A letter that arrived today, and I’m sure she won’t mind my sharing it:

Dear Ms. Hyde:

Thank you for your recent correspondence regarding civility in Congress and for the very thoughtful gift of a royal baby alpaca knit hat as part of your Warm Hats, Not Hot Heads campaign. I apologize for the delay in responding to your letter.

I appreciate learning your thoughts and of your desire to carry out change in the way members of both chambers of Congress communicate. You will be pleased to know that members of both political parties are discussing ways to bring more mutual respect, and less hot rhetoric, to our discourse. We need individuals in public service who love to serve the people, who value fairness, and who have the courage to make an objective decision after listening to all sides of an issue.

Again, thank you for sharing your views with me and for your very thoughtful gift. I commend you for your efforts to promote sensible public discourse through your Warm Hats, Not Hot Heads campaign. Please do not hesitate to contact me again about this or other issues of concern to you.

Sincerely,

Barbara Boxer

United States Senator

——-

She apologized for the lateness, but I would say it arrived on a day when that lift did me much good and I am delighted that she took the time. Well done, Senator, thank you!

(Okay, Babelfish translates tant pis as “such an amount of worse” rather than “too bad for you.” Gotta love those transliterations.)

I hadn’t seen my hawks in days and wondered if they didn’t like that I’d changed the looks of a few things out there, like that slip’n’slide for the squirrels with the shiny reflections from the greased foil by the birdfeeder.

Today they made up for it: I saw the female twice, the male once. He flew to a few feet from the window and while gazing in steadily, leaned towards me as if to say hello. I loved it.

But his mate! She came in first, landing on the barbecue grill, and that same squirrel with the severe testosterone poisoning–’terone ranger!–not a female squirrel defending her young but a male his territory, and I will mention that it was the same one that deliberately motioned threateningly at a hawk last week–at first as she flew in he started to run away, but then when she settled down on the arm of the grill he turned around midrun and audaciously came back to repeat that deliberate menacing act. Going so far as to put a paw on the bottom of the grill poised as if to leap up at her immediately above him.

Get lost, loser. She lifted off.

A little while later, her mate was doing his closeup for me on the wooden box. What a gorgeous bird. Ix-nay on the beef suet with peanuts here, Ma’am, but thanks for trying.

And not a squirrel to be seen. Even though he was the smaller of the two.

Then another hour or so later, the female flew in front of the patio again, abruptly blending into leaves and disappearing into the tree behind the grill. Wow, she’s good at this.

Guess who took offense at her invading his favorite tree?

I watched in disbelief as that little bushytail (he has distinctive markings) deliberately strode down the fenceline toward her like a cat about to pounce. And then he jumped at her! Not quite to her, but with the intent of scaring her off again like a sparrow. She again took off slowly and deliberately–I’ve seen her in a hurry and that wasn’t it–and whether she was responding to an innate instinct on the part of a bird, even a predator, to get away from something coming at her or what, I don’t know.

But wow, that squirrel’s got a Darwin wish. Coopers, looking at Sibley’s western birds guide, do indeed eat small mammals, not just birds.  He’s so got it coming.

On a side note.  The Washington Post reports on a professor who ran the recent press releases of the members of Congress through a computer to determine patterns, and what surprised him was this: 27% of everything they say is taunting. Not just chest-thumping aren’t I wonderful self-congratulations to their constituents, but actually taunting their opponents and not even pretending to try to work together to get things done in a way that acknowledges that other people have valid points of view too.

This is not the way to govern a diverse people well.

We voters should be watching them like a hawk.

I am proud to say that my Representative, Anna Eshoo, who thanked me warmly for her hat from the Warm Hats Not Hot Heads project for Congress, handled the latest quite respectfully, I feel, while explaining her point of view.  It can be done.

I got just the best thank you note today in the mail. Opened the envelope, a big grin on my face, and read a signed-by-hand note:

Dear Ms. Hyde,

Thank you so much for the very lovely hat knitted by you. Your “Warm Hats, Not Hot Heads” campaign is an extraordinarily creative way to encourage civility in Congress, and I’m so pleased that you and your friends have undertaken it. I will continue to do my best to promote courteous and constructive dialogue in Congress, and I thank you again for your warm and wonderful gift.

Most gratefully,

Anna Eshoo

Member of Congress

———-

I tell you.  She completely made my day.

Ellen has some good ideas here on continuing the campaign, and again, the spreadsheet is here on who’s covered so far/who isn’t in Congress yet as far as we know.

But don’t let that limit you. Anyone else whom you’d like to take the message to by sending them a handknit hat and a note, the more we do, the greater the impact.

I confess to having made one a week ago that I thought was going to go to Congress, but it refused my efforts to pick out a name. It just wouldn’t go. Then a conversation with another knitter led to my sending it to her to give to someone in her statehouse–the person it clearly had been meant for all along, there was no question.

Sometimes it pays to just go with the flow when a thing demands to be knit: it will tell you when it’s ready and you will know.

Merino wool takes up dye more quickly than silk does, making it easy, in the case of my Filatura di Crosa “Wave” yarn, to have a heathered effect come out of the dyebath: two fibers that have been through the mill and share differences and similarities from the experience.

Soft but closely knit and strong and warm. It seemed perfect for her. A braid of a cable around the brim, the stitches picked up and then more braids working their way up: Fisherman’s Wharf and sailors’ ropes, even the yarn itself named to match the power of the ocean reaching halfway around her district. I liked it.

It was Jackie Speier’s hat, and I didn’t get it finished in time to mail with the Senators’ yesterday but I did do those last few rows today. I emailed her office a heads-up as to who I was and what I was up to, said I was going to put it in the mail, and then looked around her site for where to send it.

Hey. I thought it surely would have been San Francisco. It was closer in–a trek, and getting towards 3:00 rush hour soon, but certainly doable.

I called.

I got this male voice stopping me as I tried to introduce myself, going, Wait. Run that by me again? What?

Gradually, I got to hear his voice sounding happier and happier as he heard me explain the Warm Hats Not Hot Heads concept and why it was important to me that Jackie Speier get one of those hats.

He seemed a little more hesitant though when I chirped brightly, Great! Then if you don’t mind I’ll hop in my car in a few minutes and bring it over.

Thick clouds at home became a cloudburst the further north I drove. A slightly soggy-looking (red-tailed?) hawk perched on a signpole over the freeway made me laugh in surprise: always a touch of raptor, isn’t there, waiting to be seen for the noticing. Speaking of which, Clara’s third new peregrine egg made its appearance on camera today.

Traffic was not too bad yet. The rain caught its breath a moment as I parked the car; a friendly touch, that.

I was screened downstairs and signed in.  I went up. I explained to the buzzer at the door, as before, who/what/why. A woman’s voice seemed to hesitate at first; I imagined her asking and the guy there going, oh yes, her, okay, so she did come, it’s okay.

But that’s just my guess. It’s kind of hard to lipread a doorbell for missing details.

I entered and immediately knew who it was that had been on the phone: the man on his feet now whose smile was all one could ever hope for. The glass between the staff and the waiting room was surely protective, but the woman near him quickly opened the door to the waiting area and came to me, smiling as well.

I’m not quite in Ms. Speier’s district, I quickly acknowledged to her, pulling the hat out, but I feel she represents me. She’s not one who needs the message of one of these hats like some of her colleagues do; rather, it’s that I personally needed to knit her one to thank her so much for what she does and who she is.

She asked if I were following the pipeline hearings. Ohmygoodness yes. Thank you Jackie Speier! Our very lives in this neighborhood may well depend on her firmness in holding PG&E’s feet to the fire they created.

I got to see, in my few minutes there, how much those two staff members clearly love their boss.

Which says to me all over again what a fine leader she is.

The hats. We’re at 245. Not a big jump from yesterday, but still, steady upwards progress.  Thank you, hat knitters! May every one of you come away feeling as blessed by your recipients’ responses as I did with mine today.

It occurs to me (woefully slow, I know) that maybe I should ask those so inclined to offer up a quiet prayer, or to Think Good Thoughts, that the many hats that have now begun to be sent out to Congress might receive a warm reception at their end points.  We’ve done and are doing our part in the cause of civility and respectful speech in the public sphere; from our hearts to our hands to God’s along the way, to, hopefully, the staffers’ and recipients’ willing ones as they open those packages.

Let them know it’s coming. Give them the happy anticipation. State our cause and our hopes upfront.

Meantime, the answer to the earlier blog question is, Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland gets the Malabrigo hat to match Parker’s, with my thanks for his work restoring the Chesapeake Bay, his hat done in the colors of the Bay.

Part of me will always belong to my home state. Whose beaches, mind you, know which end of the day the sun is supposed to come by for a visit. And with ponies! Don’t forget the ponies!

As I write the hat count is at 243.

By the sweet challah pattern on thy brow shalt thou greet thy braid all the days of thy life.

I was looking at the spreadsheet this evening for Warm Hats Not Hot Heads and was dismayed to find that nobody had signed up for Jackie Speier.

Jackie Speier is a hero to me. Until her speech, I had no idea Congress was trying to criminalize a procedure that not only is used on abortions but also when a woman is miscarrying a long-wanted and hoped-for child, as happened in her case, in order to protect her health so that no infection or massive scarring sets in that would keep her from being able to conceive in the future.

Wait. You mean the–wait–I had a miscarriage at nearly four months! And they want doctors not to know how to take care of women who *want* to have their children?! Wherever one may stand on abortion, those complications are what mine told me were a possibility if things were left to fester unattended. My loved, wanted baby had already passed away out of this life, just not out of me.

Speier was shot and left for dead while trying to help rescue her boss’s constituents during the Jim Jones/Guyana massacre. And when she spoke up back when she was in the state legislature about just what these men here were talking about banning, medically, back then too, and what she had endured with the loss of a baby she and her husband had tried so hard to have, one responded with, “Jim Jones should have finished the job.”

Wow.

That, in the commission of a crime, would have qualified as an enhancement under the hate speech laws.

She did manage to get pregnant again; she was expecting when her husband was killed by a driver who had no brakes and thought he could make it to work anyway. She’s been raising her children as a widow. She has persevered.

Speier represents the folks in San Bruno and has been holding PG&E’s feet to the fire more than anyone else. When they say that no, they didn’t know there were any welding flaws in the pipeline that blew up–there were 150 just in that section–and then say with a straight face that there couldn’t possibly be any more anywhere, she tells them, I don’t believe you. Do the work you must do to make these lines safe. Lives are at stake.

That same pipeline runs about 500 feet or less from my house, between two gas stations. Go Jackie go.

If ever there was someone I wanted to stand with, hat in hand, pressing Congress for accountability for their words and respectfulness towards one another’s life experiences in all things, she wins.

I have a lovely, soft yarn that was bought at a store I think in her district. I’m knitting it for her as fast as I can.

(With proud new-grandparent pictures and captions thrown in, of course.)

My last semester of high school way back when, I took an after-school class in downtown DC, way down there from where I lived in Maryland: it was held in a rehabbed rowhouse near the Duke Ellington Bridge.  Down Connecticut Avenue, for those who know the city. It was a lipreading class for those with new hearing losses and that’s where the agency that ran it happened to be.

It let out at ten to four, because at four, all the one-way streets turned one-way the other way. Connecticut had a chicken lane, a fast lane down the center that changed direction then, too, bouncing up and down over hills that hid daredevil oncomings from each other in heavy traffic. Not for me thankyouverymuch. The Founding Fathers forgot to put in freeways.

It also means the one time I got out late I had no idea how on earth to find my way out of the side street maze to get home. The neighborhood looked nice enough on the surface, but I learned that day why you had to stand in front of the steel-barred doorway every time and verify that you were you before they would buzz you in.

We now have 222 hats’ worth of knitters who have picked up their yarn to say no to the anger driving too much of our public discourse down the chicken lane. To urge yes to civility and respect to those in the public sphere.  Hear us.

So.

I called ahead first today to tell them who I was, what I was doing, and why I was coming. And was that okay?

The guy sounded surprised, and then charmed.

Then I drove to the office of my House Representative, Anna Eshoo, to offer up my letter about Warm Hats Not Hot Heads along with the red royal baby alpaca hat I’d made her.

I recognized his voice as he answered the door and unlocked it from the inside and let me in.  But oh, it so brought back those memories–and in such a different time and place.  It tugged fiercely at me that they would need to do that. But they do.

He invited me further in and I could see someone else at work as I stood there, unsealed manila envelope in hand. Both of them had the biggest smiles on already.

Then I showed the two men the pink and periwinkle hats tucked away in my purse as backups and wondered out loud what colors Ms. Eshoo likes, what colors they might have seen her wearing so that I could give her whichever one she would like best. I’d made the red one for her, but it was more important that she be happy with it.

Ask guys about colors and what do they do? They run for the woman in the office.

Who stepped from around the corner and she was beaming too. She looked at the red and went, Oh, that’s beautiful! And so soft… And pronounced that if that was the one that I’d made specifically for Ms. Eshoo then of course that was the one she should have, and she pronounced it perfect. We talked a little about the hats for Congress idea and they thought it was really cool that knitters would do that.

I tell you. I went home just floating at how happy those three people I’d never laid eyes on before were in their anticipation of seeing their boss made happy. That feeling could carry me forward for a long time.

Just imagine taking that experience and multiplying it by 221 more congresspeople and their staffs. Let’s get the rest of them too! Go knitters go!

Ellen was on TV! They wanted to do an interview about Warm Hats Not Hot Heads! We are at 213, with 99 available for the Senate and hoping that that publicity gives us a good jump forward.

I could have topped it out at an even hundred, but the intarsia on one  came out a tad snug and I’m going to redo it. While the queue marches on: chemo caps for family members, purple for Abby, baby stuff, the qiviut, Stitches stash… You know how it goes. One project at a time, but all projects get done when you work on them.

Our favorite new one took 8 1/4 months.

I got another hat done today, in the same colorway as Parker’s blue one here. We’re now at 208.  I like that he and a member of Congress will match each other; may it charm them as much as it does me.  This whole WHNHH project is for our children’s future as well as trying to set the tone for today.

While Parker wonders dubiously but respectfully whether Grampa remembers how to pull off this carseat idea.

Two hundred. A cool two hundred hats so far for Warm Hats Not Hot Heads. It looks like, from what I understand from Ellen, that eight more hats, especially men’s hats, would get us to having the US Senate covered at 100%.

One hundred percent!

I’ve knitted several other hats of late, too, but they were a tad small to run to Congress…

I don’t use it very often, which isn’t good for the batteries.

Richard had them recharging last night.

I can’t do Stitches West on my feet. I’ve tried. The old head injury effects go into overload in the massive visual presence of the place and my balance disappears even worse and there’s just no way around the fact that Disneyland for knitters equals chairtime for me. That’s okay; there have been many many people looking wistfully at my ride by the end of the day every year.

Richard set it up and went out the door for work; I tried it out.

Dead dead dead. Ain’t goin’ nowhere. Darn.

Jasmin’s brother Sam, who pushed me last year, was in LA.

My daughter Sam, who pushed me the year before, was across the country.

Well, I *could* try to walk it. (Yeah, let’s see if we can induce a seizure finally after eleven years?)

Um.

I did not call him. I did not text. I didn’t say boo. What could he do? I simply didn’t get myself out the door. I was about to, I kept telling myself, looking at the clock, noting that I’d paid for a two-day ticket, while arguing back at myself, okay, so then, when? How? Use the manual as a walker so you’ve got both hands holding on, at least?

Suddenly there was the front door opening again, and *My Hero* (trademarked) walks in: he wanted to make sure I didn’t get stuck and had it worked no okay he’d wondered if it might not have right he’ll go get that other battery pack and try that one oh yes he’d had it charging too.

You’re home? You did? We do? You can?

He was in a rush to get to work (some days I really really love that short commute) as he unscrewed the battery pack and replaced it. Here try that love you bye gotta run.

YES!!!

And that is how I got to go zipping around Stitches West and have the time of my life among my fellow knitters and friends that I only get to see once a year.  And to meet some new ones. (Michelle, did you see? I was wearing your socks you made me while I was in the hospital.)

I came home to the news that we had gone past 30% of Congress today. GO KNITTERS! Then I read Jocelyn’s post and followed the link in it. Folks, we need gentility, top down, and we need civility in Congress now. If you haven’t yet, will you join Ellen and me and 162 hats’ worth of other knitters in spending a few hours to help get the word out? How often do our few stitches get a chance to create changes for the good for millions of people? Good wool, good work, good plan.

Stitches still has plenty of good yarn left for it. I promise.

Kind of a reverse gift of the magi moment:

I offered Richard some chocolate torte. After all, it’s Valentine’s Day (besides, he had just given me red roses).

He passed, not because he didn’t want some but to save me the effort of making a second batch, to make sure I had enough to bring to Purlescence tomorrow.  Maybe there will be leftovers? There are definitely leftover ingredients to work with.

XRX meets Purlescence. 12:30 Tuesday. There will be chocolate. (And, looking in the cabinets, a desperate last-minute run here for paper plates and forks.)

Meantime, Warm Heads Not Hot Heads hat count for Congress: 119. Go knitters go!

My folks arrived home safely and it is very very quiet without them.

The campaign hit 108 hats.

And India started this by wondering if Ellen or I knew the old song that goes, Inch by inch, row by row, Gonna make this garden grow.

Oh yes–I used to play it and sing it to my kids when they were little, all the time, and I used to sing it occasionally with my knitting, only with, Stitch by stitch row by row and riffing from there.

They started playing with the lyrics and emailed me and Ellen happened to start hers off with that same line. I like that.

So here’s what I’ve thought of for WHNHH so far, and I’d love to hear what anyone else might come up with:

Stitch by stitch, row by row,
Gonna let our Congress know:
Got to make your peace, although
There are differing points of view…

Stitch by stitch, row by row,
We constituents are telling you, so…
Work out ways to help US grow
Now you can wear your thinking cap too.

Stitch by stitch, row by row,
Take a stand against the status quo
Speak for me with civility
Take the day, and make it brand new.

Oh, and by the way, you might want to look here (with thanks to Norma for the link). Jon Stewart’s producer. They can’t tell: is this satire or is it serious?

Are knitters serious?

What do you think?

(The Warm Hats Not Hot Heads count: we are now at 75 committed hats for the campaign for civility in Congress. Go knitters!)

We drove across the Bay and up into the beautiful, wooded hills, the reason for the folks’ visit to California: Dad had someone he wanted to interview for a biography he is writing.

It turns out the man’s son was there too, and that the man is himself a writer–and the kind of warm, bright, engaged, energetic 92-year-old I can only aspire to be someday.

He gave us copies of several of his books, waving me away when I offered to buy some, and I, having discovered that his daughter-in-law crochets, wished fervently I had a copy of my own book to share with their family, too.

We had a lovely morning of it, time I for one would never have had with good folks I would never have had the good fortune to meet but for the passion both of the older men in the room were bringing to the project at hand.

I’d driven my husband’s Prius, switching cars with him for the day since we were the ones who were going to be putting on the mileage.

And as we walked back to the car and opened the trunk to put away Dad’s equipment from the interview, there it was: a copy of “Wrapped in Comfort” that my husband had proudly put in there to be ready to show off my work and me at any time. I asked him later and he said, “Oh, I always have one in there!”

I hurried back down the walkway and rang the doorbell one last time.

Fifty years ago and then again today: “I think you need a nap, dear. Go to bed.”

I’m not tired.

“I think you need a nap, dear.”

(I don’t wanna. I don’t often get to visit with my parents, even if I’m trying not to breathe on them.)

“You need a nap, dear.”

Alright… (I’ll lie down for ten minutes and make everybody happy.)

Zonk…. And it did help a lot.

Meantime, I think Parker’s got that Mona Lisa thing down just so.  And Warm Hats Not Hot Heads is at 60 hats! Go knitters!