40″, past the part where I constantly have to think about how I’m going to do it next, on to the trees above the surf!

Meantime, there was a small dinner party tonight. At the end, people were to ask a question of a randomly-assigned other person in the group and they to them in return and then share with everyone.

I marveled at how, having known each other for decades, there was so much we didn’t really know as to what our back stories were about why we like what we do and why we do it. I shared a story that was old to me but not to them.

Mom, the woman your age in our ward is in awe of you and Dad at the trip you were willing to take with six kids and a camping trailer in a circle around the country and across Canada and down the West Coast (with a stop in Mexico) and back to Maryland for most of that summer where you taught me to knit. She has eight kids. She was going, And you were all in one car?! For two months?!

I said, And then in high school I found a sweater in my mom’s knitting magazine that I really really wanted and I asked Mom to knit it for me. She told me, Go make it yourself!

I wasn’t about to admit I didn’t remember how. I did have to ask to be reminded how to cast on–and then, playing snotty teenager, I went in my room and worked out how to do it myself.

Which means I do it totally different from how my mom does.

Which meant that when my lupus began and my arthritis was severe in my hands, I found I could knit–my way. Had it been the more elegant way my mom was taught I would never have been able to become anything of the knitter that I am now. Grab then drop the yarn in the right hand each stitch, and I can do it really fast, too (or thought I could, till I saw Stephanie Pearl-McPhee knitting in person. Wow.)

I asked C how she got into theater, and she said her dad was in a play when she was a little girl and someone had to watch her so he took her with him to rehearsals–where she quickly memorized every person’s lines and corrected them when they got it wrong.

And I laughed, thinking of trying to speed up a toddler’s bedtime story: they always know. You can’t get away with it.

I knew she’d grown up on a farm on the plains of Alberta and I had always wondered how on earth theater and she had found each other.

Clearly someone else out there, whoever they were, refused to not have theater in their lives and I wonder how many communities in how many places have benefited because that person kept doing what they loved doing no matter what ninety years ago. And roped C’s dad into it.

C has written plays, she has produced many, she has given so much to the community. She has definitely played it forward.