Counting stitches

There’s no knitting today. Instead, I dismantle the Christmas tree. Carefully, I wrap each precious ornament, some colorful glass, some cute little figures in wood, in tissue paper, and lay it gently into the storage box. The tree is more fragrant dry and dead than it was while soft and fresh. A human wouldn’t smell so good untended. Tearing the strings of lights off the stiffened branches isn’t easy, and I struggle hurriedly, because I’m due out for lunch in just 40 minutes. I realize that no matter what pleasure lies ahead, my compulsion to finish what I’m doing controls me. I have to get that last strand off, because after lunch, I won’t want to have this chore to face. Instead, I’ll want to bask. The neighborhood Italian deli is warm and bright. The roasted red pepper in my mortadella and mozzarella sandwich is sweet, like the moment. I am beginning to understand how different I have become. Counting stitches has reminded me how to attend to each moment. And this afternoon, each moment is something to etch into memory. I’m surrounded by quiet kindness. There is coffee, with raw sugar and thick froth that stays on my upper lip. There is the soft blue sleeve of a sweater that I cannot resist the urge to touch. And finally, there is the realization that for the first time since I turned sixteen, I am not saddened by the end of Christmas. The glorious season isn’t ending, but leading to the birth of every new day. Perhaps that is what the story means. Our uncertainty of what awaits us under that star is exactly what draws us forward. Pack up your gifts, and join the journey.

Dropped a stitch

Technology and knitting. Each has its advantages. But in knitting, if I drop a stitch, it's my fault. Miscalculate the gauge, my fault. With technology, it's never my fault. I now have two blog posts on my laptop, not posted. The laptop refuses to connect to my wireless router. The battle I did with it on the weekend was so frustrating that I wanted to stab myself in the eyeball with the nearby knitting needle. Now that would have been my fault. I wrote those two entries, but now having processed the weekend more fully, they seem out of date, frail compared to the strength of what I am currently thinking. Monday comes and goes, and still no luck with the wireless connection. I'm on my son's iBook. But sometimes a lack of connectivity via wireless forces one to seek different types elsewhere. It started Friday. I was leaning my chin on my hands at my desk, the last one in the office other than the cleaning staff. The vacuum cleaner was approaching. I had had plans to meet a dear friend, but her in-laws had arrived unexpectedly, and she couldn't go out. Story of my life ... best laid plans. Everyone tells me to plan, but truly, my life is ruled by serendipity. Because that's what defined Friday night and the following weekend, and there is nothing I could have planned that would have improved what occurred. A new email appeared on my screen. Okay, no Karen, but instead an email. A sorry comfort, I thought, until I read its one line message, and became intrigued. Minutes later, I was on the telephone with this unknown person, discovering all that I had in common with someone I'd never met in person. He was looking for some information on a common project. And there I was, stumbling through a conversation in which we tripped into unexpected territories, learning that we are both Unitarians with liberal views -- as opposed to Unitarians with conservative views?? -- and a bit worn down by life that day. He'd had his plans cancelled, too. The next day, over lunch, we found out that we have the same color eyes, a passion for equity and justice, and the belief that gratuitous meanness should be punishable by law. All of this doesn't seem so extraordinary, perhaps. But what was happening? A new color was being introduced into the fabric of my life. On Sunday morning, I sat with the other members of the Unitarian Church of Harrisburg choir, fondly called "The Unisingers," in the church we share with another congregation on the second Sunday of the month. This new practice is the effort of a mainly white congregation from an A-frame church just out of the city of Harrisburg to serve a less white neighborhood, a less privileged population, offering them dignity as well as charity. I had considered it folly. Barriers, I have learned through working at a school district that is 85% African American and 10% Latino, are not so easily broken, no matter how well-intentioned either party may be. How astonished I was to hear from a few speakers at the service that day that the second Saturday breakfasts are working very well. Hundreds are coming out to be served breakfast and get to know our congregation. Neighbors are welcoming us with open arms. Activists and social service people in the community are befriending us. Our minister had said that serving in this community would save no one but ourselves ... but I was seeing differently that morning. I saw that with every new contact made, more than two people were being saved. It would spread, just as surely as every successful connection made through my work has a ripple effect, as well. And next to me, my fellow second alto was weaving yellow into the blue of her sock. I've worked on cables, complicated patterns for suits that fit infants, turned the heel of a sock, built the thumb of a mitten. But I've never worked a color pattern. Megan said she could show me. I loved the alternating colors, knit together tightly. Leaving the church, I recognized my new friend standing at the door. He'd come to my Unitarian service instead of his. He'd heard the motivating speakers. The idea our congregation was making a reality, despite naysayers like myself, may now travel further. And the sparkling color in his eyes and my excitement to see him were blended with my gratitude for the spiritual experience I'd just had, and the additional moving blending of our voices with those of a Gospel group from the community. It was a multicolored morning. One of beauty, and joy.

Knitwit

Tonight, I returned to singing. (I brought the seed-stitch scarf project along.) It felt great. My diaphragm expanded, making more room for my heart. I felt like the Grinch after seeing that the Whos wake up and join hands in a circle to sing the Faroo Daroo song (or whatever it's called) without any packages, boxes or bags. They may have no gifts, but they still have each other, and they still have their song. About seven years ago, my daughter Annie (who was then only 14) and I joined the choir at the Unitarian church we attend. We're both second altos, so we were able to sit together, blend our voices, and doodle on one another's music (oops, fellow Unisingers, you didn't read that). We'd giggle at the silly tenors and bases who were constantly wisecracking and acting out, as if they were teenagers. We'd yawn toward the end of the night and wonder when it would end ... and then burst into our second winds on the car home, loudly performing the parts we'd just learned, and tweaking them to suit our over-tired hysteria. But the memory I cherish the most is of hearing her sweet, haunting voice in my ear. After she left for college in the fall of 2006, I returned to choir alone. The chair beside me in the Alto II section was inhabited by someone else. I didn't stay with it long. I felt like I was sleepwalking through life that fall, except for the times that I awakened in the middle of the night, shaking with anxiety, terrified that I'd never get over the sudden and painful disappearance of my first child. I'd wanted her to go to the college of her choice, and she did, but damn it, it was 400 miles north, and such a good choice that she was absorbed by her new life and didn't really need to talk to me much at all. I left her room intact, and whenever I had the courage to enter it, the lingering scent of her brought me crashing onto her bed, wracked with a deep sense of loss even though she was alive and well and even thriving. It was only partly about Annie. It was also about the beginning of the end of that part of my life, when nothing else mattered when one of them had a fever, when waking them up was the first task of my day. When I ate what they liked. Even with my two younger children still with me, everything changed the day Annie packed her boxes and trunk into the back of her father's Acura and drove away. The yellow VW bug she'd driven for two years was in my driveway. Just looking at the empty, stationary representation of her quirky effusiveness made me feel like an empty walnut shell. So I find it ironic that four years later, having pulled myself through years of alternating depression and manic self-distraction, intentional change and growth and the accompanying abandonment of delusion, now that I am finally enjoying the transition into the next phase of life, and anticipating with enthusiasm the impending freedom after Child 2 and Child 3 go to college, I've been told it's time to rehash every miserable experience of my life. I've been in more therapy than hippos have been in mud. I've been put on more different antidepressants than Baskin Robbins has flavors. Some of this therapy and medication worked, but I didn't really start feeling myself (a person I'd not seen since I was about 18) until last summer, the last summer of the first decade of the 21st Century, when I made a huge decision -- never to drink another alcoholic beverage again. Doctors and psychiatrists tell you not to drink with the meds, and it's right on the pill bottles. But hey, who takes that seriously, right? A glass of red wine a day actually helps women live longer. I don't remember reading anywhere that the occasional night out drinking martinis, then wine, then kahlua is supposed to extend one's life. But it sure made it easy to forget that the empty nest was just around the corner. Until the next morning, that is. So, now well into this exercise, and happier than I can remember ever having been, on the advice of other determined nondrinkers, I've been told to "do an inventory" -- that is, confront my defects, resentments, and general mishegas through writing a long rumination on the moments of my life that have contributed to my current despair, anger, fear, and hate ... wait a minute, am I in Star Wars? I'm supposed to start with my earliest memory, and trace back through my entire life looking for memories that still make me cringe. I'm a writer. I go into detail. I don't have enough years left for this. I'm almost finished with the scarf. It's deliciously black, and nubby, and soft. I often feel let down at the end of a project, as is common when I finish reading a long, gripping novel. Perhaps that's why I didn't used to finish my knitting projects, but keep them around, always having them somewhere in a basket like a puppy never grown into a dog. Nothing stays the same, right? And nothing ever changes the way you think it will ... When I enthusiastically ordered my first drink ever, a Tanqueray and tonic (how sophisticated, I'd thought) to celebrate my "coming of age," I wanted everything to be different ... right then! I wanted all the freedom that comes with being an adult. And instead, I took the first sip, and my very first step toward becoming enslaved. We knew so little as teenagers, and so many of us still don't admit what we don't know, today. I hereby openly admit: I've been a knitwit, fumbling through life. But not anymore. Bring it on, rotten memories. I'm ready. I'm going to condense you, dehydrate you, and brush your dust off my life. I went out tonight, and I refound my voice. And you know what's amazing? It sounds a lot like Annie's. Binding off.

Scarf of Gold

Disclaimer. Moving into a new mode called "Speed Writing," akin to Speed Chess, or Speed Knitting, in which one uses size 15 needles and bulky wool, guaranteeing a finished product in about three hours. Sometimes they tend toward the gargantuan, like the mock turtle I made Annie last year that is too big to pack in a reasonably sized suitcase and still allow for other garments, but the satisfaction, the satisfaction. I tend to edit myself too much, which can carry these blog entries into the wee hours, and make me dysfunctional the next morning when I'm at my day job, which pays the mortgage. Can't be doing that. Irresponsible. So, I'm trying this out. My perfectionist nature is screaming in pain, but c'es la vie. And now that brings us to the topic below, which is written with as many nonsequitor paragraphs as the writing it disparages. I guess that could be considered ironic, or just plain bad rhetoric. Tonight: Grateful for a warm home, complete with a roof and a sofa. Doesn't hurt that my daughter has let me use her laptop, as mine refused to connect through the new router. I've had to wheedle. Meanwhile, while she was using it, cuddled into her own sofa corner with a blanket, my occupation was ... knit two, purl two. The scarf grows, the seed stitch remains metaphoric of this blog. I can see both. When I write, the letters pile up in crazy-assed lines, and, if I put them here, you can read them. The miracle of the Interwebs. We can put our insanity and meandering thoughts out here for all to observe, and to grow by. This activity is what I do today, but it's of course informed by experiences I once regretted or considered a waste of time. Since, I've learned that no experience should be regarded as so. Except, perhaps, avoidance and/or addictive over-indulgence in the self-seeking search for happiness that cannot be reached that way. But even missing out can teach you to wake up and live more fully, if you let it. For a long time, I regretted missing my chance to enter academia via the tenure track. But if I had, would I be writing this perspicacious, perceptive prattle on here? Between rows of the scarf du jour? The world would be so much worse off, right? Tell me yes. Comment, for the love of God, comment! But I know this much: If I were still writing the way I wrote in graduate school, you'd have stopped reading long before getting to this paragraph. I was in graduate school during the time of the fairy tale: in fairy tales, nothing is real. In addition to the happily-married-based-on-the-illusion-of-security-born-from-another fictive narrative, here's the fairy tale in which I then lived: Once upon a time, in a land across the sea, there was a King of Theory. Like most of that written in French, his work was -- and is -- incomprehensible, even when carefully translated. I know what you're thinking: It's gotta be one of those lost in translation things, right? Right? Hmmm. Maybe. Here's a brief sample, from Grammatology: The science of writing should therefore look for its object at the roots of scientificity. The history of writing should turn back toward the origin of historicity. A science of the possibility of science? A science of science which would no longer have the form of logic but that of grammatics? A history of the possibility of history which would no longer be an archaeology, a philosophy of history or a history of philosophy? And so, for years, little girls got lost in these words. We were little girls, avoiding ourselves, playing with words as if they were Legos, rearranging them endlessly. We were as imprisoned, charged with weaving straw into gold, even though we knew the weird little man's name. We tipped our heads slightly to the right, adopted a thoughtful expression, stuck our pencils behind our ears, and tried to pretend that words are only differance. That's French for ... you guessed it ... difference ... of course loaded with more meaning, even though Derrida would argue that there isn't any meaning at all ... except of course in his writing? I mean, a bit paradoxical, no? I never fully believed this fairy tale, but perhaps because I'd succumbed to the very depressing fallacy that Derrida was -- in the no meaning exists part -- right. I found lots of solace -- or so I thought -- in a number of other fairy tales, too, including escape. Escape from life into the heady world of literary criticism and theory, where nothing can hurt as much as reality can. But since then, I've fallen into the very gritty reality of a different kind of work, the do-gooder type, the windmill-tilting, change the culture, save-my-corner-of-the-world type. Even if just one bit at a time. And I've learned that the aphorism "no good deed goes unpunished" is one of the truest. This morning, in the midst of being told that my colleagues and I were lazy-assed disorganized time-wasters with little sense of urgency, I was faced with what I would have once seen as two options: fight or flight, two words defined only by their difference from one another. The always already. But there is a third option I have been learning in another type of school lately; a third option that one takes step by step, inch by inch, stitch by stitch. Picture the row growing, the weaving of the love that is a handmade scarf. I practiced it. I smiled, pulling joy from my promise to bring joy to others, to tolerate difference/differance. And the patience came. My moment of imbalance passed. I spun joy, and thus meaning, and suddenly that straw became gold.

The Reign of Terror

It must be significant that the more I've been knitting, the more I've been thinking about Dickens. Despite having read his entire ouevre for my doctoral exams -- yes, even Bleak House and Little Dorrit -- I never knew that Madame Defarge was what was considered a "tricoteuse."

According to our time's ultimate source of knowledge, Wikipedia, "tricoteuse literally translates from the French as a (female) knitter. The term is used to refer to the old women who used to sit around the guillotine knitting during the Reign of Terror in France in the 18th century. Decisions on executions had to be made in public so these women were paid to be in attendance and give their opinion. During the Reign of Terror the opinions were rarely anything but 'off with his head.' In Charles Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities, the character Madame Defarge is a relentless and bloodthirsty tricoteuse ..." Feel free to click on any of those links and end up on Wikipedia, even though doing so may mean you never return to my blog. Perhaps I can figure out a way to get my blog on Wikipedia? Things did not end well for Madame Defarge. The hubris she had to judge and condemn others, even if it was a kinda popular thing to do, participating in the Revolution and quashing the power of the ruling class and all, came back and bit her on her derriere. She was completely unforgiving, and with a vengeance went after the descendants of the Evremonde family, who had, a generation before, wronged her family. She's a tricky one, that Defarge. She knits into her work the names of those she wants to ... and eventually does ... see die. Dickens modeled her on the Fates, who used to measure the lifespan of a human being in a string of yarn. When they wanted to end that life, they would sever the fibers. So very many kinds of friction have frayed the yarn that is my life -- most of which I had a large part in causing. Of course, friction comes in fits and starts, and lately, it's in a fit phase, the kind of time in which the amount of good you do, the quantity of truth or joy you spread, or the volume of love you share, is irrelevant. The Fates will do as they see best. It is the best of times, the worst of times. The best of times in which I have found so many ways to be kind. The worst of times in the ways I am repaid. The best of times, in which there is always another skein. The worst of times, in which I knit feverishly, to reach the next skein, because its fibers have not yet been compromised. Today, a small but memorable moment of my childhood came into mind -- a moment that I've since tried to convince myself made me as nobly intended as Robin Hood. But in fact, that was not the case at all. In fact, it was born of selfishness, and dissatisfaction with my basketful of yarn. You see, I was one of the several children in my second grade who didn't have a new box of crayons. In those days, we had to bring our crayons from home, and because my parents impressed upon my sisters the importance of keeping their things nice, I inherited a box of half-used crayons that had a most disappointing broken magenta, my favorite color. I didn't have any money of my own to buy a new box, and back then, we couldn't -- and didn't -- expect anyone else to provide them for us. I couldn't ask my mother for a new box, because that would be adlmitting that I was ashamed by the perfectly fine box I had. Anyway, there I was one day strolling a few paces behind my mother, who was searching through our local Five And Ten for notepaper. Cleverly, I let the space between us lengthen until I found it safe to lift what I saw as a beautiful, perfect, untouched-by-human-hands box of crayons and put it in my pocket. Immediately, the guilt descended. I was Catholic then, after all. Once home, I carefully stashed the box in my red plaid book satchel, and before we pulled out our brown bag lunches the following day, I retrieved the box and gave it to the little girl at the desk next to me who also didn't have a new box. In fact, she had no box at all. Her toothy grin was like a pardon. It may have been the first time in my life that I felt relief. But not enough to erase what I'd done. Prepare now for a mangled blend of metaphor: Only now do I realize that every step I've ever taken outside my box of perfectly fine crayons has frayed my yarn. Look around. There are so many kids without any crayons at all. We who had even an imperfect box were born lucky. But that imperfect box is enough to make us suspect now, to nudge our necks ever more closely to the guillotine's blade. Our names are written in society's fabric as those who have, as the descendants of those who oppressed the rest. I don't know what the answer is. Capitalism is as imperfect as any other system, and intrinsically demands that a poorer class exist. But since that early lesson, I strove to get, the honest, capitalist way, a nice new magenta crayon -- not only for me, but also for the little kids without one. And now I'm angry that I'm judged for that. A do-gooder who sees the have-nots as the lesser-thans. So, to find peace, and patience, and acceptance, I pick up my size 5 1/2 plastic needles and my black Paton Shetland Chunky acrylic/wool, and seed stitch another couple of rows on the winter scarf meant for my son. I know this entry sounds pious and self-serving. That's the problem with humility. As soon as you find some, you're proud of having done so. Repeat.

Space Suits

I once knit a pair of socks, one of which would have fit Frankenstein, and the other Bilbo Baggins. I'm thinking the product was affected by my state of mind, especially as everything I knit while pregnant came out properly shaped, with tricky cables or delicate contrasting zigzags. Funny how we glow when we're pregnant, but never attribute that radiance to the fact that we're not smoking and boozing. Of course this theory doesn't explain why our hair falls out post-partum, but I'm working on it.

In December alone, I created four gifts for family and friends through this new industriousness, and miraculously finished a project for my second child that I'd started for my firstborn. No matter how you look at it, this hobby is better than most of the others I have acquired over the years. I have yet to figure out how to play a Brahms Rhapsodie while twisting a cable, but my children assure me that's a good thing.

So whom should I honor with this daily blog, to whom I would happily dedicate 2010, a year I once thought would find us flying around in pods wearing jumpsuits made of Kevlar and shiny astronaut fashion? Shall research it tonight. Hell, maybe I'll design a signature hand-knit space suit. As I see it, I've found contented and chaos-free row-by-row living. Let's see what the recipients of my fine creations have to say to all that. And let's see what knit one, purl one living brings in practice.

I swear, like a new mother breastfeeding in a public place, I am not embarking on this madness just to needle you.

Winter to spring

Days pass
like unwrapped gifts
or delicate negligees
kept in the drawer

The year turns with songs
we do not understand
and candles never lit

What of sitting silently
inhaling the fragrance
of a dark pine

Feeling the pungent
needle carpet
softened by time

Seeing through narrowed eyes
the filtered glow
through the branches and
tasting the whisper
of each other's breath