On my way there I said a prayer for every member of our group, the ones who come, the ones who don’t, whoever might show up. I figured we could all use such good thoughts anyway, so, yeah.

She’s said it to me before in private. I was shocked speechless at both the words and the fact that she slammed her heavily damaged, arthritic hands to make her point as she said them: pain on pain.

But this is the first time that I know of that she said it to the whole group.

Lupus Support Group, Conference Room B. There were eight of us today. Six are mothers and one clearly, from things she’s said, would have liked to have been.

And then there’s M.

M fiercely believes that we could eradicate the scourge of lupus once and for all–not by research, not by medical advances, one of which we had just been discussing, no, what she said was, if lupus patients would just STOP. HAVING. CHILDREN.

And right there next to her as she fiercely derided most of us was me on one side, mother of four at the time of my diagnosis, and MK, likewise with her grown four and with her sweet three-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter in tow. Who’d been charming the socks off everyone, including M. I hope that little girl didn’t catch on that her grandmother was being condemned for her very existence.

The kicker is that lupus is not actually known to be genetic. The susceptibility to it seems to be inherited, but not the disease itself.

The others were taken quite aback but I’d heard it all before, so I smiled and responded gently, “Actually, I think lupus is what I needed to grow up.”

And I went on to describe how I had learned to be more the kind of person I wanted to be, kinder, more compassionate, more aware of others’ needs, because of the things I’d gone through via illness. (The stories I could tell! The people I would never have met but for…Like right here in this room, including, yes, her…)

I bragged on my kids by quoting Mrs. Russell, who had taught them all in elementary school; she’d taken me aside one day, well after my diagnosis, and told me that my kids were more empathetic to those around them, kinder….

The lupus, I said, had played a part in that.

“We all have something,” I added.

Another woman nodded, “The seeds of our deaths are in our births. It’s part of life.”

Another woman gave her own example of why it was okay to have had to go through all this.

I picked Richard up from work a few hours later and I was still struggling not to steam over the cluelessness of the woman’s unfathomable insult. I honestly don’t think she knew she was being insulting, though, and it was clear she was incredibly lonely, in too much pain to see beyond herself, and though she would never agree, it was very clear to me that in her old age she deeply regretted not having had children. That lashing out was her only way of dealing with it.

She needed a friend, not someone who took it personally and got angry back. (Rereading this draft before hitting publish, I feel that having written that out loud after these hours have passed, I am finally free of it.)

I hope what I said helped. I do know that I said it better in the moment it was needed than I of myself could have done, alone.

We saw the new Bay Bridge for the first time tonight, from a great distance: we were standing on the hill well above with friends, looking down at all the lights sparkling in the dark across everything below, pointing out the tower to each other. Gorgeous.

It’s midnight now, having just walked in the door, and it was 2:30 when I started out of here. G’night.

Nobody was around and nobody would know, right? So the kid got in his jacked-up truck and floored it in reverse and blindly on past the corner–and it is a fairly blind corner–and I can only guess which way he was going to throw the steering wheel from there at the T-intersection but it didn’t matter because he slammed on the brake after I left a bit of skid marks on the road doing the same.

The car behind me managed not to hit me either.

It was his mom, coming home early.

As he turned his face quickly away to avoid my eyes, I nodded to him: Proceed.

And he was off, at a prim pace just so.

The mom pulled into her driveway, I into mine, we got out, and she, a tad mortified, me, laughing it off, walked towards each other. This was one of those times when the UV sun exposure didn’t matter, we needed to come together in that moment and no later. Now. For her sake.

The first words out of her mouth were, “He’ll be in college next year.”

I so didn’t expect that–I laughed. It’s okay. Far better that he learn in a narrow miss with witnesses and caught than in something worse later.

…in the towering redwoods. Yes I did. Sunscreened, sunjacketed, big hat. Parked right near the mile-out stop on my way in but just missed the bus that had once been a San Francisco trolley car and given the wait and the late (3:40 and the place would shut down at 5:00) I simply hoofed it through the hills. Later got out of there after quitting time, when the trolleybusing was officially over, and got another stiff workout.

It was Kings Mountain Art Fair weekend. I’d been looking forward impatiently all year to seeing my potter friends Mel and Kris.

And so it was that the baby blankie got put aside for a day while I worked like mad to finish the edging on a shawl. I had been debating on it for some time whether to just cast it off or add more?

I looked at it last night and practicality begone, the answer was, more. I added seven long rows, finishing it at noon today. I emailed a few friends to ask for advice re the blocking that just wasn’t happening in that kind of time frame and then did the suddenly-obvious and thank you Chan and Bev: I held the steamer on the iron over that edging and around the shawl a bit. It was Malabrigo Silky Merino, a thick (for me), drapey yarn, and it was enough for now.

Their Stonechat colorway? The pale gray flecks interspersed with the burgundy reds look like the light filtered through the redwoods.

Kris was just thinking it was getting chilly but hadn’t said anything out loud yet when I opened my purse. She admired the shawl and was about to hand it back when I headed her off at the pass with, “But does it fit?”

Her eyes went huge. Stunned. Thrilled. Petting it, swooning over the softness, loving the colors, just dumbfounded. She loved it! I told her about the not-really-blocked, that the lacework would stretch out more once it’s rinsed and to lay it out in a circle to dry. Or just wear it as is; given the heft and hang of the fiber, it worked.

I told her and Mel that my brother had come to visit us with his three daughters and that I’d found I didn’t have enough of their medium sized mugs for everybody. I only had six. I had so been looking forward to picking out more.

And so I did, two, and a napkin holder and a berry bowl that is designed to let the rinsed berries continue draining into the plate below. Kris picked it up, and smiling at the memory, said, “Mel made this one.”

She picked up one of the mugs I’d chosen and pointed out the way the yellow and red played with and speckled through each other in an effect that she said only one firing had succeeded in doing since they’d moved their operations to their new home in Oregon–she really loved those.

Three of the four pieces I’d latched onto had that in them. I love it too. I’d had no idea it was a rare thing, and now I have all the more reason to treasure them.

“Hey wait,” I told Kris at some sudden point later in the conversation–“you forgot to write me up!”

She got an impish grin. “No I didn’t.”

Oliver Sacks’ book “The Mind’s Eye” showed up on my doorstep about 5:00 pm and I’ve had a hard time putting it down.

One passage grabbed me that I immediately wanted to go show to Lene: it was about Charles Scribner, whose great-grandfather had founded the giant publishing house that he ran; his whole life was reading and writing.

Until he couldn’t. Sacks describes alexia sine agraphia at length, where the patient can write but can no longer read, not even what they just wrote. The hands know but the eyes cannot.

Audiobooks were just beginning to come to be, and Scribner had been resistant to the idea of them.

And then suddenly they were the only way he could read, and to his surprise, he could read just as fast that way and retain just as much of it. Since he could still write, he started dictating and having people read back to him so he could manage all the drafts and editing work that must be done and so he carried on, and presented Sacks with a copy of his first autobiography, written after his disease had struck.

Sacks doesn’t go into detail about Scribner’s business dealings beyond that, but, while sympathetic to what the guy had had to go through, I thought, what a way to crack open that whole market! Make the guy in charge need its services!

It’s probably fair to guess that Scribner, at the time he was stricken, would not have thought it an act of love within the loss. And yet–thinking of Lene with her juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, a childhood friend with young-onset Parkinson’s, the blind, cross-country driving trips fer cryin’ out loud, so many people, so many conditions–can you think of a faster way to get more books into all those hands in a form they can use?

My sense of the man from Sacks’ admiration for him is that he rejoiced in that, too.

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.

It takes two.

Fairly big company, they goofed by half on the refund when I sent something back; I called.

Clearly their rep was bracing herself for the outrage from a customer they’d done wrong to. I wondered what or who she’d had to deal with prior to me.

So I took that as my challenge to cheer her up: no harm done, I knew they would make that adjustment no problem, and why not take it as the blessing of a chance to meet, if only by phone and only for a moment?

She found where the error had come in–Oh, this is it, as she fixed it. It was so gratifying to hear the smile that had come into her voice.

Cool, thanks!

I got off the phone marveling that I had actually enjoyed having had to be on the phone with customer service. How often does that happen?

Hudson and his new cousin Hayes in their matching jammies.

Somewhat elevated risk, seven and a half percent chance, the form said–my mother’s mother’s mother died of breast cancer when my grandmother was eight, even though that’s the only case in the extended family that I know of.

So. Had the mammogram this morning and got it over with.

Got the results this afternoon–to my surprise. Already? Cool.

And that’s that. Feels great not to have to worry about it.

Don’t put it off. It’s too much fun watching grandkids grow up.

————

Edited to add: I have been corrected by my sister. Our great aunt had breast cancer and is the only one who had breast cancer but our great grandmother had what was most likely colon cancer–somehow I’ve had it wrong for forever.

Parker and his beloved blankie. (And I hope by linking, the very kind Antonio at Malabrigo gets to see how treasured his Rios is. He told me at Stitches how rare it is to be granted a glimpse: all that yarn they send out into the world, what becomes of it?) One very happy little boy.

And every year at Stitches, there’s a vendor who does custom fitting and then creates and mails you a pair of shoes made in America, your choice color, style, leather and that are guaranteed to fit your feet at a Birkenstock-range price.

As a 6.5 EE, choice and fit are a rare and wonderful thing, and a few years ago I ordered navy sandals from them. I didn’t buy into the reflexology idea behind the funky knobby bottoms on the things (scroll down just a bit), but they were designed for you to be able to be comfortably on your feet all day.

There’s only one problem.

Ever since a speeder totaled my car, my sense of balance has been purely visual and tactile, and it’s a good thing I like Birkenstocks because they steady me with a lot of feedback as to just where and how far away the floor is and whether I’m tilting overly.

But those, not so much. I wore them  once and decided I risked breaking bones–they’re great shoes, just not for me.

Birkenstock had an outlet shop years ago in Gilroy till the company closed all their American outlets. But in the meantime, while my friends Mel and Kris were doing a show in the area, we found out later she and I bought the exact same clog in the exact same size and same color at about the same time. 37R. Twins. Cool!

Hey–I know someone who has to be on her feet all day at art shows who would fit those not-Birks…

And so, with her permission, I sent the navy pair off to where they would actually be worn.

And today she got me back for it. She found out I’d broken my favorite hot cocoa mug and asked for a picture.

I know the Kunihiros generally don’t mail their pottery; I was expecting to buy more at the show coming up at the end of the month and looking forward to seeing them.

She and her family made four castings of mugs, the letter in the box said, set them in a row, and together they picked out the one that best matched the photo.

The mental image of that just makes me very happy. The family gathered together, the row of mugs, the winner, and most of all the love.

My hot cocoa and I are going to do some serious celebrating with that mug in the morning! And I can’t wait to thank them in person!

A few pictures from the Aquarium:

Making waves from plastic ocean debris, creating good out of that which one wishes were not there.

An American Avocet (I think) in the shorebirds area.

My seahorses photos didn’t take in the darkness, which I regret–turns out most of them are on exhibit only temporarily; if you’re local enough, go see them before the month is up. Did I really see that big orange one blink? Sure seemed like it. Fish? Blink?

And it took me a few tries to figure out that to snap a photo of the tuna I had to hold the camera still long enough for them to swim into the frame I wanted at the random moment the picture snapped.

Stocking up for tomorrow’s company.

It was going to be a long walk in the sun from the car so Richard dropped me off at the front. I grabbed a cart, got just inside the doorway for a little shade, and stopped and fumbled with my purse to find my Costco card–you’re always supposed to show it to get in.

There was a lull just then in the streams of people, so I wasn’t in anyone’s way. I was having a hard time pulling it out of its spot in my wallet.

“That’s okay,” the woman stationed as doorcheck said to me, “I believe you”–just as I pulled it out. There you go!

“Have a nice day, sir,” she beamed.

Blink.

Skirt. Purse. Recently brushed longish hair pulled to the front (so as to keep it out of my seatbelt while we were in the car.) Tee and tunic.

But then I would be the person who would think one word and have a different one come out of my mouth when I’m tired and only realize it (well I usually do) the moment I heard it myself. So I guess I had it coming.

She didn’t even realize, one way or another.  This is certainly not the South, and given her accent she may never even have heard nor known the word ma’am. How many words in English are gender specific compared to other languages? (Blond and blonde…) Sir is an  honorific where I come from and clearly from where she was coming from, so, enjoy. I laughed and went on my way.

I held off on calling because I felt Emily had enough to deal with; an email would give her whatever space and time she might need.

She did email back today, telling me she is taking life twelve hours at a time. At the end of the day she sent a note to all, overwhelmed at all the “soot covered, mask wearing bodies who flocked to my rescue” Monday and then came back Tuesday to help some more. She and her family were going off to family for a few weeks, away from the ash and the loss to catch their breath. She vowed to plant new tomato plants when they got back (and I wondered, flame? Firefighters? Foam? She did not say.)

And her favorite jacket washed out clean.

And her skirt awaits.

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.

I suddenly had a horde of squirrels a few minutes ago. The birds had eaten all the safflower, and the bit of sunflower at the bottom of the feeder for the goldfinches was not only exposed, it was all that was left and the bushytails called all their buddies to celebrate their find.

Well heck I could use the exercise anyway. To teach them not to be the swaggering city rodents they were acting like, I opened the door (yeah lady? You and what dog? You can’t fool us, they’re gone now) and I chased the two that went in the same direction back to a tree.

They yelled squirrelly expletives at me all the way up once they hit the safety of higher-than-me, still running (but they didn’t come back).

That moment was worth every bit of the silliness that brought me to it:

Wait. Chittering squirrels.

Over all the years and all the previous hearing aids, I haven’t heard that sound since I was a kid. I instantly knew what it was, it seemed a perfectly ordinary thing, and then it hit me.

WOW.

Housework in its mindlessness (I do after all have houseguests coming in a week) is a way to let ideas sift through for the creative side: okay, if we add to the seed stitch in blue here and change the cables here and here to go over, not under, it will look like water flowing around the pier near that park… And don’t forget to add stitches to make up for the tightness the cabling causes.

But how much of that will be offset by the seed stitch? Okay, so add fewer than the typical third more. Right?

I sat down to actually start making all this visualizing come to pass and found myself remembering how much my son Richard in particular, uncle to the baby getting this blankie, liked to fit things into things. A hole where a plastic screw was missing on his Smurf ride-on toy? Bobby pins fit into it nicely. So did straws, twisties, our missing pens, anything he could get in there. We took up the air vent covers all over the old house before we moved and retrieved some of our missing silverware. Don’t let that kid near the dashboard again–we don’t know where he found the coins but we eventually found out what he did with them while I was buckling his new sister in first. Gave new meaning to the term baby rattle.

And I thought of Bashie’s story and the penny in her dad’s back. Yeah, I think a little one would have fun figuring out how to get a coin wedged into the curves of the cables.

Discovering. It’s all good.