I’ve only ever seen her a few times. Her mother is a member of our church and so today she wheeled her in.

I was surprised to see a touch of gray in the daughter’s hair. It happens, though, doesn’t it.

We threw our arms around each other, the daughter and I. Neither of us asked the other anything like, now what is your name again? I held the mother’s hand a moment; she was lucid, which has not always been so, radiant, even.

It isn’t easy to be responsible for a parent, and from a young age at that, no matter how sweet the personality of both (and they are.)

And I found myself deeply glad I had done that knitting years ago: to do my small part in caring, too, to try to let the daughter know forever that she was not alone.

—————

On a separate note: Bashie just passed away at 98, it was announced today. The woman whose father was a rider for the Pony Express after Abraham Lincoln asked Brigham Young for riders and the last, as far as we know, surviving child of a Civil War soldier.

There was a convocation at Stanford tonight, the speaker being a former conductor of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and now dean of the college of the arts at Utah State University, and Richard, his sister, her husband, my father-in-law, his sister and her husband and Michelle all went.

I didn’t risk it. Nobody needs my germs.

The speaker told of the time he ended up performing on a USO tour and how the experience had changed his life, and how he only got invited to do so because someone else who was to be on it had been drafted at the last second.

He didn’t say the drafted soldier was a dear friend. He did say that the group he thus got to be in sang for a soldier who had lost all his limbs in his service in Vietnam and the man had never spoken a word since his injuries. He did not seem to have any response to their presence.

Their last song was “God Be With You Till We Meet Again,” and at that there were tears running down the man’s face and he whispered, “Thank you. Thank you.”

They’d shared their voices and he had at last found his own.

The power of presence, the power of music: the experience changed what Craig Jessop did with his life.

The friend who’d been drafted, he did not know, was sitting in that audience listening to him tell the tale–and that was Richard’s Uncle Nate.

The family all stopped by here afterwards for a brief visit and hugs, braving my germs and I finally got to see them (Richard did yesterday); it had been a long day, though, and Dad was tired, so they didn’t stay long before heading back up the mountains. We sent them off with a chocolate torte out of our freezer for their last full day in California tomorrow.

It was very kind of them. I’m so glad I got to have a little time with them at last.

And so glad that Nate got to see his old friend.

Being sick is boring, so I’m going to mention other stuff.

Congress is trying to sell off parts of Yosemite for logging and mineral rights, along with a fair number of other public lands. Firefighting the Rim fire, that was expensive, you know. You can’t go in there, because they’re not funding the parks, but if the bill passes, the corporations can (and you never will again where they will be).

The studies and facts for anyone worried about whether or not to vaccinate their kid or how to answer someone who won’t.

Okay, and for something far more fun, this article says a Carnegie Hall orchestra was plunked on a random street corner in New York City with a sign: “Conduct us.” The first person to step up on the conductor’s podium (with encouragement from her mommy) was a little girl who had to have stood way high on her tippy tippy toes to reach the music stand, where she opened her coloring book to just the right page and started waving that baton for her daddy and his friends to start the music.

No line was formed, there were no rules anywhere, and yet everybody noticed who had been waiting longer than themselves and waited their turn, strangers looking out for strangers and laughing together while appreciating the magic of the moment. Move the baton slow or fast, point at this player or that and the musicians watched and honored their efforts and played along for the sheer joy of it.

Can we send them all to the halls of Congress?

Clearly Washington needs more musicians. They would bring out the best in the people who need it the most.

Brian Holloway, whose name will probably be familiar to people who follow football, had a locker just a ways down from mine in high school and was close friends with my friend Brad (the friend who posted notice of Steve’s passing.)  Between them and their little brothers a grade younger, they set the tone for the jocks in the school: be good to other people. Be proud of their accomplishments (missed the state football championship by one game) but not too full of themselves. The stupid drunk partying thing? Not cool around the captain of the team and his buddy.

Every high school should have jocks like that (said the emphatically-not-a-jock). I don’t remember a lot of details about Brian but I do remember that our class was fortunate he was in it; he was just a really nice guy who made the world better around him.

To whom this just happened.  (Updated link here.)

Over twenty thousand dollars in damage to his house, stupid teens tweeting their own little reality show while Brian read their posts from far away, incredulous. The rampaging mob, hundreds of them, stole, drugged, drank, peed, broke, shattered, vandalized, graffittied, all the while publicly glorying to each other in their destruction.

And his response?

To hope to rescue those kids from the tragedy of the trajectories they’d just sent themselves on.  To hold them accountable for the sakes of their own souls while telling them here was his website and here was their chance: own up. Come clean. Don’t stay in that horrible hole forever where it will only get worse if they let bad decisions compound bad decisions and flood out their futures. And don’t think you can duck out if you don’t do it–we know.  He offered them something priceless: take responsibility and by so doing begin to reclaim yourselves. Come help me get the place ready for a picnic for military personnel.

Other teens who had had nothing to do with that night showed up too after they heard: to help clean up the terrible mess in shame for what their peers had done and to offer solidarity to a family who had done nothing to deserve this.

And that is a gift they gave themselves as well as the Holloways, forever.

My sister Anne needs to see this. Her boys could totally pull it off. Enjoy!

And on an also-whimsical note but in a totally different vein, you may have heard that Voyager 1 has escaped our solar system–that actually it did August 25th of last year, but they waited till this week to announce it because they wanted to be very sure of their measurements. But yes. Confirmed. That’s when it was.

Neil Armstrong passed on August 25, 2012.

One great leap for mankind…

Just need to run the ends in on the baby blanket–tomorrow. But the knitting part, it is done.

The cashmere-blend Epiphany yarn on the next project is down 28 grams and going fast.

And for a little fun: someone among the ironworkers repairing the old Bay Bridge after the Loma Prieta quake  of ’89 had an artistic side. Permission was not asked, and good thing, because state officials said it would not have been granted–but a troll was created and the workers welded it in place underneath the roadway. A little public art to brace against natural disasters. To stand guard. Ships passing below could see him and apparently the traffic news helicopters could zoom their lenses to him but I’d never heard of the thing till now, when the current ironworkers refused to let him be gone with the old span that was just relegated to history this past weekend.

This time Caltrans got it right. The little troll, our local man of steel, is to be saved for a museum still bolted to his piece of his bridge and according to the LA Times, officialdom has now asked that, given how trolls traditionally go with one bridge and one bridge only, and that ours has done such a marvelous job of protecting all from natural harm, that a new one be created for the new bridge. Of steel, in a place protected from the sun (a troll after my own heart), and they offered that it might be made by the ironworkers, or someone in a non-profit industrial arts class in Oakland, or…

On the sly. Don’t tell them. Just go for it.

Cue the Habu Textiles folks! That steel laceweight yarn I could never see a reason to buy at Stitches–it’s windy on that bridge and you know a little someone will need a good scarf.

There may be those who would like to sign a petition like the one I linked to yesterday but take issue with its stance on gun control.

And so I searched again. There is indeed a petition that simply asks the White House to award Antoinette Tuff the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her heroic actions the day of the school gunman in Georgia. It is here, and I have signed it, too.

Meantime, two little someones had a good time at their first baseball game.

Took it easy today, knit just a few rows, and the hands are much better off.

But I did get to show Rachel at knit night the colors of her yarn coming together in that baby blankie, all but the last one in there. She loved how it was coming out. Made my day.

Meantime, if you didn’t see the story, I highly recommend scrolling down near the bottom of this page to see the longer version of the interview with Antoinette Tuff.

A mentally ill young man with an AK-47 and 500 rounds of ammo in his pockets got through the locked doors at an elementary school as a parent walked in and Ms. Tuff found herself face to face with him. His face showed his intent.

She felt the fate of hundreds of children and teachers on her, that one wrong word and they and she and the gunman and who knows how many cops would all be dead. She started talking to the guy while silently praying–not just for all the innocents but for him, too. “I put it all to God.”

She found an opening when he told her his name: that was her mother’s maiden name. “We could be family!” He was cool with that.

She told him some of the things she’d gone through to show that one could come out okay even after really bad experiences, that she wanted him to go forward and experience the parts of life that were to come for him, that the good to come would prove it was worth it, and she eventually talked him into emptying his pockets onto her desk, all the ammo, the gun, everything, and into lying down on the floor with his hands behind him while she sat at the desk so that the cops could know she was okay. So he would be too.

And thus it ended peacefully. He’d shot some shots earlier, but nobody was hurt.

I have never wanted so badly for someone to be awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom. I want Antoinette Tuff to get to see the whole country cheering her for who she is and for what she did. I was the tenth signer of the petition; will you join me?

I was at Purlescence tonight, knit night, and admired what the person next to me was working on. It was a very soft variegated purple, I think she said a handdyed merino/kid mohair blend, a nice chevron pattern, densely knit and warm, very pretty.

I’d followed her pictures on Facebook on her trip to Europe she’d just gotten back from.

She’d had a great time, she told me.

“Did you buy any yarn over there?”

“No,” she answered, hesitating– “but I lost some. One skein. One irreplaceable skein.”  She paused, then said it again: “Irreplaceable,” shaking her head slightly, still grieving the loss in spite of herself.

It was for the project she was working on. She’d bought the yarn ten years ago, long since closed out now. She had started a scarf but now it was going to have to be a cowl and oh well. “Cowls are nice,” we both agreed. She had tried Ravelry, she had tried asking every likely yarn store she could find anywhere but it was long gone.

I told her my story, which wasn’t anywhere near hers, of trying to match a dye lot, leaving messages–and not thinking to mention that I was on Pacific time. One helpful shop owner, working through emails before she opened the doors for the day, called me rather than emailing back, the more personal touch. Very nice of her, actually.

And so my husband woke up to the sound of the phone in the dark of the winter night, California time, handed it to me, and growled, “It’s your boiler-room New York City yarn pushers. They want you to know: they don’t have your dye lot!”

Oops.

During those last couple of sentences, the friend’s phone started buzzing and she apologized a bit and picked it up (oh it did? sorry I didn’t hear it) when I finished.

It was a message from someone on Ravelry who’d made a project out of that yarn. Ten years ago. She had three skeins left. “They’re yours.”

Overwhelmed to the point of tears, the shop cheering, hugs and huzzahs all around. Wow, what were the odds! And what timing! We all got to celebrate with her! For both of them! I tell you, that place was full of really happy people all the sudden.

What that generous knitter whoever they are could never know was that our friend had toured a World War II concentration camp in Germany, and I can only imagine the emotions and the losses it represented. I have seen and felt Gettysburg, a place beyond words, and that–

But…this….

Her yarn. Somewhere on that trip. It was gone.

Someone stepped forward tonight for a complete stranger simply because she knew what it was like not to be able to finish the project as she’d dreamed it and she could well imagine what it would mean to her to now be able to. Because she empathized with her fellow human being. What a gift, what a deeply meaningful gift, and may it come back to this good person again and again in her life.

“Knitters are the BEST!” our friend exclaimed.

One of Michelle’s friends gave her a book on chocolate today, and flipping through it at home, all three of us stopped at one page of pictures with the identical reaction: the old Scharffen Berger plant in Berkeley! It wasn’t labeled but we knew it instantly. We took the tour there years ago, back when the founders, not Hershey, owned what was then a start-up. They were determined, with input from the wonderful Alice Medrich, to make the best chocolate in America. (And then later when one of the men was dying they sold out and the little factory got shut down and now Tcho in San Francisco is setting out to take the spot of best chocolate-maker in the country–superb chocolate, highly recommended.)

The tour guide showed us the room where a woman was deftly and quickly wrapping individual chocolate bars. By hand.

And there she was in that photo and we could tell you that the photo was shot from the doorway we saw her through and that that was the actual woman we’d seen. I wondered if I was remembering right but Richard and Michelle both confirmed, and besides, there had only ever been the one person doing that job, from what we remember from the tour.

They had actually just bought an automatic bar wrapping machine at the time but then found it didn’t fit through the door in the old 1907 building, although we found out later they managed it not long after.

And what a building: the ceiling was in brick. Curves of bricks. Note that brick crumbles in earthquakes and that this place had been finished the year after San Francisco’s big burning 1906 quake. How a big double S set up stayed up there… It has been one of life’s mysteries for me ever since.

Hershey’s promised not to compromise the quality, but there are definitely those of us who feel they did.

We have thought for some time that if I could just get to the Tcho factory tour without having to walk through a lot of sunlight to get to it, we’d be right on it–and I just got my push to go find out.

I wonder where their employees will be in a dozen years. I’m curious to know if they bought the Scharffen Berger wrapper machine that had been right across the Bay Bridge from them. And I hope that woman is working for Tcho’s now in product development, taste-testing after all those years of being surrounded by the aroma of the world’s best cocoa beans. She’s earned it.

The best thing, by far, that I have ever read on the subject of Paula Deen is this essay, ending with an invitation to her to come cook and bake and break bread with the author. Powerful in his forgiving, his empathy, and in the opportunity he offers her. The point of my mentioning this is not Paula Deen: it is in the wisdom and the words of the wonderful human being that is Michael Twitty.

And more locally:

Last October I loaned a friend a skirt for part of her Halloween costume. It was a tall size Talbots, silk, bought off Ebay for a buck plus shipping charges that were no more than a gallon of gas–it seemed worth the risk at the time, though the color was a guess from the poor photo; I could always change that part anyway.

Vivid orangey red is the exact light frequency that sets off my head injury the most and tosses my flimsy balance away. Yow! But it was long, flattering. Elegant.

Emily absolutely loved it. She’s tall, she loved the color, it fit her perfectly, for her it was perfect, and so when she came to bring it back I offered her to keep it.

No no, it’s yours, and she refused, delighted by the gesture, though.

As I mentioned yesterday, I was cleaning up in preparation for our houseguests. They’ll be here after seeing Yosemite–I don’t think my brother’s been in California since the summer I was 10 and he turned 12–and somehow I came across that forgotten skirt. And so I found myself looking at it yesterday morning and thinking of Emily.

Well, I did already try to give it to her, time to finally go put it in that dyepot and darken the color.  A lot. No sense in having it go unworn. The lining is polyester and will likely stay what it is and resist the protein-fibers-specific Jacquard bath, but that’s okay. Seems a shame to risk it, though–it’s harder to dye finished clothes evenly than it is yarn.

But no sense in wasting it, either. I started to pick it up to start the pre-soak.

Something felt so strongly, no, that, no, and I put it back down. Huh. I looked at it again and thought of her and how much she’d loved it, and at last left it spread out on the ironing board ready to steam press or dunk but doing nothing yet.

I found myself thinking of her all day as I passed in and out of the laundry room with the neon-bright skirt front and center. The skirt was secondary; Emily seemed uppermost in my thoughts.

There was an email that came in last night.

Emily’s husband was out of town. She thought she smelled smoke. They think it was her water heater, but whatever it was it became a two-alarm fire that also damaged the apartment above her.  She and her baby got out and nobody was hurt but she was evacuated from her home.

Many, many friends responded to the mass email and helped her get her family’s belongings, what remained of them, into a storage container because I guess it all had to go. Now. Richard, who has done Red Cross volunteer work responding to house fires, says that typically it takes weeks for the fire officials to investigate causes of unknown origin–you don’t want the next apartment over doing the exact same thing shortly after, you want to find and verify and fix. And then there’s the wait for the repair work to be done before you can move back in. It can take months.

I was absolutely wiped after cleaning out the yarn room, and with that recent Crohn’s growling, I did not dare push my body further in one day.

But what I could do was to offer a beautiful, bright, cheery skirt that I knew would fit her body and soul, something new rising from the ashes.

Don’t know if her computer burned… Haven’t heard back yet.

Whether she lets me give it to her or not is almost beside the point. When she most needed support by her side, before her friends knew, the Love in the universe was right there for her trying to get through my thick head. Emily. Emily needs you.

I interpreted it in a way that made sense to me at the time, but at least at the end of her terrible day she could know there was someone who’d been thinking of her constantly from about the time the whole thing started.

And if in the fire she lost the scarf I knit her awhile ago then I will go find some fabulous, soft yarn and it will be in bright orangey red.

There was an article in today’s Mercury News and I found myself wanting to throw out the hype and the extraneous and, for the sake of his children in time to come, distill it down to its essence re a man who’d been away from his family on what I assume was a business trip; while overseas, he’d bought some toy fire trucks to bring home to his little ones.

The in-flight movie was a foreign film about firefighters rescuing people.

He thinks, gratefully, that that put him in the frame of mind to react well in what would happen next: he was in the emergency seat aisle and next to the window, and he wrestled that door open on that Asiana flight in San Francisco that had just crashed and then, instead of riding the slide to the ground to safety, he shouted to his fellow passengers so they could know there was a way out and he stayed to help.

Someone screamed MOVE! and smacked and walked on one already-hurt woman trying to protect her daughter, someone hit her, at least one man in utter panic adding injury to injury, people pushing and shoving and grabbing for their bags, impeding the exodus from the plane as the smoke came at them; but the man by the emergency chute helped the woman and her daughter to safety.

And dozens of others.

That man was later grateful that in such pain and chaos the best had come out of him, that what he would so hope his response to others would be actually had been, and he clearly ached for those who’d panicked and done terrible things. For those who now have to live with themselves for not doing right by their fellow passengers–that would be so much harder, and how could you ever know in advance how you would react, maybe blindly like that… He asked that people not judge them.

He was so glad that movie had been the one shown. He wondered maybe that had made the difference for him?

His compassion for those who’d responded poorly in such primal fear moved me deeply.  He wondered if he could just as easily have gone that way too, but thank heavens he had not.

He got home. He told his children nothing; they were too young to handle or understand such an enormity as he’d just experienced, and so he protected them, too.

And his little boy, playing happily with his brand new fire truck, out of the blue and with no prompting whatever exclaimed in delight, “Let’s go save some people, Daddy!”

(Edited to add, Thank you, Ben Levy, sir.)

What a long day.

It started with a phone call–and I heard the phone ring, without any aids in, as I stepped out of the shower, which is an exceedingly rare but turned out it was a needful thing–letting me know that our oldest had been in a car accident.  I grabbed my old aids quick, wet hair and all: a teenager with pedal to the metal had hit her car hard enough to spin her out into a parked car that then was thrown into another parked car.

This is our kid with the autoimmune hemophilia. But after some time in the ER, she’s home and recovering. Thank heavens for airbags and attentive doctors and her good friend who came to get her. It was the guilty teenager himself who called 911 for her.

Then three of my cousins and their families were locked down in the Boston area as the whole world prayed for everybody’s safety, hoping hard for a good outcome. The one with young children had them visiting her parents in New Hampshire, where they did not have to see.

And then, as I’m sure you already know, the surviving bomber was captured and taken by ambulance to the ER and nobody else was hurt and he didn’t die either and the crowds poured out of everywhere and lined the streets to cheer all those officers, all those agents, all those long hours they’d put in to protect everybody, facing down their fears for us all, and it was a finish line of celebrating, joyous fans after the kind of marathon that nobody should ever have to go through.

My sweet husband this morning, wanting to see a way to forgive, wondered out loud if, like the DC sniper case, we had someone young and impressionable in thrall to an older, more evil man, and perhaps he might still be malleable enough to be able to come to see what he’d done should he survive being found. There was no doubt in our minds that he would be found. We had sat through a neuropsychologist’s lecture, years ago, where the man had said that in our youth our brains are not fully myelinated, and that what that means is that we physically cannot draw the mental line from A to B to mean C will happen; “So if your kids act brain damaged, it’s because they are,” he only half joked. Around 20-22 for men, a little earlier for women, that is when one can begin to see the future impacts of one’s actions.

That lecture has made it easier ever since for us to understand and forgive anything a teenager might say or do.

The New York Times and the Boston Globe have already run profiles of the two bomber brothers suggesting that very dynamic between them.

A cop said to one of the reporters as the ambulance drove the guy to the hospital, There will be justice, not revenge.

And in those words he represented the best of America in the face of what was done to us.

(And to clarify after Kelli’s comment: yes, absolutely. He must be held accountable to the full extent of the law for his actions.)

This amaryllis is dedicated to the people in Boston. It’s supposed to have a good two feet of stem, but due to its exposure to red virus last year, wasn’t able to grow one. It refused to let that stop it from offering the blooming it was meant to give to the world.

Meantime, they caught the guy (and I’m sure that story will be updated by morning). He was arrested today and accused of sending ricin-laced and threatening letters: the President was sent one, as were five members of Congress, some of them hand-delivered, and what looked like a bomb was left at a Senate building entrance; thousands of staffers were locked down.

Those Congressmen’s peers still voted to make it so that, should this man get out of jail, on bail or for time served, he then can have access to any gun of any capacity he should so choose without submitting to a background check against his mental or criminal state. The Senate wasn’t even willing to say to Heller with you. (Paging Scalia.)

Wow.

But I thank those those worked so hard at identifying and stopping this guy so fast and I pray for all the other investigators needing the help, as well as for the wounded and those tending to them.

Of whom there are now more. My heart goes out to everybody in the town of West, Texas tonight.

Today we celebrate our oldest: Happy Birthday, Sam! It snowed that day; today there was so much wind that I wondered, looking up through a skylight, whether a limb or two on that big tree might come down. (It held.) A finch leaving my feeder suddenly got thrown far sideways in the gust but recovered and made it to the safety of the trees to ride out the worst with some of its flock.

My cousin Tina had kids visiting and they decided that maybe watching the marathon with three grandkids in tow under age four would not be the best idea after all and so they went to the JFK library instead, figuring they would have it all to themselves while everybody else was at the race.

Which they pretty much did.

They left at 2:40. By the time they got home it was clear they needed to turn on the TV…

Ezra Klein wrote a beautiful, moving tribute from the point of view of a marathoner’s husband celebrating the cheering crowds and the history and the runners and the rescuers here. I highly recommend it.

We had recall work and then, it turned out, major warranty stuff as well being done on our car, and there came a phone call saying that a rental car was covered with that warranty. The Prius was going to be staying there for a few days.

The dealership that used to drive me nuts, this afternoon, sales and service people alike on the floor wanted only to make life easier for every single person who walked in those doors. There was a genuineness, a quietly shared vulnerability, a need to reach out. Sit, sit, (while I waited for the rental to be delivered) may we…  I don’t drink coffee or tea, and they were keenly disappointed not to be able to give me that small gesture, wanting to be able to Do Something; I regret not having asked for a simple cup of water, for their sakes’ and my own.

Note all the runners and first responders and average people alike who ran TO the fire and the smoke in the bombings today, their need to help others instinctively and instantly more important than their very lives. That, that is who we are as Americans and as human beings and we will never forget those who by doing so ran against the force of the wind to rescue us all.