Someone new was in church today, and there was a Sunday School lesson on the Biblical story of Jonathan and David and comments made on the essence of friendship.

I told them of how one small decision to be of service, of my friend Lisa and me going together to visit a mutual friend’s child in the hospital in Oakland once a week, had grown our friendship and had led, a year later, to Lisa’s offer to watch my preschoolers while I did swim therapy for my newly-hit lupus to treat my sudden and severe arthritis, if I would watch her little boy in return.  We did that morning trade-off for three years four and then five days a week, an immense amount of her time that I could never, ever possibly have asked for. And what a difference it made in my life!

The new woman came up to introduce herself afterwards:  saying, she had heard the other side of that story.

Say what? What other side?

She told me she had just moved from Lisa’s ward and that Lisa had told the story of how she was profusely grateful for my help with her two-year-old back in the day.

I was going, wait, wait, there’s nothing I did that remotely compares to what she did!

Wow.  Huh.  It got me thinking how, with true acts of service, both do come away feeling like they were blessed the most of all.  But you know what, Lisa? You still did way more.

Meantime, thank you all for all the anniversary wishes!  Today is the actual day.  And after thirty years, I still think we have the best honeymoon story ever.

Richard and I went to a concert to hear the resident musicians at Menlo College performing tonight:  everything from Brahms to Gershwin’s jazzy notes to a new artist in New York whose work our friend Russ had commissioned but had had to download the music, still written in longhand, for the performance. It was that new.  I didn’t hear the composer’s name nor Russ’s description very well, but I tell you: New York City put into music, beautiful music, is how the piece sounded to me. The subway, the rush of commuters, the quiet of the museums, he’d captured it exquisitely and I could spend hours listening just to that and whatever else the man might write.  (Someone can stop me right here and tell me it was all about crop circles in cornfields or something, whatever, I  loved it.)

That was from the fellow who, if you will, wrote the pattern that knitted all the sounds together.

The men who were working with their hands using instruments invented centuries ago to create a thing new and unique each time they followed those given patterns were the musicians (you get to hear them here) that are the Saint Michael Trio.  They were selling CDs to help fund music festivals and commissions such as the one we got to hear.

It strikes how what they do echoes what we knitters do. From our ever-improving skills and our hands and our hearts to reaching outward.

And then they topped off the evening with a soothing-then-rocking-out “Stairway to Heaven” that was the best. version. EVER !!!

First, a photo to show the difference between needlefelting, like Hilary‘s falcon, and felting; Diana made me the colorful turtle.

Maybe someday I’ll post about the man from Mexico who was working on the grounds while the place was being torn down by half at a time and rebuilt.

But anyway. Today was a lupus group meeting at the local community hospital, and I chuckled as I pulled into the exact same parking spot near the door that I have somehow gotten every single time since the new seismically-correct hospital opened.

We meet in a conference room next to the cafeteria in the basement and this time the group decided, hey, let’s have a salad potluck and do lunch together.

There was a new person there, her first time.  And that is the main reason I go to these: to show the newer/younger patients that you can have this disease a long time and life still goes on with it and it’s okay: no matter what it may throw at you, you are still you and the rest is just noise.

One of the things she wanted to know was how to know what to expect. The short answer is, you can’t. The long answer is, statistically, how you’re doing at five years out is how you’ll very likely be 20 years out.  No organ involvement? Wonderful! She was particularly interested in the cardiac statistics, and someone who is a nurse answered but I didn’t hear what she said, so I didn’t say anything, not wanting to possibly repeat her.

But the percentage of lupus patients who show cardiac disease at autopsy is in the high-90’s percentile. 50% of those will never have known it.  (And of course, then there are the occasional patients like the unnamed one a Stanford cardiologist was just shaking his head over to me: he’d had to do a quintuple bypass on her. At age 21.)

There was also one older member there with her first set of hearing aids, and she seemed  discouraged with them at two weeks out. I told her it takes about three months for the brain to adjust to sounds it’s not used to hearing, that you get better over time at picking a voice out of background noise, that the pain at the unaccustomed volume–it’s called recruitment–does go away, but no, it’s not perfect and it’s not instantaneous.  And that the adjustment time is longer if you’re rarely actually around much in the way of sound.

I asked her if hers had directional mics?  She thought so, but didn’t know what that really meant.

It means the aids are picking up the person you’re facing and likely leaving out the people to the side. I explained about the consonants being higher pitched than vowels, making speech sound mumbly due to missing pieces.

I came away feeling like I had actually been able to be helpful, which is always a good thing.

But what struck me was how much sitting at two tables pushed together, everyone facing each other, a bit of food in hand, had made the atmosphere less formal. Had made people more comfortable speaking up about their personal lives, not just the lupus aspects of them. Had made the conversation a back-and-forth, give-and-take rather than the one turn for you, one turn for you, one for you, version of speaking that goes on at the regular meetings, had made it more a meeting of friends than merely patients, and I very much enjoyed today’s.

I gave the newcomer my contact info and blog addy.  I wanted to make it clear: we’re all in this life thing together.

Here are Glenn Nevill’s photographs, the whole scene starting at picture two taking place in one second’s time, of lunch delivery of the San Francisco falcons. Eat and run!

Meantime, one of my fellow falcon enthusiasts came over today.  I was hoping the Cooper’s hawk would make an appearance for her, but no such luck, although she did enjoy the show the birdfeeder put on.

Hilary’s the one I was looking for Edgar for.  I never did find him, but I did find some good roving to share.  She’s into needlefelting–and her work is so exquisite I wanted to run show it to my parents, especially my dad the art dealer, and exclaim, Isn’t this just so cool!

Because she came with a surprise.

She had had to trim the body down a bit, she told me, because the feet weren’t supporting it.  (It looks perfect to me!)  She’d had the proportions just so the first time.

I’ve done a very little bit of felting, but I’ve never tried anything remotely like this. You’d have to be able to visualize what you want and then know just how to make it come out like that, not to mention doing all that actual work.  It takes the eye of an artist.  My pictures didn’t quite capture it, but she got it just so right down to the toenails.

I am reminded of Sandra Boynton’s lesson on how to mold chocolate bunnies: “Take one block of chocolate, 4x4x7 feet.  Chip away all pieces that do not contribute to an overall impression of rabbitittity.” Uh, yeah.

I am just totally in awe, and totally in love with my very own little falcon perched by my left hand as I type this.  Wow. Cool. Thank you. I had it perched on my knitting books while she was here, but I think I’m going to keep it on the arm of the couch, watching me knit at my own perch.

She told me it’s a tiercel, ie, a male, tiercel meaning “third” and males being a third smaller than females.  That tummy tuck and all that.

So.  He had a hard time standing up on his feet, had to have abdominal surgery, and is thinner now but can stay up just fine now and is ready to take on my world.  My stars, could this little tiercel be any more perfect?!

His name hasn’t come to me yet.  But it will.

I typed that, looked at it, and thought, Malcolm?  Hmm. Maybe.

Hilary, you’re wonderful! And it is absolutely beautiful.

Last year, my friend Nancy gave me an amaryllis plant that had been given to her as a bulb kit but that had never bloomed for her; she thought maybe I could get it to this year. It’s gorgeous, Nancy, thank you, and I’d give it back now if you hadn’t moved away.

The parakeet came back to feed many times today.  I wonder, if I were to put a bird cage with an open door out there, whether it would climb right in and make itself at home–but I’m perfectly happy watching it being perfectly happy.

And yet.  Not so much when it hit the window flying in a panic along with the finch flock–going not quite in the same direction as the others, being not quite one of them. It seemed okay afterwards, but it sure sharpened the caged life vs. longer life question about it for me. I tell you–personally, I’ve gone for longer and found it’s okay for it to be that way.

This picture is for Rachel: I’ve started in on the Malabrigo Silky she wound up for me.

Meantime, I got the perfect Mother’s Day present from my daughter-in-law and older son: “Outwitting Squirrels.” Okay, you already know it’s going to be good!  And then the author quotes the owners of bird stores in Cabin John and Potomac, Maryland–I bet his kids went to the same schools I did.  The guy had great fun writing this.

My favorite part? His tale of a woman in Massachusetts who found some old LPs in her attic. She strung them on a rope separated by knots with her birdfeeder below: no squirrel could climb that stair-eo.

Then she got to watch them trying to jump down onto the top LP to hang downwards towards the feeder.  Here came the first: it got spun off into the snow.  Hey…! Cool! Do it again!

She described it as a line at Disneyland, waiting their turn. No food but almost as good.

I mentioned it to Richard and his reaction was, “Like the buffalo.”

Wait, the what?

And then he reminded me.  After the musk ox got reintroduced to Alaska, the buffalo did.  “Where the deer and the antelope play” had nothing on these guys.

Okay, so if I ever seriously think about parakeet cages I’m going to have to provide it a lot of toys. They’re members of the parrot family and can talk; I wonder if I could teach it to knit.  Or at least recite my line-by-line lace instructions so I don’t lose my place.

For Mother’s Day weekend. Best kind of present there could possibly be is, simply, presence.  Actually, he’s back out the door with his sister and their friends, but I’ll happily take every moment I can get and I’ll even share, too.

Meantime,  Jocelyn has a bird in her yard doing karaoke at all hours, defying her personal noise ordinance.  And boy does that bring back memories.

This is a corner of the back yard I grew up with in Maryland. One year, a woodpecker having too much fun with the wood siding discovered the second floor of the house to be high, safe, and warm, and pecked out a hole big enough to raise her family in. Insulation! Ooh, soft! Bonus points!

That nest was between the plasterboard and the outside wall and right at the head of my sister’s bed.  Till the babies fledged, there was not a thing anyone could do but wait for the day there weren’t little chirping hungry woodpeckers at the crack of dawn. (While hoping for no obnoxious cracks from teenage birds getting plaster’d.)

Mom and Dad eventually–they waited till they were really, really sure those birds were gone–got a tall ladder and plugged up that hole, hoping Momma Bird would get the message.  Woods, see? Tall trees, that way, go!

Thank you, everybody, for the input. After looking at that scarf all blocked and done this morning, (5.5+ x 62″ out of those 24g!) it just felt like it is wonderful the way it is–and that I should knit and offer the person the alternative of a plain cream-colored cashmere blend, her choice; it’s pretty hard to go wrong that way. (So, back to the needles, I’m not finished there yet.)

Meantime, I have a friend whose emails my Thunderbird program, for reasons unknown, has been bouncing into the spam filter lately, about every other message.  We tried to pin it down: is it when it comes from her phone? From her computer? There seemed no particular correlation and it went on for days, with me dragging her messages up to my inbox as if I could show my computer, See?  *That’s* where it goes.  See?

All seemed mysteriously well this morning after all that, and I was thinking, Oh good!  Until I did a tentative check later just to make sure the new pattern was holding.

Nope. I fired her off a note:

“And we had fun fun fun till the T-bird took the addy away.”

I guessed, looking at my brown fluffball, that I had enough qiviut left for perhaps five more repeats.

I somehow got eleven out of it (with very few inches to spare).  That little ounce just went on and on and on.  Yay!

Meantime, the darkest red amaryllis, my favorite, opened its first blossom today. I’ll never see its second beyond the bud stage:  I took a deep breath, cut the stalk, and walked it at dusk down the street to a neighbor whose 90-year-old husband is ailing and who needed that.  I didn’t want to inflict the plant on her–not one more thing needing taking care of. Just a flower, smaller and daintier than amaryllises normally are due to last year’s necessary neglect. A survivor.

Which meant that a normal bud vase would do the job–it wouldn’t tower and topple over. It’s all good.

It was gorgeous and she could watch the process of the living blossom for herself as the second opens.

Meantime, after taking this photo, I rinsed the qiviut scarf and laid it out to dry.  No blocking wires for it. I didn’t even manipulate a yarnover up between stitches when I found I’d missed one–I frogged it gently back down to that point and did it over, wanting no tension against those fibers.  Go gentle gentle gentle on this stuff.

Which brings me to my question tonight: my daughter does not care for the undyed musk ox color.  I have read that dyeing qiviut damages the fibers, and after all that hand combing of the animal in a specially designed, enclosed holding pen, the hand de-hairing, then all that hand-spinning, all that hand-knitting, all that was done on the part of three different women along its way to get this thing to come to be in its exquisitely glorious softness like nothing I have ever knitted before or probably ever will again, the last thing I want to do is take away from that softness.

I also happen to want the recipient to like it.  Color is so much of the experience of wearing something.  I’ve never met her. I can only guess what she’ll think of it.

I could, theoretically, simply dunk it in water with dye stirred in and it would take up the dye. However, without any simmering heat, it wouldn’t be dyefast–can you imagine her wearing, say, a white cashmere sweater and getting caught in the rain or even, for goodness sake, sneezing! and having dye run permanently down that sweater from her scarf?  Or on her winter coat?  So you see that if I dye it, I have to go through the whole process no matter what it might do to that qiviut.

Grayish brown it is, then.

The question was asked in church today: how do you prepare for the unknowable, the un-prepare-for-able.

The usual answers were bandied around, like, this is how we’re ready for the next earthquake, etc etc.  I started to laugh, and the Sunday School teacher’s face lit up and she started to walk towards me holding out the mic in her hands–but I, wanting not to be boring, wanting not to state what seemed so obvious to me and that I knew they all knew anyway, really, just kind of waved her away with a “Don’t GO there!” The room, full of old friends and newer ones, broke out laughing.

I instantly regretted it, though.  Yes, actually, I did have something to say. I am, however, better at writing it than saying it out loud, so here you go:

The only way you can be ready for whatever life might throw at you is to already have had it throw some of it at you. Experience counts.

Experience is only a small part of it.

It’s who we are. Who, I should say, we choose to be.  Every day. In the little details. It adds up.  The little decisions, the little interactions with others, the little reactions to setbacks and how we deal with the aftermath (including of our own making).  A sense of humor is essential.  If our focus is on ourselves–and the really, really hard part about illness is not to get so wrapped up in dealing with it that we’re too focused too inward too often–then we’re not prepared for the next blow.

But if we take each thing life throws at us in terms of, okay, God, I know You love me, I know You say You won’t give me anything we can’t handle together but this part really does seem a bit much to me right now and do You suppose You could trust me just a little less with this testing thing right now? But after that initial reaction, if we go, okay. What am I supposed to learn from this.  Is there some way I can turn it around to be a blessing to someone else.

Then, I say, we stay open to the possibilities around us and no matter what our circumstances may be we are fully alive.

Then, I say, we are prepared.

Let’s see, top, Little Lovely Malabrigo laceweight, middle, Stonechat Malabrigo silk/merino, bottom, 510-yard balls of Creatively Dyed sock weight–that’s 4310 yards and many hours saved for me, all cheerfully wound by (formerly) No-Blog Rachel today while we chatted. Did I mention she’s an angel?

She looked out my window at one point at all the activity going on: “You’ve got a nature preserve out there!”  I laughed, thinking of a guy back home back in the day who got fined for not cutting his grass.  He took it to court, telling the judge he’d created a nature preserve–there in the middle of Potomac, Maryland, the pricey and well-manicured town of many a political and media celebrity.

And also the town that runs alongside part of the C&O Canal National Park and part of the Cabin John Creek watershed preserve that runs for ten miles.  Those birds and animals needed more connecting points.

The judge was totally cool with the guy’s point of view.  Case dismissed.

Now, ‘scuse me, I’ve got some major knitting to go do. Thank you, Rachel!

Okay, No-Blog Rachel, the best part is your fault. I only had that cast-off to do. But I kept not doing it.

The good but bad part is, I found myself out unexpectedly in the sunlight in the afternoon–lupus alert!–in a chance encounter with a neighbor I’d wanted to talk to.  Good idea, bad timing and place.  After maybe 20 minutes my face was flaming into a painful sunburn, at which point I reluctantly excused myself.   I’m glad I had that conversation, very glad for a good neighbor, but when I’m reacting that hard that fast, I know what so often happens next. Maybe I should just go schedule the cardiologist appointment and beat it to it.

I will be highly relieved to have the next week or so turn out okay with no flare. Crossing my needles.  Tightly.

But in an antidote to that, I got a note from Rachel. The end result is, she is coming over here tomorrow to help me wind skeins and to simply have a good time hanging out, or rather, in.  Friend time, risk-free!

She felt bad that an earlier offer to do so hadn’t worked out till now. She had no way to know how much I would be needing, today more than any day in a long time, not to let resentment flare up hard against the lupus I can do nothing about.  Resentment that does no good for anybody.  Her timing was the perfect antidote.

And by golly, I wanted to show off that shawl enough, especially after she complimented the color in the comments, that it is finally now finished and blocking.

I needed that. Thank you, Rachel. I can’t wait!

Kurt at Imagiknit asked Saturday what a peregrine is, after I exclaimed that that soft handspun Peruvian Tweed alpaca in shades of gray would make a great peregrine. (Are peregrines soft? But then, how could feathers not be?)

I so much wanted to show him Evet’s gorgeous Earth Day photos in response. I think they could answer his question better than I ever could.  And man, ya gotta love those last two: someone had slammed a door loudly behind Evet, and Mama Clara announced, Okay, that’s it, you’re done. Bye.

And that was what I’d planned to blog about today.  And then I got an email.

That shawl that I mailed off that had so bugged me that it had taken me three weeks, what with taxes and all, to finish and get done: it arrived today where it was going.  On the most right day, and the delays that had seemed such a problem to me suddenly made sense.  The person I sent it to took the time to thank me right away, which amazes me after all the things she had to deal with and do today–including attending a service for a fourth-grader from her school who had passed on Saturday.

I am so glad I didn’t ignore the impulse to go knit that.  I am so grateful that my hug arrived around her shoulders the first day possible after the loss of that little girl she knew. This is what knitting is all about: sending love forward.

I forgot to tell her one thing, though, which is that if it should ever snag or tear, there is a spare length of yarn worked a good ways across the bottom row.  Anywhere else, surely it would get lost or tossed, but there it is.  Invisible but right there at hand, ready to reloop a broken loop, ready to hold it back together for her, at the ready, any time.

Which is as close as I could do to doing that in person for her from several thousand miles away.

It had been two years since Nina and I had done a yarn crawl.  Last year’s medicalnoise simply, neverendingly got in the way.  We were long overdue for some time together, so today we threw our things in her car and headed north.

I introduced her to Cottage Yarns in South San Francisco and snagged the last hank of Malabrigo Sock Botticelli Red in that dyelot, just to make absolute sure I had enough for my project–you know, the one I ripped out four times in my perfectionism before I got it right.  Having a lot of yarn left over, just in case, so much beats the alternative, and  I want to be able to be more generous on that shawl’s length that I would be for me, personally, if that’s what feels right when I get to that point. (I will add, the yarn held up just fine to all that ripping. Makes me more willing to buy more.)

The owner grinned to see me right back and right back in that Malabrigo basket, and she welcomed us warmly.

And then we went to Imagiknit in San Francisco, a marvelous shop full of light, both in the people and in the shop itself.  As we drove closer to it, looking around and at our map, (hey, I know that park!) I mentioned to Nina that my cousin Dan lived in this general neighborhood.

She dropped me off and went hunting for that most endangered species, a parking spot in The City.

I had only seen Imagiknit in the wild, at Stitches.  The store itself has two big rooms: the animal fibers in here as you walk in, the plant fibers over there in that one.  I imagine that would make it easy for the vegans or for the allergic. (I appreciated that the angora rabbit yarn was on a table by itself in the center, thereby far less likely to accidentally intermingle fibers with the wools.)

I bought a little Malabrigo here, too, some laceweight in exactly THE shades of rosy reds, and the gorgeous many-shaded skein less than perfectly pictured here, a colorway not quite like anything else around; it had a tag that said “test” on it.

Test? I asked. Am I allowed to buy this?  Did you dye this? Did Malabrigo?

The lady laughed and said yes, Malabrigo dyed it, and then explained it was a line that wasn’t out on the general market yet.

It’s a two-ply superwash merino worsted, super-soft.  They’d put in just the right amount of twist–not too tight, that would add too much friction to the hand, not too loose, that would let the fiber ends pop out. They’d done this exactly perfectly right.  Bravo! (Okay, Malabrigo, so let me buy more, okay?  Could you like, maybe, shear your sheep a little faster or something down there in Uruguay?  While those little lambs are just, you know, milling around like that, waiting impatiently for my needles. Whatever it takes.)

I told them I hadn’t been much of a hat knitter, but there was a family that had lost a child whom I’d knitted hats for and their little boy still doesn’t want to take his off ever.  His attachment to that hat had sold me on knitting them, so this worsted skein would be the next one I make, for…whomever.

I now know what I want to make the next piano hat out of, too, once there is more than the one skein in my world.  Can you Imagiknit?

The kicker? As I waited for Nina to swing back afterwards to pick me up, the guy who stopped at the stop sign across the street from the shop as I opened the door:  I could not believe it.  “DAN!” I mean, c’mon, what are the chances?! But it was him.  He looked slightly around but not all the way to where I was standing, shrugged ever so slightly, must be just city background noise, and drove off and away.

Leading me to thinking, you know?  There are others I love that I also need to go spend more time with, now that I can.  I’m so glad Nina got me to stretch my boundaries and go farther than my usual path and to see that I could. I’d needed that.

Wait, I thought–you’re still here?

He commutes here once or twice a year from Sweden. I’ve never met his wife, although I’ve knitted her a scarf; I figure, when you live that near the Arctic Circle, a little warmth sent one’s way is always a good thing.

He was there in church last week, but then he was again today too.  I did a doubletake.  He’s like the Brigadoon of the ward, y’know?  But two Sundays?  He was talking to my husband and as I came up I overheard–oh of course. The volcano.

He had discovered Walmart, in answer to my asking.  He’s close to our taller son’s size; if we’d known we could have given him some great hand-me-downs.

We offered him dinner any night every night any time till he can get a flight back out.  He smiled, thanked us, and told us he had plans: his daughter was in college about 800 miles away and her semester was ending this week.  If by then they were still grounded, he was going to take his rental car, go get her, and they would do the sightseeing road trip they could only otherwise have dreamed of ever having the time to do together.

“Vol,” French for “fly,” can? No.  So. Don’t miss Carlsbad and the Grand Canyon on your way!

This first part’s just background noise: I hadn’t worn my Malabrigo shawl before.  I hadn’t been planning to, either, for quite some time to come, but it really did match that outfit well and it was almost time to go.

Oh, wait, I realized as I pulled it out of its ziploc–weave in that last end and snip the other one before we go, quick!  It had been carefully put away with its instructions, safe and sound, not quiiiite done.  There.  Done.

Nina liked it.  “That one’s different–I like that!”

We were at a wedding this evening.  We’ve known the bride since she was a small child.  There was much celebrating, many reunions between old friends going on, many people who rarely see each other but love each other dearly, all coming together in joy.  I found the grandparents of the bride, the grandmother having been a fellow swimmer at the CAR therapy pool when my kids were little; we threw our arms around each other.  I saw others doing likewise, over and over. How ARE you these days!

Congratulations, Sara and Juan!  It was good to see you being the happiest of all.  Dancing for well-deserved joy; you’ve both chosen well.  Our best wishes for happily ever after and always.