So here’s what I know now: Hayes went 15 minutes without breathing when he was born. I knew he’d been given transfusions and oxygen.

They did take him off the cooling blanket Thursday and gradually warmed him up, so the fact that the MRI on Saturday was normal was everything they could have hoped for in terms of worrying about brain damage–it’s a miracle. It’s just a miracle.

He will stay in the hospital a number of days yet to establish his breathing as the effects of the morphine on a newborn’s metabolism gradually wear off.

I cannot tell you how grateful I am for all the prayers and positive energy sent his way. I know so many others in his situation don’t get to have a happy outcome. It looks like we sure do. Not home yet, but…

I so cannot wait to see my grandsons playing with their new cousin. To life!

I almost deleted most of yesterday’s post. I came thisclose. I didn’t want to make the yarn anybody else’s problem nor even to remotely seem like I might think it should be.

I have very generous friends. Thank you, Kathy, thank you, Rachel, and everybody else who got beaten to the punch. I offered Rachel to swap her some silk for her blue Cascade, sure that that basil green in my stash would be just the color on her, or maybe the brick red, and she half-waved me off telling me she knew I needed to give back but it certainly wasn’t necessary.

Yeah well.

So we’re still working out schedules to get together.

Meantime, Hayes’ MRI results came back: absolutely. Normal. (Standing on a chair and cheering  to the skies!)

See? Just the threat of being knitted for helped him get better! (I’m still waiting to hear when he’s off the cooling bed, but hey. We’ll take every good step along the way.)

Oh, and the photo? Someone brought this flower arrangement to church last week. One young man got up to give his talk and as he started, he couldn’t help but turn back to it and he marveled to his audience, wanting to share his close-up view, There are *fish* in that vase!

Okay, I’m slow–it wasn’t till I typed that just now, a week later, that I realized, oh, wait, it IS a Christian church, and as a visual poem that’s pretty cool.

The best part was the little children who came up after the meeting to see the fish swimming quietly under the flowers where you would never expect to see such a thing.

I learned something tonight.

I finally got to go to Purlescence‘s knit night, the second time since May due to germs and travel and other friends’ schedules. I walked  in and felt like, oh, I’m home!

I had heard about the Halos of Hope program to knit chemo caps for cancer patients (finally googled it just now; I recognize the logo, that’s the place); those running it donate all their time so that there is zero overhead involved, only the mailing of the caps. They sell patterns for them to try to meet those mailing expenses themselves as much as they can. Benjamin Levisay had mentioned it on Facebook.

But I’d thought, well that’s nice but why don’t I just knit one and drop it off at the clinic’s hematology department next time I go in and save them the postage? They do actually have a collection table for such and I’ve thought for awhile that I should.

So I asked Nathania. I knew Purlescence had gone in in a big way, with a 24-hour Halos of Hope knitathon last weekend. (I missed it. Richard had a bad 24-hour bug and I sure didn’t want to contribute that to the gathering.) Two hundred and ten hats!

And that’s when I learned that Halos is aimed at those in medically underserved communities and where yarn money is hard to come by; here, there are a lot of knitters and crocheters, there’s a lot of people who are financially quite comfortable and it’s not difficult for the needs to be met: something beautiful, something artistic, something made with love and talent and skill and compassion and a good-deed outlet for one’s leisure time.

I mentioned I had an online friend who has to drive two hours to get to the nearest doctor, and she nodded, Exactly.

And then she told me of a woman here who was housebound and limited in her old age–but she could knit. She had talked to Nathania, wanting to contribute, and told her she could afford to knit maybe one or two a month; Nathania and the others at the shop responded with, Let us help you out with that. And so they gave her a large donation of yarn, and at the knitathon she got a ride over there and was just going to…drop them off in the corner and, y’know, slip back out the door…

No no, come, let everybody see what you did! And so her fifty-four hats got put in the center of the group for everyone to see and the woman got the applause and cheers that she wasn’t looking for but so much deserved.

She had earned her halo.

I remember how hesitant my mother-in-law was to ask me to knit her a chemo cap, and how deeply gratifying it was to be able to say, Of course I will!

And then another and another, let’s see, Mom’s favorite colors, and another and another, I tried to make her a full wardrobe of chemo caps.

Tonight made me stop and envision what it must be like to have–none. Wow. Soft yarn, small purse project, coming up.

And now the other video taken yesterday: Hudson at three months one week. (That soft new-baby hair, it’s almost all gone.)

We stumbled across a newsletter from Stanford this evening that we hadn’t thrown away because it had an article Richard had wanted to read on a new-improved type of cataract surgery.

We did a doubletake when he happened to pick it up: this meant we still had, now that we wanted it, the article neither of us had noticed on a treatment they’d pioneered for full-term babies born with oxygen deprivation, including their trial over a dozen years ago of a cooling process to keep swelling in the brain and seizures from setting in during the most dangerous early period, to calm down metabolic processes that would do damage; it is now the accepted standard.

And that’s what they’re doing with my daughter-in-law’s sister’s Baby P. But the cold is painful for him so he’s been on a morphine drip. Still, he’s active despite the morphine and he got through the first 24 hours without a seizure and that is very good. And we are very, very grateful for all the prayers and the Thinking Good Thoughts and the support. Thank you all.

Normally, our son explained, when the cord is wrapped around the neck and causing problems, the heart rate drops during delivery and they’re right on it. In Baby P’s case, everything appeared normal, heartbeat peachy fine, until he was out: but not only was the cord wrapped, it was kinked, and there was no way to know how long it had been affecting him. He stopped breathing two minutes after he was born and he had a hole in his lungs.

He was supposed to have the breathing tube removed today and that hole is supposed to have healed by now, as we wait on updates; babies are amazing little troopers.

He will be in the NICU for a number of days being monitored and the next big risk is when they let him warm up again. But his sisters have been allowed to come in and meet their new brother and welcome him into their family.

And a year from now he’ll be giggling with and bugging Hudson by grabbing him to try to pull up and walk just like Hudson, just like Parker’s cousin four months younger did with him two years ago.

Hang in there, little buddy.

Years ago, someone from my then-knitting group (which would gradually dissolve as people moved away), a staff member at Packard Children’s Hospital, was diagnosed with cancer. It was when they started her chemo that they found she had an autoimmune liver disease and could not take the treatments.

Lenore faded pretty quickly.

Near the end, she offered our group her yarn, having no family of her own to pass it down to, and I looked her in the eyes in a quiet moment and promised her I would make something beautiful from it to remember her by; she was grateful, with tears.

And then I was not in town, I don’t remember why, for the yarn get-together: people chose, and there was a bit saved for me for when I got back.

None of which, to be honest, had the remotest appeal. Just, none. I wanted it to but it adamantly refused to comply.

And I felt guilty about that. I had promised. It had meant so much to her.

I was cleaning out some old stuff today and came across a stitch sampler that had been among those itchy scratchy hideous s0-not-my-color yarns. It was knitted very tightly, like a good solid old Irish sweater. Way too short to be a scarf, way too funky shaped to be, say, a hotpad, way too much work to just toss aside; she’d put a lot of time into it when time had been the one thing she had had so little of left.

This time I put it around my neck and imagined it sewn shut at the ends as a small cowl.

You’d want a thick turtleneck under it to protect from the itch, but, yes! At last. She herself had made the pretty thing to remember her by.

And I do.

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.)

You’ve seen the first picture, right? What you can’t see on that first one is a whole bunch of other loops besides the ones that show there, pulled way, way out.

Sometimes when you have to go to the blankie hospital, you have to get stitches.

I spent several hours again on the thing today, using Friday as my inner absolute, past-due deadline.

All worked back in now. Kitchenered across the break.

I kept laying it out on that rocking chair, done at long last–and finding two more places where Parker had worked more loops loose. Fixed those, laid it out–two more. Flip it over–oh wait. And there’s this whole pattern-repeat area where he’d pulled row after row in a row, open wide and say ahhh…

Five o’clock was running in my direction fast and I so wanted to be able to tell them that Parker’s blankie was finally on its way back home.

Four thirty-five I pulled back out of the parking lot.  Tuesday they get to open the door and the box will be there.

My brother and his daughters are coming in two weeks. They are driving from Colorado. We shall tour the Aquarium with them. We can’t wait!

And it dawned on us tonight that that means the yarn room–you know, the one with all the projects for book one and the successes and rejects and hmm maybe I should improve on this ones let me think about its for my long-delayed second book idea, plus the yarns to go with, all of it has to be emptied and put somewhere else–and not in the other two bedrooms they’ll be staying in.

Oh goodness.

Not to mention the fact that a friend was desperate to get rid of her late grandmother’s hospital bed as she closed down her house for selling, and it happened to be between when a doctor sat me down and explained to me just what that scan showed, trying to prepare me for the news, and when the biopsies came back–and they were negative. By that time we’d already helped the friend out and taken the thing off her hands on the grounds that it looked like I was going to need such a thing.

And having not gotten rid of the old twin bed in the yarn room yet, we simply put it upside down on top, mechanics-side up. Where else you gonna put it?

I wondered if we should pass it along now that we didn’t need it and my husband thought bluntly that given the last ten years… Yeah, might as well keep it so we have it when we need it.

Or not. We could figure it out later, there was no hurry.

But in two weeks…

Which is why I was sorting socks. Makes sense, right?

(Edited to add: there is no basement. There is no attic. Not in this California Eichler.)

It had been awhile since a good Trader Joe’s run, and it was time to stock up on the honey mints that I reward myself for treadmill time with, bags of frozen fruit for making crisps with, organic sugar too, dark chocolate salted caramel peanut butter truffles. And ginger cookies, one of the few worth buying store-boughts over, don’t forget the ginger cookies.

No we won’t eat them all at once. I promise.

I got in the checkout line of a middle-aged clerk whose cheerful face I have enjoyed for a number of years.  She was being given a hug by a quite young fellow employee about to leave–the job, the area, her friends,  on to her new life, and I waited, not wanting to interrupt nor put any pressure on them.

Ah my. Back to work now. And the older woman turned to me, emotions close to the surface, and asked, It’s been awhile. How are you?

I’m fine, I smiled, and you?

Good, thanks–but no really: how’s your health? You doing okay?

I so was not expecting that. But instead of feeling intrusive, it felt like a tap on the shoulder reminding me how good I have it now, and I really meant it when I said thank you. To reassure her, I gestured towards the two bags she’d just filled and told her, “When life is good, you buy the fun foods,” and she laughed in relief–and at the truth in the thought.

———

And while I was typing that, a small finch hit the window and was laying on its back a few feet away from me–I thought at first dead, but no: its tail quivered.

A towhee, a gentle, bigger bird, reminded me in that moment of that clerk as it eyed me quickly to be on the safe side and then hopped down straightway from the box and it went directly to the finch’s side and sang–encouragement, to my surprise. It was not a bird that posed any danger to the injured one, but I did not expect it to matter to it that the little one was hurt. Clearly it did. Get up, get up, the hawk might see you.

Then the towhee flew away.

The finch pulled herself to upright and watched me for awhile. When I blinked, she blinked back. I kept my eyes shut longer to try to encourage her to rest. She did.

Good. Not blinded by the impact, then–that’s the biggest worry.

And when she was ready, sooner than I expected, she too flew (I saw that wing tucked partly across her earlier, I’d have thought it was broken, but no) and was off and away and okay.

There was a new neighborhood being built just outside the then-future DC Beltway, with California-style houses with panels of glass set floor-t0-a break about waist-high-to-ceiling, looking out on the woods; it was near a ten-mile-long park set aside as a watershed preserve with Cabin John Creek running through it. Frank Lloyd Wright had built his youngest son a house to the left and down around the corner. You’ve seen Calvin and Hobbes on their sled out in the wilds? Yes.

There was a crowded neighborhood near the DC line of “war boxes,” my mom called them, small starter homes for returning GIs that large families quickly outgrew. My folks had four kids in one bedroom there.

And so three families picked up together when I was three and moved to the quiet new neighborhood where there were miles of trails along the creek to explore that had been built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression, there were children to play with, parents who knew each other and looked after each others’ kids and you knew you couldn’t get away with anything–it was a great place to grow up.

One of those families was Wendy’s, and so I’ve known them all my life. Their house was the second door to the upper right of this photo.

She and her husband decided to come from across the country to take a tour of Napa’s wine country and it turns out they were flying in and out of San Francisco airport. He had an old college roommate in the Bay Area who wanted to see him, and I meantime offered to drive up to the airport to try to see them for, oh, maybe ten minutes while they were waiting to go through security or something but only if it would work out okay for them.

They had a better idea than that.

They were meeting the old roommate for dinner in Burlingame at 5:00, and Richard and I drove up to see them at 4:00. To show off our husbands to each other. To reconnect.

We all ended up walking a half block from where we’d met up to a place Richard and I knew would be a lot quieter: and so there we were, back in Copenhagen Bakery, buying those Chef’s Surprises again. (And now we know why they’re called that: the filling is almond and–whatever. Not blueberry this time; his was apricot, mine egg custard.)

We talked. We laughed. We all showed off pictures of our kids, our two grandsons (they’re not there yet), Wendy’s sisters and kids and her parents, and it just now hits me writing this that I forgot to show her pictures of my folks–the point being that it is amazing how, 36 years after I probably last saw her and childhood long left behind, I could have picked any one of them out of any crowd anywhere. It was so cool.

Part of me, part of you, always will be. So glad it’s so true.

She wondered, Do you remember running through our storm door?

Yes, I thought it was ajar and I just went to go push it the rest of the way open to tell Marcy who lived across the street to stop bugging us while you were trying to teach me a new game. I had just enough time to think I didn’t know that glass bends… (And then I stuck out my arm across the table.) Wendy saw the scars, proof of her memory of the story, and exclaimed.

I added, I always tell Californians it was a window (which it was, but) because they have no idea what storm doors are. (Flimsy screen-type doors, only with glass instead of metal mesh, to give you one more line of defense against the latest thunderstorm or hurricane.)

How long had I had lupus?

Diagnosed 23 years, why?

Her sister they think might have…

I’m so sorry. While being glad I was proving that life can go on, d* the statistics, full speed ahead!

Wendy had been beating some statistics of her own this past year and we knew how good we had it that we were able to get together. It was so good to see her. So good to see what a good husband she has, and such beautiful kids!

The college roommate and his family walked past the windows of the bakery, glanced in, saw us and the guy’s face totally lit up and then his kids’ did–just like ours had (and had stayed that way, and I imagine theirs did too). Peter ran to go throw his arms around them, Wendy staying for just one last hug and laugh of our own first.

I tell you. I could live off the joy of this day for a long time to come. Thank you thank you thank you, Wendy and Peter. Blessings on you and yours forever.

—

Edited to add–p.s. You guys are heroes all over again. I told them about the Caremark debacle in Jan ’09 and how you guys called, emailed, stormed the gates en masse, and in a life-and-death situation made that company pay attention and get me my Humira after all, after their employee had told me on the phone that they weren’t sure they wanted the liability of providing me with such a dangerous (read: newly approved very expensive biologic) drug and had refused to send it. Go you guys!

The Washington Post ran an obituary on my friend Steve.

I did not know that muscle spasms from his disease had kept him from mastering Braille. One more thing for him. But I love how his can-do personality comes out in their article.

Richard and I went out to dinner tonight at Flea Street Cafe, as we try to on this day every year, and at one point a little boy showed up at my elbow. He had carefully rehearsed (or been rehearsed with) his word-by-hesitant-word speech.

“Thank  you  ve ry  much  for  the  gift” (and he couldn’t resist adding) “mayIkeepit?”

“Sure,” I smiled, “happy birthday!” And to his little brother too.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen small children at the very proper Flea Street before, and when the family had come in I’d glanced around to gauge the reactions and had seen fleeting glances of oh, this isn’t… But only briefly. So I imagine the other diners were parents too, knowing full well that children instantly know the emotional score in the room. Besides, they were adorable.

They were offered seats at the larger table right behind me. And all was well.

But at one point the–grandpa?–took the boys outside to run off a little steam while they were waiting for their order. Makes sense. I said quietly to Richard, who was facing them, If they need them, let me know. He knew exactly what I meant.

They were cheerful when they came back in, but at one point it seemed to me a good time to, so I turned and asked the mom if they might like a bit of distraction?

They were thrilled with the fingerpuppets. There was an exclamation of “OH!” from the mom as she looked a little more closely and I imagine saw that they were handknit. The little boys sounded so cute, and we went back to our fine celebration of the day.

We had had rather early reservations, and so we finished before they, and as we turned to go, the three adults at their table caught our eyes and thanked us, with feeling.

Hey, we remembered the days…

My one regret though is that I didn’t stop and make a point of thanking the little boys for being so delightful–I confess I was being a little too mindful of the adults waiting by the front door for our table and I missed the moment.

I like to picture two little fingerpuppeted hands waving hi over their dessert at whoever came next.

Happy Anniversary, Honey. Thank you!

It seemed a good day for putting things in order. Going through and setting aside with an eye towards unknown others stuff that was no longer needed, claiming anew that which made me smile to see it: hey, I could use this yarn to make…for….

We were eighteen, serving on a Mormon youth conference steering committee, the advisor assigned to me the woman who would later be my mother-in-law.

The adults had asked that the program have a little more to say than just this this and this here here and there.

I was asked to read the proffered piece aloud.

“Who *wrote* that?” Steve, deeply moved, asked the group at the large table.

That moment was the highest compliment I could ever have asked for and the first moment where I knew I might actually have a chance at becoming a writer. If Steve thought it was that good…

There’s a small handful of us out there who grew up together, who knew each other from our babyhoods, always there in the background, with other good friends too moving in before we all moved on (or not) from our corner of the Maryland suburbs but just us few who knew each other that long. Being members of the same church brought our families together from whatever our circumstances and equalized any outside differences inside, in our case, Chevy Chase chapel.

I married one of them.

I signed into Facebook this afternoon and immediately felt the breath knocked out of me. It was the first post I saw and for quite awhile the only one I wanted to see and I signed right back out while I tried to take it in.

Steve was gone.

I would never get to see him again.

Richard would never get to see him again.

At some primal level I still cannot understand how that could be. Steve’s *dad* and Richard’s dad were babies together and they’re still here!

Steve made my later lupus and Crohn’s combo a walk in the park. He started having some trouble with his hearing in high school, and at one point back then I tried to talk to him about it; my hearing loss had been diagnosed a couple of years earlier, progressive at the time, and I knew what a blow it could be. Neither of us knew then why it was happening to us.

But he didn’t want to talk about it. Too soon.

Mine later was found to be an allergy to aspirin, plain old garden-variety aspirin, a reaction from having climbed into the medicine cabinet as a toddler and overdosing on the candy-tasting baby pills.

His, not so much, and his sight began to have problems too.

But he graduated from college and then from an MBA program, married one of the nicest people I have ever met, and carried on as his sight and hearing both continued to slowly, inexorably dim.

My family and I were back home maybe ten years ago. I knew he had only the slightest peripheral vision and hearing left. It was summertime, traveling time, but he didn’t know we were coming and had no reason to expect me to be there from the other side of the country–and yet, when we came into church and I said hello to him, his face turned to wonderment and then mine did too as he asked, almost afraid to for half-disbelief half-joy, “Alison?!”

How he knew I did not know. But I knew it had to have meant a great deal to him to have been able to figure out that I was there, I really was, and so that moment meant all the more to me too. I had been wondering how to let him know, but there you go. He knew.

And I have hoped for another such moment ever since. Steve would know me. There was the pure certainty of a child’s trust in the thought, he always does. Steve would know. And he would be glad.

My parents moved away, then Richard’s parents moved away, and I no longer had quite reason enough to fly home to visit that ward.  We did seriously consider staying through the weekend when we were in Baltimore a few weeks ago just so we could do exactly that, but logistically, given the time Richard was already taking off from work and the extra thousand on the plane tickets it would have taken, we just couldn’t make it happen.

I so wish.

I’ve wondered from time to time over the years how long Steve would have to live with so much taken away from him. At the same time, so much was given to him: a good wife, good children, and the family financial resources to deal with whatever help they might ever need, and, best of all, a strong faith and a cheerful disposition that saw him and her both through so much.

The disease that had taken so much of his body finally claimed the rest today. Fifty-four years. It was enough. Our friend Brad let us know he got to go home.

Rest in great peace, old friend. And thank you for teaching me a little of what you knew: that there is more joy to be found than can ever be taken away from a grateful heart.

Several years ago, I was at the Copenhagen Bakery and Cafe in Burlingame and in their display case was something that said, if I remember right, Baker’s Surprise. Or else Chef’s Surprise? They looked good, so, I bought some–and at first bite instantly wished I’d bought many, many more and that the place was much closer to where I live. Picture a crunchy amaretto cookie filled with sweet almond paste done just so, perfection in a confection.

Somehow the memory of them caught my attention the last couple of days: to the point of emailing the bakery, describing the things, and asking if they still made those? It would be worth the trip…

I haven’t heard back so far but I wasn’t really expecting to. Just encouraging them and hoping. If only. Maybe actually drive up there some day this coming week, if they answered? Somehow I just really wanted to go there.

Richard and I were out looking at flooring store after flooring store today, trying to decide this option vs that, and it was getting dinnertime-ish. We bought smoothies to tide us over and to get a chance to sit down a moment.

I mentioned that bakery and those cookies, and somehow on a whim he chimed in, Sure, let’s go!

It was about 35 minutes up the freeway.

The street it was on was closed and torn up. At least some walking in the late sun would be involved.  We shrugged our shoulders and carried on. The parking lot was full? Someone pulled out just at the right time, there you go.

Now for the backstory that we didn’t know was going to have anything to do with this: Katie, about our age, has been a teacher and mentor to some of the teenage girls at church for some time now, and one of them was being raised by her great-grandmother. Who recently had had to move to–where, I have no idea. But it’s hard to graduate from high school and have to have a new place to come home to, hard to have your mom figure aging and more than anyone else’s that you know, lots of changes flying at the kid all at once.

Katie had kept tabs on her, and it turns out she’d invited Helen to dinner tonight. She knew the best bakery in the Bay Area and it had a great cafe, too.

They were in disbelief at seeing us walk past the windows. Katie leaped up to say hi, and there we were coming into the bakery part at the next door down. There was this, What are YOU doing here! moment of surprised delight all around.

We bought our pastries–the guy grinned and proudly pointed out the amaretto/almond paste pastries when I asked, blueberries in them too now, and wow, they were good, he was right–and we went over to their table.

Helen! We were so glad to see her. Katie, too, but Helen was the biggest surprise. *So* very glad, how ARE you?!

And how often do teenagers get to see that the adults they know feel that strongly about them? That they are loved, that they matter, that it doesn’t matter that they’re not family. To see that age has  nothing to do with degree of friendship–that she was absolutely as important to us as Katie. Go Helen!

To Copenhagen: thank you beyond words, and please keep up the good work. We will be back.

Got my semi-annual Prolia shot, got the usual instructions to please wait 20 minutes to make sure there’s no reaction to the med. Did I want to wait here in the exam room or out there?

Oh hey, out there. And I have a whole lot of yarn: waiting, not a problem.

While I sat in the reception area, someone else pulled out her knitting, too, a soft, fuzzy and I’d guess handpainted yarn. Kid mohair most likely, quite pretty.  We talked shop a moment.

She asked about my project, and I described the top-down circular shawl it was going to be when it grew up, not a closed circle but (and I drew it in the air with my hands. A bagel with a slice taken out.)

She asked, very much wishing, “Oh. Where do you *find* patterns like that?”

(Bwahaahaa.) “My book,” I grinned, wishing I had a copy with me, but today just hadn’t been a day for carrying extra weight on that shoulder. (Oh look, Amazon’s not asking hundreds for a copy today. It bounces around now that it’s out of print.)

That led to, “Purlescence? Where’s that?”

“Well, across the street from where the Sunnyvale Trader Joe’s used to be, in the same strip mall as McWhorter’s used to be, and the Lace Museum used to be at the other end.”

She laughed.

She’ll find it.

(An aside: I’m healing far faster than I have any right to expect from yesterday’s backflip. Thank you for your kind words, everybody.)