A week ago, old friend and occasional commenter Monica and her husband Klaus were in town, visiting from Sweden, and our friend Miriam threw a dinner and had a bunch of us over to see them. They were newlyweds and Klaus was working on his PhD at Stanford back in the day; it’s been 15 years. (Monica: I still haven’t gotten the photo off Richard’s camera.)
Klaus is currently the Mormon bishop in their town. Bishops have two counsellors, all of them serving as volunteers, and one of Klaus’s occasionally flies here on business. Three weeks ago, that fellow was here, and I had brought a lace scarf to church that I’d knitted on the chance that one of the new folks might be wearing red that day.
But I saw him first, and jumped at the chance to have him take a part of Monica and Klaus’s old ward home with him. I offered it for his wife and asked him to tell them all hi for me. He accepted it graciously, but a bit wonderingly, clearly not getting why I would do such a thing or why, quite honestly, judging by the look on his face, it should matter. Knitting? It was baby alpaca, and clearly that meant something to me because I mentioned it twice, but okay, whatever. He assured me that she liked warm things around her neck. Sure, he’d give it to her for me (and you could just hear him thinking, and what was your name again? Familiar face, yes, but?…)
So. Monica and Klaus were here after that, and we had a great time catching up. She is the friend who, back in the day, had knitted all her life but had never learned how to knit cablework. So I showed her. She was the most unruffleable person I knew, the most perfectly calm soul, the kind of person I wanted to be when I grew up, so I was quite surprised at her reaction: an outraged, “That’s IT?!” That was all there was to it? She had let herself be afraid of trying it because it looked too complex, and it was that simple?! We had a good laugh over that.
Yesterday, Klaus’s counselor we’d seen three weeks ago was back already, looking fairly jet-lagged and ready to fall asleep in a moment. But when he saw me walking into church, a few minutes early, his face totally lit up and he stood up to come say hi. His wife had loved that scarf. Yes, the color was just right. Thank you *so* much.
It was worth every stitch to watch him go from clearly feeling absolutely beat just then to absolutely delighted. Gratitude is an energizing thing, and in that moment it went both ways.
So when that other husband, the one I blogged about yesterday, later refused to be impressed (be still, my beating ego), I already had a bef0re-and-after to chuckle over going on in the back of my head. They come around. Give them time.
(p.s. Yes, I staked that Picotee amaryllis immediately after those snapshots.)
