Petaluma
Friday June 08th 2007, 9:25 am
Filed under: Knit

petaluma-020.jpgThe resident geek and apprentice geek are still working at fixing this computer, and today for some reason it’s not reading pictures; I’ll add them later. I mean, these are pictures you have to see! (Okay, got’em now.)  Meantime, two friends of mine and I drove up to Petaluma yesterday to join the hundreds coming to Stephanie Pearl-McPhee at her booksigning.

It was amazing how many people took pictures of the crowd. Maybe we’re all trying to convince the subsequent venues they’ll really need all those chairs? There’s this sense of, this is our Stephanie, she is a force to be reckoned with, WE are a force to be reckoned with, now, you all take good care of her.

One of the things she mentioned was how her brother-in-law, who works for Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders, sent her an email gushing over what a good job she’d done when she got her fellow knitters to raise $15,oo0 awhile ago. Uh, well, we eventually did better than that: when she decided she wanted to double her total that by then had gotten to $120,000, she asked us all to consider how well off we are–no matter how poor we may be by our neighbors’ standards–and to help take care of those with far less.

She met that goal in 72 hours. Seventy-two hours, $120,000, and it kept going. Her brother-in-law, then, stunned, went, how do I…how do we replicate…how?…

And she said, when we knit, we are doing a small thing, one single loop after one single loop, and seeing how it adds up to the whole. We see the power of those individual loops, we live that, over and over and over. When it comes to donating to Medecins Sans Frontieres, we don’t give up, thinking the problems are just far too much bigger than what we can do anything about; we each add our little bit in, and it adds up and up and up.

I have said it often, I will say it again here: there are no small acts of kindness.

And go, Stephanie!


2 Comments so far
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I remember way back when she asked for donations. I went on her site several times a day to watch the total go up, up, up.

There is something so special about knitters…

Comment by Amanda 06.08.07 @ 11:43 am

Oh how I love the photo! The colors! (I’m on a Mac.) Thanks, Alison. Stephanie’s wonderful, and I wanted to see how she looked on that day, at that time. Now I’ve caught a glimpse.

Comment by Robin 06.08.07 @ 3:51 pm



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