Medical week, round three: I had to go in for an ultrasound. You know, just to make sure I didn’t need an ultrasound.

Drink 40 oz and come in an hour later. Did. Used the facilities apparently a little too close to the time; came in, and–nope, you need to drink more and we’ll call for you in twenty minutes.

(Cool! More knitting time!)

So I’m sitting there in the waiting room and someone I hadn’t seen earlier who works there appears from around the corner and nods at me with a smile. I smile and nod back; doing 2×2 ribbing, I don’t have to look much at what’s in my hands, my eyes are free to notice what’s going on around me. I’m knitting a hat at the center of the Venn diagram of two circular needles, the tips not in use waggling a bit as I work. In retrospect it must have looked complicated.

It isn’t.

She disappears back into the hallway behind the door.

I apparently had been verified as friendly: and so, two minutes later, she reappears through the door with another woman who immediately sits down next to me (as the first stays standing, smiling and nodding some more) and tells me that they’d taken knitting classes together at such-and-such LYS in Los Gatos and they didn’t get it! Why does it do this when you do that, and, and… They were in agreement that they were both about to chuck it. They clearly were both also in agreement that they didn’t want to.

“If you do stockinette stitch for your scarf the edges will curl. If you do some knit/purl combination at the edges it’ll be okay.”

“That’s what the lady on the plane said!” she confirmed eagerly to the one standing.

Then she said something about practicing with garbage yarn–her phrase–and I told her, “If you knit garbage yarn you end up with garbage. And it’s not fun. I use really nice yarns and it makes me want to knit.” And here–I had her feel the baby alpaca in my hands.

Ooooh!

The standing one stayed shy and a little apart but the smile was getting bigger.

They had great enthusiasm, they loved being able to talk about it with no pressure of being in a yarn store where everybody else was better at it than they, and they just seemed to need to know that knitting really is something one can stay passionate about even if one has to start at it by being a beginner.

Is there anyone who was never a beginner?