Long long ago in a job far far away…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Him: No, no, that was someone else.

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

This went on for over a year.

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

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

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

So they did.

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

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

The perfect chance to expound on his lofty ideas.

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

Me: So what happened?

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

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

He needed me to drive this time. Oh okay.

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

Dunno, never looked for one.

Me neither.

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

He didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were five two-hour sessions of the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints this past weekend, all of them watched from home.

Which means I could knit.

And boy did I have something I wanted to knit. I’d spent all week sure I had a particular yarn but completely unable to find it, not in the place it was supposed to be and not in the places it wasn’t supposed to be and I just couldn’t knit anything else till I’d gotten it out of my head and made real on my needles. Which wasn’t happening.

Till Friday night. At which point the little hide-and-seeker jumped out yelling PEEKABOO! It had fallen behind. I cast on and did the first row to get the chore part of it done so that in the morning it would just be the good part.

Because.

Sunday a week ago, they’d decided at church that with new people moving in, people needed to get to know each other. So they’d set up chairs in circles of about a dozen and handed everybody a sheet of paper with a list of questions to ask each other. There were two sets.

I groaned to myself because this is the kind of thing where it’s all white noise to me. Lots of people in the room talking at once means that the weak-to-me higher pitches of the consonants are obliterated by the decibel level of the rest.

Hmm. How’s that battery…not too bad… I pulled up the app on my phone and asked Haylee next to me if she’d be willing and explained how to use it: for it to pick up what you say, it can do it in this noisy environment but you have to put it right to your face and you have to keep this button pressed while you talk.

I didn’t say, and if you let go of the button and then push it again it erases everything.

I had become a tad reluctant to ask people to use it. They don’t get it. They let go of the button. They hold the phone at the distance they want to. It stares back at them with its initial little prompt unchanged and then they think it doesn’t work.

Haylee, whom I barely know, immediately grokked the whole thing–and not only how to use the app but how the situation was for me. She not only used it to help me hear her, she used it to tell me what everybody else in the group was saying, repeating softly rightupclosetoit.

I took careful note of the colors in the pattern on her skirt. I knew I had that in Rios. I had just finished the afghan and I couldn’t wait to do this next.

Five days. But finally I found it.

So: Conference. (Which had given me a week’s grace period on this.) GO!

I cast off during the last session.

Even the ends are run in now.

Note to myself, and anyone else potentially following this later should know that I am an exceedingly loose knitter: 90 st, US 6, two half-repeats of 10-stitch fern lace, then an M1 in the single stitch dividing them, two more half-repeats, another M1 and then continue from there. Probably should have done it again and taken it from 1 to 4, but it was all a doodle anyway. Maybe next time. I just didn’t want to make it floppy-wide at the bottom, but I don’t think I needed to worry.

It sits in ever-larger folds down the front, not too tight at the bottom nor too loose at the top and I really really like how it came out. I cannot wait to surprise her with it.

She laughed and laughed when I told her I’d set a timer for heading out and the gadget had heard wrong and apparently thought I was going to a farmer’s market: it displayed a tall basket of vegetables with the kale on top in the place of honor. Go see kale! Huzzah! Music and tossing veggies at the bell!

Because Gail is moving away and found herself with a party thrown in her honor. Several men lifted her wheelchair up the two steps to the door. She doesn’t weigh much anymore.

I finally got to meet her daughter who’d knitted her that gorgeous top-down sweater with the lace-leaf yoke–and Gail was wearing it tonight. Ruth’s sweater was gorgeous, too, and when she found out I was a knitter too we were instant friends.

The resident dog, a spaniel, walked through the crowd with a gentle wag of its tail but not eager to pick out one stranger from many for it to pay attention to.

Richard brought her a plate of strawberries per her request.

Gail lost her husband decades ago (to a terrible medical mistake that should never have happened) and I found myself saying to Ruth, I remember your dad.

That’s all I needed to say. She was so grateful.

Her mom, about the age of my own, will now be in walking distance so she can keep a good eye on her care rather than from a two hour flight away.

It was so good to see them and to get a chance to say goodbye. I snapped a picture.

And looked at it. And showed it to Gail. And then offered a do-over and she laughed and laughed again because that’s Gail and said thank you and meant it and yes please let’s and leaned back towards Aly and we got her a better send-off that time.

My phone number’s going to be the same, she made sure I knew.

My email’s on the card I wrote, I told her.

A hug and then another for safekeeping and Richard and I stepped away into the night, knowing just how badly we were going to miss her.

So since I couldn’t join the Hands Off! protest for the sun exposure, I watched the Saturday sessions of the LDS Church’s semi-annual conference in real time rather than later. (Link is to Sunday’s.)

I was struck by how again and again the talks were pleas for compassion and humility, reminding us at this Easter season how the enormity of the Atonement was in Jesus’s compassion for every single one of us, more than we can ever know. “Love one another as I have loved you.” One speaker even said to ‘never let your party or’ (as he quickly added I forget what else, I was too busy being surprised) ‘be greater than your love of God’–given that they never, ever talk politics from the pulpit. I’m quite sorry it needed to be said and very glad he said it.

Afterward, I checked the reports: well done, everybody! Look at all those crowds–yay!!! Look at DC. Wow. Of course WaPo reported it: they had to. Wow. You did it. You spoke up for the least of these and for all of us–and for me, on a personal scale in my disability. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I was standing just past the top of the stairs at the entrance to the museum, chatting with the security guard. I was waiting for my friend Jean: the last time I’d seen her, we were in high school.

He told me about meeting up with old friends from high school; some you do, some, it just never seems to happen, but the friends you made are friends forever.

I very much agreed  with that last part.

Then he said he’d graduated five years ago. I smiled and told him, I’m 66.

And wondered out loud if I would recognize her. I’d given her a description of what I was wearing just in case, but that was all silliness because of course the moment we saw each other I exclaimed to the guard, There she is!

The smile on his face for us was as big as our own.

Her brother was with her and he toured the museum while we found a cozy spot and caught up on things. There was nobody else in that room but the echoes of our words and our memories.

Favorite teachers. Classmates gone now, ones still here, who had I seen, whom had she seen. Katherine: yes! Both of us got to see Katherine, one of the most fearless people I know, a USAID worker willing to go into any country any time.

Who thankfully was stateside visiting her mom when that entity got broadsided by a proverbial Cybertruck with no brakes, but anyway.

Such a good time. We took pictures. We stood in front of a sculpture in bright yellow of two letters: depending on which side you stood, they cheerfully called out, YO! Or… oy.

Needs a J, I said, as her brother raised his camera.

Someone had a lot of fun putting a dragon eye in that tree. The fact that the iris looks like a black beetle is the perfect extra Halloweeny touch to it.

Wrote to my city council members today. Wrote my congressman. Weighed the morality of being part of the April 5 peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations vs doing right by my family and not risking a flare by being out in the sun to hold up one of those placards. The physical reality of lupus always wins and I always stay inside and it’s so deeply frustrating–but it’s also how I made it to thirty-five years since diagnosis.

But by golly I can drive past slowly honking my horn and waving and cheering in solidarity.

Dunno if you saw the guy who tried pulling a stun gun on an older woman at a demonstration in front of the Berkeley Tesla dealership last week. It is fair to say that that UC Berkeley medical school professor was not having it. Peaceful, peaceful, guys! but yeah, she was not going to let him do that to anybody else.

Deep breath. And a thank you to the cops who came to serve and protect peacefully and they did.

Casting off in purl stitch from a wrong-side row to end a seed stitch border gives it such a polished finish. Love it.

Meantime.

A fun bit of amateur theater at church this evening. For me, a four year old stole the show: all dressed up as a mouse, she had a tail. A long tail. A tail she could twirl. A tail she could wrap around her waist in a hug. And again. A tail she could flip up and down, lasso or yo-yo, all the things, but she did, she had a magical tail and it would soon be all over and she was not going to miss one moment of it.

She was adorable.

We needed a grocery stop on the way home. Richard said he’d sit in the car and read his book while I ran into Trader Joe’s; I invited him to join me, but something felt cheerfully like he had the right idea.

When I came back to the car, the first words out of his mouth were, Well that was weird.

What was weird.

A guy knocked on the window. He had a little kid, and said the younger one had fallen asleep in the car and he didn’t want to wake him up and if he gave Richard his phone number so he could call immediately if there was any problem whatsoever, could he leave Richard keeping an eye on his little one while he ran in real quick?

And you let him?! (I said as my brain jerked back decades before to a local baby who had been snatched when a parent ran in a store ‘for just a moment.’)

He, on the other hand, had had the immediate reaction that I had to think my way past my knee-jerkiness to: he remembered what it was like and how hard it was at that stage of parenthood. He had a clear line of sight to the kiddo. It was a compliment to be taken for the kind grandpa that he is and that the guy had instinctively trusted him to be. He lived up to that trust by not taking his eyes off the kid till the dad got back. Three, four minutes at most, he told me, he was fast.

I said, That WAS fast–they’re in the middle of rearranging the store right now like they occasionally do and everything’s moved out of place. It took me forever to find anything that wasn’t in the dairy case. But I bet his wife wouldn’t be thrilled if she knew, though.

Maybe.

Did he thank you when he came back out? (He was already gone by the time I did.)

Oh yes. Richard added that he’d seen it as a chance to make the world a little better place for one overwhelmed dad in this one place at this one time, to be a neighbor. And who wouldn’t want that?

(I’ll put the P.S. up here: In falcon news, the female was sound asleep brooding their four eggs when her mate decided he wanted some nighttime duty too and woke her up to kick her off. This video is for every one of us who is not naturally cheerful at being unexpectedly woken up in the middle of the night. She was mad!)

—

Weird chunks of raised itchy scalp. Memories of a hairdresser from when I was pregnant with my second and long before I’d ever heard of lupus feeling those dried lumps in her hands and asking me gingerly, Did you know you have bald spots?

I had the baby, the hair grew back in, and it was all a weird one-time thing.

Till this year. I knew this time not to scratch at it because it would just pull any hair out with it and after the basal cell surgery took a round inch-plus off the top there awhile ago, let’s hang onto what we’ve got. Gradually it settled down. Last week there was the last of one lump, today I didn’t really feel anything up there. But it was my six-month dermatology check anyway, so I mentioned it.

When did it start?

Around the time of Trump’s inauguration.

She guffawed.

But it was true, and at some point I’d wondered if my angst over the destruction of the rule of law was manifesting itself on top of my head after it spread from one spot to three when the political news was particularly grievous.

Naming a reason for it–or just random chance, or maybe doing better at staying out of the sun–something made it calm down and go away, which is wonderful. May it stay away another 40 years.

Best way to cure something is to make an appointment to get it seen.

The front page of the San Jose Mercury News yesterday, and today at the Washington Post–alright, it was time. 23&Me has filed for bankruptcy. Your genetics, the questionnaires you’ve answered, your lineage, your relatives, all your personal data and by some extension theirs through you could be put up for sale to anyone with any agenda.

The Merc buried the lede, which should have come first instead of as a postscript:

—

“On the website, customers can also direct the company to destroy stored saliva samples and DNA, as well as revoke permission for their genetic data to be used for research.”

—

I imagine it probably helps a whole lot to do that before you go in there and delete your account first like I did. For which the instructions from the Merc are:

—

“To delete their 23andMe account and personal information, customers can follow these steps:

— Log in to their 23andMe account on the company’s website.
— Navigate to the “settings” section of their profile.
— Scroll down to the “23andMe data” section at the bottom of the page.
— Click “view” next to “23andMe data.”
— Download their data.
— Scroll to the “delete data” section.
— Click “permanently delete data.”
— Confirm their request — an email from 23andMe will follow, containing a link to finalize the deletion.”

—

That it did.

Would you want the people currently raiding Medicare and Social Security data to get ahold of this? This was the only such company that cared about privacy and data protection and now they’re not going to be able to.

The first talk at church today was by a young man whose American family had lived in Eastern Europe for part of his childhood.

He was talking about the life of Jesus.

How his parents had fled their country under the violence of an edict to kill all baby boys under the age of two. How, when that leader died, they had at last returned home to their own country.

But how much did he ever really feel it was, and how much did the people there ever regard him as theirs, and as the speaker said that I suddenly saw how he could see that question in a way the rest of us would not have. Then he asked: Wouldn’t that have made it easier for him to willingly thwart oppressive leaders himself.

I had never thought of that.

The second speaker, someone I’ve known for years, kind of interrupted herself to make an aside re something that had been weighing heavily on her: how people–good people–people she’d loved and known and respected–had come to show a, a, (she searched for words, not wanting to tear down and knowing that people only truly change when they feel loved, not dissed) a… mean streak… that was so unexpected.

She said it near tears with so much love for them, in pain and wanting better for them, that they could not have denied the gift her words were offering them. There was a way out from that.

She is a lawyer and loves the rule of law and holding all people equal before God and man.

There were a very few in that audience who needed to hear that message and many more who were intensely relieved to hear Love Thy Neighbor given voice and attention. Intention. Towards all.

Because if we don’t have that what is left to us? But we do have it, we do, and we must.

I’m heading out with Nina in the morning to play first day of the Bay Area Yarn Crawl. (Had I ever been to this LYS in Morgan Hill? No. This other one in San Carlos? Never heard of it somehow. Well then we will discover them.)

But first I wound the skein of green Manos Silk Blend that she brought me back from Uruguay last month as, y’know, kind of a yarn vaccine–and because I owe it to her to have it ready to cast on. Pretty stuff.

But I promise you we will succumb to the wool fumes just the same.

I took photos of two dye lot numbers to see if I can match them–you know how doubtful that is, but it has happened before and hey, you never know.

As I sit here remembering back in the days of random phone calls from investor types dialing into our area code and not having the least clue that it was in a time zone three hours off from theirs. …The email I’d sent off to a LYS, including my number. To make it easier for them? To make the inquiry feel more legitimate a reason for them to spend their time looking at all those little yarn tags? I can only guess now.

And my husband waking groggily up at dark o’clock, shoving the phone across that I had not in my sleep heard ringing, and going, “It’s your boiler-room yarn pushers in New York City. They want you to know they don’t have your dye lot.”

It’s been a running joke here ever since.

They were calling before opening the store in order to catch me before I might head off to work. It was very kind of them. They could simply have ignored me, but they were trying to be as helpful as they could as fast as they could and get that info to me so I would know to keep trying.

So let me see what I can do tomorrow.

If I don’t find it, maybe they have more of that Rios in New York City.

They haven’t had one in a long time that I can think of but there was a craft night at church tonight: bring whatever and get together.

I asked the organizer to text me the night of because I wanted to go but I knew I would forget. Which I did. And she did. I thanked her. I wore a mask: I knew she’d just had her last cancer treatment.

A few card tables were pulled out for watercoloring on. Two people were crocheting large afghans. I had my fish. One woman was sewing some appliqué, the project mostly folded up so you couldn’t really see anything but the flower at hand.

I asked to see it.

The whole thing laid out was revelatory–it was a stunning work of art.

She’d had no idea I knit. I know, right?

One friend asked me to spread my afghan out so she could see the whole thing. She knew me enough to say, And you just knit it, right, no pattern? Art is like that: it tells you where it wants to go.

It’s the boss of us, I affirmed. She grinned.

The things we take for granted about ourselves that others have no way to know. Seeing each other’s creativity was what the evening was all about, and a good time was had by all.

Even if I forgot to bring my turtle chart and had to put that off for several more rows.

Although, she would have heard mine, come to think of it.

So.

Dental follow-up appointment. They called yesterday to reschedule me. Got there early because parking’s a bear. Brought just a hat project in a ziploc, since it looked like it would start raining again any second.

I sat there and sat there and sat there. I could hear the folks at work in the adjoining rooms but no one was manning the check-in and nobody had any clue I was there.

After half an hour, another patient came in.

She was elderly. She looked smashing. Her hair had been done, her dress perfect, her makeup demanded you notice her eyes.

Those warm and smiling eyes. And an accent I couldn’t quite place other than to think she’d been here a long time now.

She exclaimed over my very simple turquoise stockinette stitch beanie that had the bottom folded up and the decreasing happening at the top of my needles and told me how pretty it was.

(I thought, Honey, I can brag on a better one than that), and pulled out my phone and showed the latest.

Her mouth hung open in surprise at that afghan. She embiggened the details for a better look, chasing the screen around with her finger.

Then she started to tell me she could knit, even if not a lot and that she doesn’t anymore. “We all could; we were invaded,” as if that should tell me everything.

I was suddenly glad I was wearing a gerdan, but she didn’t mention it so who knows. Either way, Eastern Europe was my guess.

But just then someone appeared who worked there but whom I’d never seen before nor she me. Her own accent was thick and clearly of Slavic origin. She wanted to know who I was and why I was there? Caught herself and backtracked a bit and asked if I had an appointment? But I wasn’t on the books…

She took my name to doublecheck that. Nope–I was off by a week.

I wondered what her experiences had been, too.

I explained that I’m pretty deaf and that I’d handed the phone to my husband when they’d called to make the appointment and I was sorry we’d gotten it wrong. She said that was her on the phone,  now realizing who I was, and she apologized–to which I said No, no, I got to meet you (turning to the woman I’d been talking to) because of this–thank you!

I went home chuckling over the effort life had gone to to get me to finally start to finish that silly hat (typing that knowing it still needs nine more ever-smaller rows. If you’re going to be so close you might as well be so much closer.)

Richard told me a few minutes later, They said today!

Meant to be, then, I told him.

My only regret is that I never got to ask that woman about the country she’d come from and how she’d managed to make it here. All those stories she’d lived through and how she’d come out of it a warm, loving person: I wanted to hear them!

Me, walking almost in the door from Trader Joe’s: I found it!!

Him, meeting me at the door to open it for me (but that’s not where I was heading yet.) You found it!

Last Monday I did some grocery shopping. Wednesday something in the car seemed…off. I remembered a news story some years back of someone who bought a new car, had some raw chicken roll under a seat, didn’t use the car for two weeks and when they found it their insurance company paid for all kinds of remedies before giving up and totaling out the car. Brand new. Replaced. For a chicken.

Thursday I opened the hood and cleared out all kinds of stray leaves, trying to find just where this stupid dead mouse or whatever it was was. Friday I searched the inside of the car yet again. Saturday I gave my friend who’s blind in one eye–oh wait, I thought I wrote about that here, guess I didn’t–a ride home but first apologized that the car had this, uh, problem, and we’d been trying, and I was so sorry.

Well if you don’t find it come back to me and I’ll find it for you guys! he promised.

Sunday parking the car at church we hoped nobody could smell it from outside the car.

Monday we didn’t go anywhere probably because we really didn’t want to. We promised ourselves we would finally find it once the sun got low enough for me to help in the search again. We forgot. And then you don’t go looking for decaying squishy things in the dark, I mean…

He never was sure it smelled mousy, though. I wasn’t either but it was definitely dead.

The next thing I said to him this evening at that doorway was, Remember that bag of greens in cream and garlic sauce that fell out of the freezer in the garage and didn’t get found for two days?

Yeah?

I bought another to replace it so we could finally try that stuff once, at least. I only discovered where it landed because I had a bag break just now and the trajectories led me to this–where I know I looked again and again and again. But there it was. I found it!

Clearly we are not meant to touch that dish, he said as I held it at arm’s length heading towards the garbage bin past the gate, exit, stage right.

He didn’t have to add, So please don’t ever buy it again.

…I went to go title this “At least it didn’t explode” and suddenly…

I told Richard, “As far as I know”…

And put on a jacket, was glad to see it’s not raining yet, and opened the car just to be sure.

It is much, much, much, much better.