trip to the yarn store (getting yarn for my three big girls as well), insisted on me taking it home.

After knitting awhile on the blanket, I realized I had not purchased enough of the bamboo yarn to finish Estonian Lullaby Blanket so I went to Yarnmarket.com and got lucky: extra skeins in the same dye lot as the ones I purchased at Ruhama's.  But then it occurred to me that the scalloped edging might look nice in a contrasting color.

I couldn't decide which contrasting color to use, and as you know, sometimes it's difficult to get a true sense of the color from your monitor.  So I bought two colors.

And it turns out I was right!  It does look pretty with a contrasting color thrown in there.

After I'd put the yarn in my online cart, I started thinking about that cream colored lace yarn I bought the week before.  The cream color is lovely and goes with mostly everything, but this woman is a very vibrant person.  I just don't see her in sedate cream.  She's a blue nail polish with a racing stripe sort of person -- maybe she'd even be offended by such a neutral color choice.  

The last thing I want to do is offend someone with a handknit item. 

Clearly, I needed to buy more lace yarn, in a shade with more presence. I ordered three skeins of what I thought was olive-colored yarn so that she'd always think of Olive when she wears the shawl.

As you can see the color is not olive, not by a long-shot, but it is very pretty and I can picture the recipient in it.

For those of you counting at home, that is quite a lot of yarn I've bought and been given recently.  I've never approved of yarn diets: they lead to feelings of deprivation and the urge to buy more yarn than if one hadn't been dieting at all.  So we'll call this a yarn goal.  Since I bought the last batch of yarn during Passover break,  I am going to try not to purchase any new yarn until Rosh Hashana.  Yes, that is next September. 

Books and patterns don't count.

 

 

 

Before There Was Daisy

The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —

Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —

I've known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —

- Emily Dickinson

 

Daisy was conceived against medical advice. 

Approximately two weeks before her zygote-hood I was in exam room one, waiting for the gastroenterologist to confirm what I already knew but did not want to admit: my Crohn's had come back.  The eight short years of remission were over and I was, once again, a 92-pound bloated tick of an abdomen with matchsticks for arms and legs. This is what Crohn's does: at first, you don't realize you're losing weight because your belly is so distended.

I noticed there was a copy of Everybody Poops among the magazines. Why?  It felt like a cruel choice for reading material, even if the exam room was meant for pediatric patients with inflammatory bowel disease.  Yes, everybody poops -- but not everybody poops fourteen times a day. 

By the time the gastroenterologist came in, I was sobbing.  He sat down and said, "Well, the good news is Prednisone isn't the only option anymore.  There's a whole new class of drugs out there than the last time you were sick.  Sulfa is a thing of the past, and they've come up with more tolerable ways to get the 5-ASA where it needs to go."

I said, "Can you take it when you're pregnant?  Because I really, really want to have another baby." 

He put his hands to his temples and said, "No.  We are not having this conversation.  We're going to get you stable.  That is the only thing we are going to do now."

I do not remember the rest of the visit.  I imagine we talked about drug options, I had blood drawn and he sent me home with prescriptions for mesalamine and cholestyramine resin.  All I had heard was that I was not supposed to get pregnant, and as you know, I only had two modes when it came to maternity: nary a thought of children, or wanting to be pregnant yesterday. 

The thought of Sabina being more than two years older than her younger sibling felt intolerable.   At that time, I perceived every unhappy moment of my childhood as a direct result of my siblings being eight, eleven and fourteen years older than I was.  And that sibling who's eight years older than I?  We hadn't discovered each other yet.  I mean, I knew about Lo, but we had never been in the same phase of life at the same time, and I had no reason to believe we ever would.  Before she left for college, her interest in me was limited to my ability to assemble snacks.  "I'll time you," she'd say, as if that somehow made it fun. 

The day after that awful appointment, something unthinkable happened: the gastroenterologist called me on the telephone to apologize for the way he had spoken to me in his office.

I'll give you all a moment to regain consciousness.

Yes, a doctor called me to say he had been wrong.  "I was way too harsh," he said. "Would I want my daughter to conceive while on mesalamine?  No.  Would it be safe?  Probably.  But you're entitled to want a baby, just like any other woman.  And I had no right to dismiss you out of hand."

So there I was, on a drug that had not yet kicked in, living on Ensure and overcooked carrots.  (I don't care how many flavors Ensure adds to its repertoire.   They all taste the same: like the can they come in.)  I looked cadaverous, and yet, in two weeks I was pregnant. 

And I was terrified. 

I can honestly say I did not relax for one moment of that pregnancy, even though as sometimes happens with autoimmune disorders, I was back into remission by the end of the first trimester.  Daisy was born at thirty-six weeks and two days: long enough to weigh a respectable six pounds and five ounces and have a healthy amount of lung surfactant, but not one moment longer.  I truly believe she was trying to make things easier on me.

For the first four weeks on the outside, Daisy did nothing but eat and sleep, sleep and eat, and sleep some more.  Her eyes were almost always closed.

At some point during the fourth week, she opened her eyes and saw that it was Not Good.  Daisy was a much fussier baby than Sabina had been, but made up for it by having eyes like stars.

Daisy did not like her bassinet.  She did not like strangers.  She did not like her bouncy seat.  She did not like the car.  She did not like to be held in any position that was comfortable for the person doing the holding.  Oh, sure, I was a handy food source and LB was tolerable company.  But there was really only one person in her life who could do no wrong.

Guess who?

Happy 16th birthday, Daisy!  I'm so glad to be in your society.

 

Becoming Jen

There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, if you ever meet your antiself, don't shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light.

        - Steven Hawking

 

I was named after someone my sister had a girl-crush on.  Jennifer was not yet a popular name in August of 1965, but would become so shortly thereafter.  I know very few 46 year old Jennifers but hoards of 45 year olds on down.  It tapers off sharply, and I now know of no Jennifers between the ages of 15 and 30.  Anyways, I had a common name, even if I was released slightly ahead of its popularity: much like my brother David (that would be Hen) who was born before the Davey Crockett song came out.  Just ahead of the trend, our mom was.

I was Jenny for most of my childhood.  I never really liked Jenny: I didn't feel like a Jenny, and it reiterated my position as the youngest.  I was the only family member who was called by a diminutive, the only child whose name did not have a Spanish translation, and thus, the only child whose name my mother could never correctly pronounce. 

In fifth grade I switched schools and saw a golden opportunity to become Jennifer, and Jennifer I stayed for the next thirteen years.  I made it clear to all I met that I would not answer to Jenny, and it was very rare for someone to even try.  I was a small but formidable person and I think it felt natural to call me by a name that began and ended with a consonant.  During those thirteen years I remember only one person calling me Jenny: my thesis adviser in college. She called me Jenny even when in a classroom full of people who knew me as Jennifer (the creative writing majors were a small group, and by senior year we all knew each other and heard each other's voices in our heads, critiquing our stories as we wrote them).  

My thesis adviser's Jenny felt like the gesture of pointing towards one's eyes with index and middle finger.  I see you!  I see the Jenny within.  And because I admired her to the point of worship, I never corrected her.

I liked it.

On the first day of fiction workshop at Brown, our instructor (like my poetry teacher later at USC, she was a Female Face #4) took attendance.

"Jon?"

Long-haired guy raises his hand and says, "...but I go by my middle name, Dan."

Female Face #4 takes what feels like absolutely forever to make a notation in her attendance roster.  How long can it take to cross out Jon and write Dan?  This comes as no surprise.  Female Face #4, in all her incarnations in my life, has moved in a slow and deliberate manner with a distinct awareness of being watched.

"Josephine?"

Small Malaysian girl says, "I am Josie."   Again, our instructor makes her slow and painful corrections.

"Susan?"

Blonde athletic girl says, "I go by Sukie." 

Immediately, I know Susan/Sukie and I will be two ships passing in the night.  I cannot fathom why someone, when given the opportunity to stop being called Sukie, would let it pass by. 

More painful crossing out and rewriting.

"Robert?"

Flannel-shirted Sacramento boy to my immediate right whom I'd already learned had been graduated in 1988 says, "Present.  But I go by my middle name, Joseph."

It takes FF #4 even longer to write Joseph than it did to write Sukie.  Finally she looks up.

Sacramento boy then says, "... and most people call me Joe."

Asshole!  I think.  You did that just to be difficult.  I glance at him and see from his bemused profile that's it's true -- he's poking at the teacher! 

Later, I'd be surprised to learn that he really did go by Joe.  To me, he looked absolutely nothing like a Joe.  At that time the name "Joe" was irrevocably tied to Giuseppe from the empennage section.  This Robert/Joseph/Joe person was far too Norman Rockwell to have a name I associated with ethnicity.  He looked -- yes, here's when it first occurred to me -- like the boy who mowed my parents' front lawn when I was growing up.

"Is there anyone else who goes by a name other than what's written on this roster?  Because this is the only time I'm going to make changes."  Apparently, Female Face #4 herself was getting tired of this game.

Our instructor had started with me and worked clockwise around the room, ending with Lawn Boy.

"I go by Jen," I said. 

Why did I do that?  I had rarely, if ever, been called Jen.  It felt too personal, too casual, and it was as if I'd stood at the front of the room, lifted my sweater and showed everyone my very new, very angry-looking bowel resection scar.  I could feel Lawn Boy looking at me and I knew he could tell that Jen was something new.  He also knew that I had done this not just to bug the instructor, but because I wanted to become someone new.  And he sensed I regretted it. 

I ascribed a lot of thinking to this Lawn Boy person I'd just met, a lot of thinking about me.  And I wasn't wrong.  He was still looking at me now that roll call had finally finished and our instructor had begun the slow, laborious process of saying what we'd be doing in her class.   I stared straight ahead.  This odd discomfort was nothing new.  Whenever I've encountered destiny --  one of those characters who's going to be important later in the novel -- my first reaction is always to look away.