What a turkey
Thursday December 14th 2006, 12:45 pm
Filed under: Knit


My idea of heaven is getting a chance to see the unknowable long-distance good outcomes and celebrating them with the people who caused and who experienced them. For instance: I can just picture a small woman, with hair thicker than mine in a long black braid down her back, complexion darker than mine, laughing with me and with another woman over what a few of her stitches had done.

I’ve mentioned before the fingerpuppets I order by the dozens from Peru. I didn’t have many left from the latest batch, but somehow I still had just the most right one.

A week before Thanksgiving, I was in seeing one of my specialists, a peach of a man; it was a routine appointment, and I asked after his family. He mentioned his wife had recently had back surgery.

Every woman who has ever put on a Thanksgiving meal (or man, for that matter, but I tend to relate to the women most, personally) knows what a big to-do that whole scene is. I blinked at the thought of trying to pull it off while recovering from something like that, and I was thinking of that as I walked into my closet, and…

…There were my fingerpuppets. There was one, and I don’t have a picture of it to show you amongst the menagerie, sorry, but it was brown. A large bird. It had bright colors cheerfully decorating the edges of the feathers on its big tail. Which is why my doctor’s wife opened up a card in the mail to read me half-apologizing for having lifted their address from a thank you card they’d sent me a few years earlier, and saying I was sending her my best wishes and a “turkey with all the trimmings.”

I had a question for that doctor yesterday, and sent his nurse a message; he called back this morning and answered it: and, thank you for the turkey!

I asked him, “Did she laugh?” Because what could help heal a person better than a good belly laugh?

The sound of his voice in response was such a gift: I got to hear his love for his wife in capital letters as he exclaimed, “OH yes!!” He told me it would be part of their holiday decorations from now on.

She liked it! Hey Mikey! Cool. Very cool. Now, can you just see the two of us telling the woman who’d knitted that turkey and sent it off with a bunch of other little puppets to the USA, wondering what would ever come of it or any of them, that it had been about so much more than putting bread on her table? And thanking her?

(P.S. And you see that one I got to stand there, watching over the animals? The woman with gray-streaked hair, wearing a shawl, a cane, even glasses. That one’s mine; the only way it could be a more perfect portrait is if she had knitting needles and yarn in the other hand. She watches over my knitting perch.)


3 Comments so far
Leave a comment

When are you going to knit some puppets?

By the way, TAG YOU’RE IT

I’m afraid you have to read my blog to understand it!

Comment by fiberfanatic 12.15.06 @ 3:12 pm

Right after I run out of people who want me to knit them a lace scarf, Mary. Lol!

Comment by AlisonH 12.20.06 @ 10:43 pm

[…] all have heard of the handknitted finger puppets from Peru […]

Pingback by SpinDyeKnit 09.27.08 @ 7:31 pm



Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)