We don’t do business anything on our Sabbath if we can at all avoid it, so talking about buying stuff feels a bit hypocritical.

Ain’t it great to be human. So here goes:

I posted to my knitting group recently about finding someone selling old-stock Holz and Stein needles and how good those are.

Tonight at our Zoom, one friend said she’d thought, sure, I can try a pair.

She was telling us, marveling, that these were the best needles she’d probably ever had!

She was asked what made them so, and she talked about the finish, the smoothness.

I thought, and the perfect join between the needle and cable, the perfect tip for all kinds of yarns, not too sharp, not too blunt. The sturdiness from the wood having been treated to withstand the stresses of being a musical instrument, and how cool that the leftovers got put to such a good use. You’re just beginning to find out. Have fun!

It just totally made my day that she hadn’t simply blown money on a rather expensive pair on a retiree’s budget but that she had actually fallen in love with them the way I had mine, and I pictured the many many hours to come of her enjoying them because she knits even more than I do.

And she gives away more of her time and love that way than probably anyone I know.

She’s the perfect person for the perfect needles to have found their way to.

At that picnic on Monday, a friend who’s an oncologist asked me point blank out of the blue, How’s your health?

I admitted I had an ultrasound coming up on Wednesday, but they’d done one previously and found nothing so the doctor didn’t think it was cancer but wanted to keep tabs on it.

He said something about his patients hating ultrasounds and I kinda shrugged it off. But not out of ignorance–rather, eh, I know what I’m in for.

Turns out it actually was easier than last year’s testing. Yay. And for getting one step closer to ending this two-year period. The hard part is the waiting to hear. I have plans for this next month of my life that I am going to do (Hi, Mom!) because I said so.

I mean, that always works, right?

(Update: I just signed in and there was the radiologist’s report. No mass seen, no abnormal thickening. Yay.)

Having your parents divorce while you’re starting to hit puberty can’t be easy. The kid’s had a rough time of it, the parents don’t have each other there for emotional backup as their oldest starts his teens, and I’ve been trying to figure out if there was anything I could possibly do but have come up empty for months now.

Because every thirteen year old boy wants to be best friends with a sixty-six-year old woman, right? Uhhhhh…

There was a potluck picnic in the park this evening. He and his little brother were heading to where the food was being set up when suddenly, to show off, he leaped up to the picnic table and danced across it, down to the bench, and back to the ground heading past me.

I caught his eye just long enough: “I was just thinking, another week or so and you’ll be taller than me. And then you did!”

That’s the first time I’ve seen him laugh in a good long time.

My friend Anne told me her story this evening and I asked if I could share it.

She and her husband had gone out for ice cream.

In her words, after asking me to pray for the elderly gentleman:

“We were waiting for someone to take our orders, and he gave up and walked out just as someone showed up. I went and got him, and paid for his milkshake. As we were leaving, and he was heading to his car, I told him to have a nice day.

That’s when he said his wife died yesterday. To say I was gutted is an understatement. I parked, got out of the car, gave him a hug and prayed for comfort and that good memories would counteract the grief he feels.”

To which I expressed that the fact that the employee had been out of sight to the point that he had given up while they happened to be right there feels to me like the choreography of G_d: had he been immediately taken care of, there would have been no conversation, no meeting of hearts, no sharing of pain nor offering of compassion nor even the simple gift of a milkshake on a day when he so needed to feel human connection. Enough to get him out the door to go buy, what? Ice cream? I can imagine him thinking, Why? What does that matter now?

But there was. It happened. There was.

She and her husband were part of the answer to the very prayer she’d sent up on the man’s behalf.

Some years ago I mentioned a woman in my lupus support group whose health and mental health were spiraling downward together. She was an immigrant and at that point had no support system here other than us. We all did our best to reach out to her but it was hard to feel successful.

One month, an unusual thing happened at the meeting: only three people showed up. Her, the group leader who is a nurse as well as a patient and a very gentle, quiet soul, and me.

Listening to S, it was a wonder that she had even made it there but that seemed a sign that some part of her still wanted to live.

In the quiet of the room she opened up just enough for us to see what she had finally decided to do and said I’m sure more than she meant to of how she was going to do it.

Which she could have just gone and done already and none of us would ever have known, but she hadn’t, which said to me that she didn’t really want to, she just saw no other way out but had wanted to see us and say goodbye to us first.

We did our best to just listen, to convey that we cared.

And then I raced home and grabbed the phone I could hear on, because my cellphone in those days was not it.

Riiiing.

I know, HIPPA and all that, but can you tell me if you *don’t* have a patient named–? I explained the situation.

The first doctor’s office staff, after some checking with colleagues for guidance on the situation: We don’t have a patient by that name.

Thank you very much! (Calls second office, repeats the question.)

(Checks with colleagues, too.) We can’t tell you that.

Alright, cool, she’s with your practice, I said, I thought so. So: IF you have a patient by this name, this is who I am and my phone number, this is who the group leader is with her name and phone number and she can verify that this is what this patient told us at our support group meeting a few minutes ago.

They thanked me and got me off the phone fast and were right on it.

Five minutes later the woman herself called me. She was furious.

DID YOU CALL THEM?!

Yes. I did.

WHY DID YOU CALL THEM!

Because: I knew you would be angry with me. You. Are. Worth. That. to me. You. Are. Worth. That.

There was a sound that I could only interpret as wanting to be angry but suddenly turning into what started to be crying but she hung up fast before I could hear more.

And then we didn’t know, and we didn’t know, and we could only pray and wonder, but the two of us never told the rest of the group anything more than that we were worried about her, and that was nothing new to them because they were, too.

Eighteen months later she surprised us by showing back up. She tired easily, but there was a resilience I hadn’t seen before. She didn’t mention the suicide attempt, just that it had been hard–really hard–but that she was doing a little better now. And she had learned that when you have autoimmunity affecting the stomach, your body doesn’t process food well at all and studies have shown that that can impair your mental function and cause depression. So they’d been working on all of that.

At the end of the meeting she walked out with me and once there was no one else around to see it, threw her arms around me and thanked me.

Our group went to Zoom with the pandemic and she was part of it for awhile and then eventually she wasn’t and we’ve all wondered and hoped things had held for her. She had come so far.

Our group leader’s phone rang this week.

Our friend’s family had moved to Canada when she was a child and then she’d come to the US.

I can’t imagine how it must have been under the current regime.

It was her. She wanted to touch base and let us know: she had moved back to Canada and had bought a place with her elderly mom and things were going very well.

Our leader marveled, She sounded so, so happy! I’ve never heard her so happy, it was so wonderful!

She was home. Country, family, everything–at long last she had come home.

The Musicians in Residence at the local college put on a concert tonight: violin, bass, and a piano played by a dear friend of ours.

And not just a concert but a lesson on Claude Debussy. Russ gave a bit of history and a demonstration of the heptatonic scale typically used in Western music, with a picture of it on a bar of music on the screen behind him. Julie Andrews and The Sound of Music children singing Do Re Mi appeared next to demonstrate and the audience chuckled.

Then he showed the pentatonic scale (five notes in an octave instead of seven) and played it. Then the whole note scale, no sharps or flats. Neither of them sounded like much with so many sounds missing.

But then he started playing some familiar gorgeous Debussy piece whose name I didn’t catch, and then another, using those scales. The fun begins when you mix them up between the two hands or instruments.

See! He said, bounding enthusiastically up from the piano bench and waving his arms at the audience. You can try this at home!

The next screen: You TOO can convert classical music to Impressionism! You just need six things:

1. You have to say it in French!
2. Pentatonic scale.
3. Use the sustaining pedal a lot.
4. Whole note scale.
5. Unusual rhythm.
6. I had a hard time seeing the last thing through the tall head of the guy in front of me and Richard doesn’t remember so I can’t tell you and
7. I’m not actually typing the numbers 6 or 7 but this computer program is expecting me to because I typed that you need six things so it is bound and determined to put a numbered list of six things here and won’t let me type anything without auto-adding those numbers and won’t let me delete the numbers after I do. It’s creating an Impression of what I’m trying to say. Russ would laugh and laugh at that.
8. And then, 8, after I said that and hit Save Draft there was no sign of any of the numbers on my Preview page, including the ones I actually typed and the 8. it put before any of the rest of this sentence.
9. So we’ll just have to see how this blog post plays out. (Still indented, too!)

Packing at the end of the most recent trip home, she’d tried, but it just didn’t all fit in; did I have a rollaboard she could borrow?

You can have it, I told her, or borrow, whichever works for you. I quite liked that one but it was just a little small so I hadn’t actually ever used it. The local Costco had cleared them out at all of $13; those FULs sold out in a flash.

I got a text today telling me she was sure I wouldn’t mind. She was sure this was what I would have wanted to do with it.

Oh honey yes and amen.

A single friend of hers had just found out she had breast cancer and then died a week and a half later. Her grieving family had come to collect their daughter’s things the best they could.

My daughter had given them her luggage for it. On a whim, feeling silly about it because she couldn’t see how that size would work out, she grabbed the FUL bag too in case they could use it.

It was perfect. It was exactly the thing that exactly solved a problem and they were so grateful.

They are not people of means, she told me, and this is what I could do.

I nearly cried. In pride in my child, in grief for theirs, and I thanked her for letting me help, too, without hesitation even when I didn’t know yet.

And now I know why I found and bought that bag.

The blossoms continue upwards and my sour cherry tree is dancing for joy in a hoop skirt.

Meantime, my old friends Ron and Theresa at thebuffalowoolco.com have been selling the last of their bison/silk socks. They’re my husband’s One True Sock and we stocked up when they announced the cost of silk now is ending those and when they’re gone they’re gone.

But then the mill, using up the rest of the yarn, made a few more pairs.

The catch was that they were seconds.

Ron and Theresa and crew personally went over every single pair to make sure they were okay, and they were, but seconds are seconds and they knocked a chunk off the price.

When Richard opened the package yesterday (I got him something else too because socks for your birthday is officially a That Doesn’t Count gift no matter how much he likes them) it took me about a heartbeat. And then another.

Why they were seconds.

Their socks have a little bison motif knit across the toes and that motif is color-coded by size.

The XLs were yellow.

My mediums are yellow. His are supposed to be orange. It really speeds up the sock-sorting by a lot and I’ve always thought it was a nice touch on their part.

Ron confirmed it when I asked: someone at the mill had forgotten to change that yarn during the knitting.

I told him I’d laughed, because, of all the problems in the world right now? There’s more than one way to eyeball a sock size.

And I told him that surprising us with an extra pair that was bison/merino was very generous–and brilliant. Because someday my hubby will need more socks. And now he has a way to learn in advance that their other ones are great, too. But that was so unexpected and so cool to find tucked in there.

See? Socks *can* be a real gift!

Twice, we had forgotten to get more sugar. I never run out of sugar: it’s just one of those things that’s always there.

Angel food cake time of year and–well that was brilliant. I’d already separated the dozen eggs. Hah, maybe I could…

Going next door to borrow a cup of sugar sounds so delightfully old-fashioned (and half-embarrassing to have to, just like way back when. But we don’t go shopping on the Sabbath, and that was something that was entirely understood back there back then. Maryland was the last state to let go of its Blue laws that enforced the religious concept of a day of rest on many commercial establishments–because Sunday isn’t every religion’s Sabbath. Nor is everybody religious. Equal protection under the law. No governmental establishment of religion. Totally reasonable to revoke. Done.)

The thought also always takes me straight back to–

–I don’t think I had ever actually attached the word “refugee” to her. She was just Vicky. But when your colonialist mom sews what she can of the family fortune inside the hem of her little girl’s dress right before they flee the country in order not to lose that one last bit of all that they had…

As a young woman, that little girl became a nanny to one of my dad’s artist clients, who brought her along with his family on a trip to the US. My mom was cooking dinner for twelve rather than eight and she found herself out of sugar. Knowing Mom, it was surely to bake fruit pies.

She asked Vicky to go next door to borrow a cup.

Vicky came back astonished: Madame! Your neighbors! They are Jewish!

Mom was astonished: Yes of course!   (??!)

We would never…!

I don’t know if she knew that the dad of her young charge had illustrated anti-Nazi material before France fell or that he was Jewish himself. Maybe even she was.

But what came out in their conversation was that America had been portrayed in her growing up as the most flamingly racist, bigoted country there is.

And here was an American woman astonished that anybody would be surprised at having a Jewish family next door. And not just next door. Why would anyone even think about it, people are people.

Too bad it was too early to know that the family that would later buy that house was headed by an African-American surgeon.

After making all the baking sounds in the kitchen this afternoon I said to Richard: You know how we kept forgetting to buy sugar?

The look of uh-oh on his face.

We have a melanger. The box of superfine at the back of the cabinet. We had enough.

—

(Edited to add, and the verdict is, with more than half the sugar being superfine that was the best angel food cake with the best crumb I have ever made, and I’ve made a lot of them. I wrote it down in my vintage 1952 Betty Crocker to make sure I do it that way again from here on out.)

Long long ago in a job far far away…

He was trying to remember the guy’s name. No, the one before that, what was it. I said do you really want to remember it. No not really. So anyway.

And then he told me a story I’d never heard in full before. He said it was the one where he’d really learned that you have to listen to the other guy even when they’re blatantly wrong and not just try to say what you think.

He had a boss, and this boss had a vision of what he wanted the big project to be and told his minions to get to it.

But there was a problem: that software he wanted them to create and that hardware he wanted to put it into–wouldn’t work. Would break.

This was back when what you now carry around in your phone took a whole room full of computer equipment running on hamster wheels.

Me: Was this the job where the boss was trying to break the laws of physics?

Him: No, no, that was someone else.

The guy wouldn’t listen to anybody trying to tell him anything: you have your assignments, just go do them. You heard me!

This went on for over a year.

One of Richard’s co-workers was our neighbor down the street and quietly told him that the boss had commanded him, presumably at the peril of his job, not to talk to Richard. Why? Because he knew too much and wasn’t afraid to speak up.

People on the team were frustrated and angry and all that did was make things with the boss worse. They wondered how upper management was letting this waste of the company’s resources and their time go on.

Finally, my peacemaker sweetie went Ghandhi on the guy: he quietly talked to everybody and said, Listen: as long as we keep fighting him we’re giving him a shield to hide behind for *his* boss and he can blame us. If we all stop arguing so he’s got no one to push against, maybe that will finally make the difference.

So they did.

(And here’s where I was picturing the protests I’ve seen at Tesla, where everybody is having their say on their signs while loving being in each other’s company and having a good time together.)

The guy’s boss came into town to sit down with him and hear him out on how this big project was going.

The perfect chance to expound on his lofty ideas.

His boss listened to him in disbelief: but you can’t do that with that, you have to have this first to do that and you don’t.

Me: So what happened?

Him: The guy got transferred overseas. To a job with far less authority, about as far away as they could send him from us.

The English Morello tree today: absolutely winter-bare on top, fully in bloom on bottom, gradually working its way up.

That is how I don’t have to do all the harvest work at once, but rather it’ll be one hour every morning picking and pitting and weighing and freezing. One morning per future sour cherry pie for two weeks; after that, I told Constance on Monday, I get tired of it and call friends to come pick the rest. She laughed.

Part of it though is that I want them to see that if it’s their favorite pie, too (and it usually is), if they have room to plant a bush they can grow their own pretty quickly.

So. I’d pulled the last bag out of the freezer to celebrate her. A ceramic pan for the crispiest crust.

Loaves and fishes, way in the back of the freezer where I’d checked three times I just found another bag.

You know that has got to be gone by the first of June to make room for the new. Such a problem. Not.

An old friend needed a place to crash for a night to break up an eight hour round trip and we’ve been having a great time catching up. Years ago I lined up her little kids’ books by height to look pretty for the real estate photos, thus aiding and abetting with mixed emotions her move to California’s Gold Country: happy for her, sad for me. I’m so glad we’ve kept in touch.

One of the things mentioned over dinner was that during remodeling some of the much older houses out there, the owners have found gold embedded in the walls.

Huh. Who knew. Makes sense I guess if you’re in the 1800s and want to put it where no one can find it nor steal it.

I wondered, if I say that out loud will people show up at real estate open houses there with metal detectors?

Of course if that were to become a thing, the owners themselves would give it a go.

(Never did take an updated picture.)

You know those times when you really really hope someone is as knit-worthy as you expect them to be?

I found Hayley. First, I totally threw her with the question, Are you allergic to wool?

That was so far away from anything she expected to be asked that it took her a moment to say she wasn’t.

I told her that most people hand me back my phone and say they can’t make that closed-caption app work–that she was the first person to immediately get it and not only that, that was the first time I’d ever felt fully included in any of those group out-loud chats.

She caught her breath as she almost cried.

And I wanted to express how grateful I was…

Is that a scarf?!!

An infinity scarf, yes, I tried to match your skirt from last week.

I got the biggest hug.

But then, I’d already gotten one when she did that for me.

People like her are how a knitter decides to knit for the next person like that.

Rush hour. Carpool lanes. A blood test two cities away. Sure, glad to.

He needed me to drive this time. Oh okay.

That was quickly dealt with; next was Costco. Ours? Or the one a few blocks from here? Does it have an Optical Center?

Dunno, never looked for one.

Me neither.

But we needed one. My Sibley’s Guide to the Birds is heavy enough that last night when it landed on my falling glasses, not only did the frames twist but a lens popped halfway out. I was making do with an old pair because those were pure funhouse mirror views, but at least I had backup.

He didn’t.

Surely they did–and yes, they did, just past the entrance and in the opposite direction from where most people coming in would be heading towards.

It was a quiet afternoon for that particular crew. Richard was over at one end having them fix his glasses–he’d sat on his in solidarity or something like that–and I was at the other with a patient man who sighed in spite of himself as he got out the tiny screwdriver and simply took the whole thing apart and slowly put it back together again, testing the straightness again and again. It was a chore and it took awhile but at least no one else was waiting.

Then a mom and a teenage boy walked towards me. Hispanic. His jeans were stylishly tight–the problem being that they were apparently not comfortable. He tugged at them in a place you don’t tug in public and his eye caught mine right then.

I instantly flashed back to a man about eight years ago who’d nailed my white privilege surprise when he told me he’d grown up in that neighborhood and that if any Hispanic kids like him wandered into the town next door the cops would be all over them. And were.

For just walking around?! Or driving on a public road?!

Oh yes. He was gratified that I was so horrified but he wasn’t surprised that I never would have guessed.

That Costco is in an industrial area surrounded by one of the poorer neighborhoods around, which in turn borders what is often listed as the richest zip code in the country. Tech CEOs live there, well-paid sports figures. The former CEO of Hewlett-Packard. The current CEO of Apple. The kicker is that part of that is because the lots are big, and the lots are big because a hundred years ago they had to be for the leach fields because that town couldn’t afford to create a sewer system. Hah. Look at it now.

So. This kid sees me seeing him at the most embarrassing moment and he instantly puts on his best defiant rough tough swagger face, trying to look nobody-messes-with-me.

He was no match for someone who’d raised four teenagers who’d towered over me.

Deflection. Standard tactic. I gestured towards the huge boxes about the size of a subcompact car stacked in big pallets with the third group all the way up to the rafters and said with a smile, I wouldn’t want to be near those in an earthquake.

Totally threw him. What? He looked where I was pointing. I said it again. His eyes went big. He suddenly went total little kid, you know, that sense of oh wow! discovery when you think of something you’ve never thought of before–he had to tell his mom, and when he did, the warmth in her smile would melt anyone.

I was not what he’d thought I would be. He was not what some would make him out to be.

They walked off just as Richard was done and came over to me. My optician offered me my glasses back. I thanked him and put them on. Richard helpfully grabbed their little stand mirror so I could see how I looked and I mimicked my best supermodel self to it a moment and grinned, Now all I need is a haircut.

The optician, who till then had looked so tired, guffawed and said Well maybe we can find some scissors around here, making as if to search over here and over there. He was smiling as we left.

We are all in this life thing together. Wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s not every day you read a story in the Washington Post about a protest at a town hall meeting and suddenly, while scrolling down, realize the person holding the poster in that picture is your best friend from high school.

Go Karen!!

But then, being a person who was willing to stand up without hesitation for what she knew to be right is why we became close in the first place all those years ago. And still are.