I made it through the first meeting of church today. I had a plan.

It didn’t quite go that way.

I recently gave someone new there a baby alpaca lace scarf as a welcome; in conversation, I found out she had two daughters.

I asked a mutual acquaintance, since I’d never laid eyes on the kids, and he told me the teenager likes dark colors, the younger one, rainbow. Bright.

Sharp eye for a guy, I thought; I was impressed.

So the last pink sparkly cashmere hat was to go to the nine-year-old. As for her sister, I knew just the thing.

But this morning as I went to pull that waiting blue scarf for the teen out of its ziploc, something wouldn’t let me. It just wasn’t it. But I…! Nope.  Just wasn’t.

Huh. Okay, I’ve learned not to argue with that feeling, even if I wish it would explain itself. But then, what then?

Going through ziplocs, I found a baby alpaca lace scarf I couldn’t quite place. But it instantly felt right. Curious. I took it out, examining the pattern and the soft hand of it. Yes. Okay, then, and I put it with the hat and took them to church, touching both of them as little as possible and trying not to breathe on anybody.

That scarf was from yarn I’d hand-dyed awhile ago, as a matter of fact, it’s a remnant of one of the overdyed balls shown with the original light blue color at the center in my “Wrapped in Comfort” book.

I remembered later: I had taken it out several months ago, looked it over, and thought it would look great on someone Hispanic. I didn’t have anyone in mind but it became my carry-around project for those odd moments, eventually bugging me because it simply didn’t get finished but rather kept nagging me in my purse with no sense of accomplishment–because it had no intended recipient to motivate me.

So I finally simply sat myself down one day, probably around November, and spent hours on it till it was a length that pleased me. There. Done!

Now it just needed someone with coloring to match it.

And then I totally forgot it existed.

Yes, they’re Hispanic. Yes, the color would look perfect on any of them.

But then no, I didn’t see them at church. So much for that.

I was fading and asked Richard to take me home. First, though, I saw the person who’d told me about their color preferences and handed him the ziploc, despite his hesitancy, saying, he would see the mom before I would, here, you take it.

As we were getting in the car, two more meetings yet to go inside, guess who walked past us on their way in.

I explained why I was leaving and told them what was waiting inside for them and who had them as the grins on all three of their faces got bigger and bigger.

I could just picture the moment inside right after that, the glow spilling over onto the person left holding the bag.  And probably anybody else around.

Sometimes the plans are bigger than mine.

I finished my Abstract Fibers scarf, though it’s bleached here by my flash. There is no pooling other than what I created by how I laid it out.

And while I was knitting–221 yards’ worth of fingering weight this evening, the math side of my brain needed to figure out repeats vs repeats done tonight vs weight etc–I was listening to whatever random CD came up on the player. If the music keeps playing the needles keep dancing.

The album cut by the old high school jazz band started up.

Okay, I think I’ve mentioned this before, but… When my son Richard was in middle school, his jazz band teacher also taught jazz in the high school and he aspired to join that group in a year or two.  They won a place in the high-school jazz competition at Monterey, so we drove down there that Saturday to cheer them on–and they were good enough to be invited back later to play as professionals in the main Monterey Jazz Festival, thus that album. *That’s* what a great teacher can get kids to accomplish.

We cheered on the kids on another team that had driven in a bus all the way from Maine for the competition. Now that’s heart!

We later went to the end-of-year school concert too, and again they played a piece that I’d liked so much: Bedtime for Bigfoot. I think it was the one that had been written by one of the kids as an AP Music assignment and it was hard not to get up and dance to it on the spot–you knew those kids were having a ball when they played it.

Richard-the-younger and I did a quick grocery store run afterwards, and as we got out of the car I asked him to sing the first note of that song.

He nailed it. Perfectly on pitch. The kid is good, and I about burst with pride.

When I was naming one of my shawl patterns, it seemed only fitting that making a giant version of my Rabbit Tracks lace should be called Bigfoot by comparison.  It wasn’t till later that I realized why I loved the word so much.

A teacher who believed in his kids.

Kids who learned what they could really do.

A rocking, happy song that celebrates that.

And I bet you my son could still sing it starting on exactly the right note. And his new son is trying to tell us he could too, just let him get the talking thing out of the way first.

A house finch (ironic, that), was probably artfully isolated from its flock and was fleeing the Cooper’s hawk at full speed when it hit the window.  Boom! It died instantly.

I turned at the sound, one I rarely hear anymore, but my motion startled the hawk out of its lunch and I caught just a glimpse of the banded tail as it went off through the merest opening in the trees. Mad flying skillz: I haz them.

Oh well, it won’t have to expend much energy to retrieve its meal at the pick-up window, I thought.

Says me. The squirrel didn’t get the memo. I saw it dashing up my tree with its fast food carry-out a few minutes later, running as fast as it could as far as it could to get away from anything that might steal its happy meal with the prize inside.

Yes, they do eat birds, it’s the catching them that’s why you just don’t see it. It continued far, far down the telephone wire as I watched, outraged, thinking, you don’t even live here and you steal my birds’ food? I mourned the little red finch.

That did it. I fled. If I’m getting ticked off at the wildlife for being what they are it’s time to put me around people and friends and take a deep breath from everything that has nothing to do with squirrels or birds–Purlescence, here I come.

What a relief.  I plunked down on the floor there, trying to keep out of the stream of sunlight from the door, grabbed the yarn Kaye and Sandi had gifted me with on Thursday, and cast on.

Pamela’s granddaughter, age 3, smiled at me and waved hi shyly. Totally charmed me.

It felt like a long time since I’d knit a lace shawl. It felt so good. Something familiar, something new. Kidsilk Night–never worked with it before–with Alpaca Fino, slightly lighter, making the silk look even shinier, the combination Sandi’s idea. I’m not a glitter person but this project could change my mind.

The yoke is finished now and it’s one of those moments where you look at your knitting and think wow, have I ever made anything this pretty before?

And here’s the funny thing: it’s gray, smog gray.  It’s not my color.  And yet. There have been a few times when I’ve knitted something whose color I normally didn’t like but that I knew that the person it was for did, that while I knitted it with them in my mind, wrapping wool around wood for them personally with each stitch, it was the most beautiful thing in the world to me then. And to them, too, when they got it.

But did I want to knit up the leftover yarn afterwards, all that oh-so-beautiful yarn I’d been loving?

Nope. No real appeal. Totally gone from me the moment the project was given away, back to just not my color. But for the time that it needed to be, it was the best one in the world to my eyes and in my hands.

As this is. I can’t wait.

(Ed. to add by the light of the morning: it’s dove gray, the color of the bird of peace.)

Five o’clock at Trader Joe’s. I usually avoid grocery stores at that hour, but there I was.

And there was an old friend; she saw me first. Hi! We talked a moment, I did the grandma stereotype and whipped out a couple of Parker pictures, we laughed. There’s nothing like an unexpected moment together to take the drudgery out of the shopping.

And then, as we chatted again at checkout a few minutes later, there was a young mom with a toddler and he was quickly going into escalation mode.

My friend smiled at them both, remembering when her teenagers were that size, saying that they get tired and hungry at this hour (as in, it’s okay); meantime, I reached over with a yellow-with-brown-stripes duck fingerpuppet.

The woman looked at me, gobsmacked, questioning…? No, I told her, I didn’t make it–though it is handknit. A women’s cooperative in Peru does these.

And now the man behind her in the line was smiling.

Another young mom with another toddler was next up behind A., and that little girl with the most adorable curls was as happy as could be. That mom helped us help the stressed mom by admiring the ducky to help the little boy be charmed by sheer peer pressure. (Totally worked, too.)

So out came another one. A striped green fish!

Oh you don’t have to do that! the second mom exclaimed in surprise.

May I?

And then I got to watch those two playing happily with it while A. finished up–and now everybody around us was happy.

The power of the fingerpuppet (not to mention A.!)

Maybe I should make a hat with a pocket and tuck one inside.

My friend E. spoke in church today. About braces.

She needed braces as a kid, she wanted braces and was all excited about it till the day came that she actually got those braces. Hey! They hurt! Nobody said it was going to hurt! And not just for that first day, either!  She said she cried, she told her mom she wanted them off, and you can just picture the rest of the story: being reassured she would have a beautiful smile when it was over, retorting that she didn’t want a beautiful smile, not if she had to go through this no make it stop I don’t want them.

And now? She’s one of the smilingest people I know. Her mom was right.

You know the point she was trying to make about our Father’s wisdom.  And of course, life puts real teeth into the analogy.

It isn’t always easy. I listened to her while remembering two years ago–remembering my decision to try to find meaning in the experience by praying silently for each person who came through my hospital door and what a vast difference it made in our interactions, even though those doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists and wheelchair pushers and the list goes on and on never knew. But I did. And then I had to live up to the request I’d made on their behalf.

We are meant to learn, to grow, to find ways to serve others better and with more compassion through each experience we have whatever our background, and, best of all, to come out in the end smiling.

I was going to do another hour of knitting on this and then show you how it was going to look with the braided cable turned brim-up; I’m delighted that my expectation on the cable/stitch ratio proved right.

But my lack of balance did one of its occasional zings and I’m icing my hand and that’s it for this evening.  I do really like how this hat is coming out.

Meantime, (you can ignore the pajama silliness right at the beginning) Jon Stewart did the best job I have seen anywhere of saying what I think should be said and heard and discussed widely in the aftermath of Saturday.  It is well thought out, kind, and straight from the heart.  I highly recommend it.

My heart goes out to the wounded, the families, the bystanders, the doctors and nurses and ambulance crews and all those who have had to see firsthand what was deliberately done by a human being to other human beings.

My hometown paper had this to say.

It doesn’t matter what party the shooter belonged to. It is the simple truth that the unbalanced among us had been told what to do to get the most attention and to believe they would be praised for it.

The words we choose to represent ourselves by have consequences beyond what we can know or control, and that is especially true in the political sphere. Choosing to have basic common courtesy: is it so hard? It is so essential.

And yet.  However one feels about how this all came to be, there is another truth: that we are all in pain, all grieving over the senselessness and the pain and the injury done to individuals and, really, to all of us.

And that speaks to the empathy and the great good in the very great majority of us. We may not personally know any of the people at that scene, but they matter to us as if they were us.

We are all in this life thing together.

To celebrate Michelle’s last evening home of winter break, we took the kids out for dinner at a place she suggested. I don’t usually go near Japanese restaurants because sushi is just not an option anymore, but she raved about their bento boxes and promised there would be plenty I could choose from.

And so there was.

The server was pleasant but, oh honey, clueless. You don’t put a meal in front of one person while the others admire it hungrily for a long half hour. But the food was good and the prices probably the best bargain in town and I could see why university students loved the place.

And they had mackerel. I had not seen mackerel on a menu since we moved to California in ’87.

I was 11 the summer my folks drove north with a camping trailer and six kids in tow and stayed on Prince Edward Island off the coast of Canada for two weeks. I’ve blogged before about my mom later packing up house after 45 years in Maryland, coming across some yarn in a box and wondering where on earth she’d bought that and when.

I knew. It was from that mill on PEI we’d visited. (See? She taught us right: travel a bajillion miles and look for the nearest yarn store!) I’d made a granny square hat and scarf out of it in junior high and those were the leftover skeins and I don’t remember what she made out of it.

I still have mine. Wool lasts.

One of the things we did while we were there was to go deep-sea fishing for mackeral. Get on a small boat and go way out on a big ocean.

That fisherman had it all figured out: you get the tourists to pay to board. You give them fishing rods that were simply four short boards nailed together in a square with a string hanging from the contraption, with a big collection of hooks (you show the folks how to tie them on) because you’re going to lose a bunch of those each trip out.

You show the 11-year-old girl your new toy when she asks: the radar that helps you find schools of fish. She wonders how you’re so sure they’re all going to be mackeral; you assure her you are and they are as you ease the boat over and above them.

Seemed rather unfair to me not to take your chances the way Nature intended, but then I didn’t have rent to pay.

And so we caught mackeral after mackeral that afternoon, the numbers roughly corresponding to our ages, everybody keeping count of their score, the littlest (my younger brother turned seven that summer) sometimes needing a little help. Memory says I caught two and a half–my little sister and I both saw a rod jerk that we’d walked away from, bored, and both of us being sure that that one was ours, grabbed it together and landed the thing and then both counting it because you know, you don’t concede to your sibling when you have a perfectly good half-claim on the thing.

One fellow had a brand new and very fancy rod and reel he was eager to try out and to show off with.  It was maybe a little too efficient: he caught a shark. I assure you the rest of us hustled away quickly from where that fairly-big thing was flailing around on the floor after he hauled it in.

There was a big wooden holding tank in the center of the boat, us beginning fishers adding in our mackeral as we caught them. I wanted to keep my catch separate–I wanted Mom to fry up mine for dinner for everybody, I might not be getting many but they were mine–but the boat owner just laughed, saying no, they all go together in there and you all take as much as you think you can eat when you’re all done.

But don’t take what you can’t, though, because fishing is for eating. You don’t waste the life of the fish.

To the guy with the shark, he said, Those are tasty but we don’t have room for it; it’ll just sit there in the tank and eat all the mackeral, throw it back.

The guy threw it back. (I’m trying to remember now just exactly how. The thing wouldn’t have been lightweight, wouldn’t have been happy, and it could definitely have put some teeth into its argument.)  A few minutes later, he caught it again. Same one.

How’s that for a workout routine?

That’s when I decided sharks were kinda stupid. Don’t tell that to the hockey team in San Jose, though, okay? Just between you and me.

As we came back towards land at the end of our ride, the boat owner explained that the fish we didn’t take with us he would be taking to that fish processor over there, where it would go into cans so all of it would go to good use.

Dude got free labor, a chance to meet new people and to tell fish stories every day should he feel like it to a new (and definitely captive) audience each time. If he teaches children to respect what Nature lets us take while he makes a little extra money to pay off his boat or his house, hey. I’d love a chance to tell him thank you for earning a living that way.

Broiled mackeral. But wouldn’t it have a ton of bones? I didn’t care. (There were five, all easily dealt with.) Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia across the water, wooden squares and ropes and my little brother landing a really big one with I think it was the boat owner’s, but I remember someone’s big arms suddenly wrapping around from behind him, helping him not let go of that thing while talking him through it as if that little boy were really the only one doing any of it or deserving that moment of glory. It was the best and last fish any of us kids caught.

And the one tonight that caught memories and held onto them without letting go was very very good.

So the plan was, turn in that last final of the semester and then go into surgery that day and the baby would come three weeks later, by which time Richard-the-younger would have recovered enough to be really helpful.

Which means he had his ACL replaced Friday and you know how the rest of that story complied with their plans.

We were at the grocery store this afternoon when we got a text from him: in the ER. Suspected blood clot. MRI in a moment.

He did not respond to his phone.

We called our other kids and went home and waited to hear, fully aware of what a blood clot could potentially do to a father of four days.

I can’t tell you how glad I was when the phone finally rang: the swelling and the pain, yes; blood clot, no.  Good thing he took it seriously, though, because you just don’t mess with what that could have been.

Unto us our son is given.  And his son, in time for a Christmas that merits a lot of thankful celebrating this year. And with the way things turned out, Richard gets to spend a lot of time sitting holding his newborn.

Who likes to hold onto him, too.

And on a side note–it has been raining in California. A lot.

UPS, at least around here, decided that it would be cheaper this time of year to buy some bicycles with trailers rather than rent extra trucks, and to hire people (often college kids on break) to deliver the extra loads of packages that way. Stay in shape, earn a little money, and put a smile on the face of every person you ride past.  We’ve had the bikes deliver to us twice now that we’ve seen.

This morning nobody was in a hurry to dash out into the downpour to get the newspaper.  I finally opened the front door in the afternoon to–

–and there, tucked right against the door, out of the rain, were two packages.

And our newspaper between them.

Today, my mother turns 80. Eighty years from today, our grandson will too. Welcome, welcome to the world, little one. Happy, happy birthday, Mom.

Phone call 1 am: Kim’s water had broken. 4-something am: my husband texted as to whether there were any news yet? The phone rang a few minutes later, saying Little Buddy (his name so far) had arrived about 30 seconds ahead of that text.  5 lbs 7 oz, 18″. He’s a preemie, but not by much and all is well.

Note that I had given my son the hat the hospital in New Hampshire sent him home with when he was born, and I do believe that is it on his son’s head.

(Ed. to add, Nope–they’re still making the same generic hospital hat 26 years later.)

I mentioned earlier the passing of Smokey, and after quoting his love Jan’s words, this happened the next day. Cool.

What I didn’t mention on the blog, I did yesterday to Jan and to Smokey’s oldest daughter.

The 13th would have been his birthday as well as mine, and thus was the day of his memorial service. We got to see old friends from back in the day, it had been way too long… PAM!!! Pam, who had had no children yet when we moved here, who had latched onto my babies and adored them as we adored her. SO good to see you! And you, and you, and…

But what I said to those two members of Smokey’s family, with more detail here, was this:

My husband’s first job out of grad school was in a town near New Hampshire’s southern border where a couple of high-tech companies had started expanding into to escape Massachusetts’ taxes in the Route 128 corridor.  The town was growing fast and was a mixture of old small-town New England and young professionals from all over.

The old folks voted down things they didn’t want to pay for: kindergarten being one of them. Instead, the schools there tested a small child coming in for the first time to see if he could do the things you’re supposed to learn in kindergarten–and if not, or if he froze up in front of the stranger doing the testing, he got put in Readiness, which was kindergarten by another name. There were eight-year-olds in first grade there!  How does a child recover from that?  They don’t.  And that was a third of the children. Shyness could tank your path forever.

There was a memorable School Board meeting where some guy proclaimed all public schooling as being (slamming his fist on the table and shouting) COMMUNISM!

We invited the folks next door over once for an evening of Scrabble, and were stunned at being turned down with, “We don’t play that kind of game like you educated folks.” The woman went on to tell me that they were discouraging their kids from going to college.

And this was where my children were going to grow up? Nice people around us, make no mistake, it’s just, we grew up in the part of the country with the highest number of PhD’s per capita and high expectations on the children. Lifelong pursuit of learning is just something you do.

We moved here near Stanford University just before our oldest turned five.  I told the two women yesterday that now, she’s finishing her PhD, a researcher with a dream to cure malaria. The others are  in their own graduate paths, the last in his undergrad, inspired to pursue his own area of science by a gifted middle school teacher.

Smokey had not only offered my husband a job in Silicon Valley; he had changed… everything. (They were nodding; they knew what the schools here are like: the pressure, for good and bad, for everybody to be the next brilliant scientist or engineer to change the world. The co-author of the high school biology textbook was my oldest’s actual teacher, passing on her love of the subject and inspiring her to follow her footsteps. )

“Everything!”

Jan was thrilled.  His daughter was nodding, going, “All these stories I’m hearing! All these people he influenced! I never knew…!”

The question asked today at church was, and the teacher was asking for our personal stories here, “What gift are you most grateful for? Not necessarily some material one.” (Making it clear that a material one would not necessarily be excluded, either; it’s the meaning of it that matters.)

What do I have to say for myself, I thought.  Well now.  Starting at faith and family and friends, there are so many more moments than one could ever begin to say.

I offered the story about the great surprise of my first amaryllis bulb, sent to me at my freshman college dorm just before the start of my first-ever set of finals. It was a birthday present from my dad.  He had always given my mother an amaryllis for her birthday; mine is a week before hers.  With that package, he was declaring me an adult now and his full faith in me and I totally bawled when I opened it.

But what I didn’t say to that teacher was, the intimacy of her question reminded me all over again of how infinitely grateful I am for the skills of the surgeons and everybody else last year.

And for the doctor who walked in my hospital room seven years ago needing terribly for me to live. And so I had to.  Everything else after that only came and only will come because he cared so deeply in that moment about someone he barely knew, rather than trying to shield himself from pain when all seemed lost.

I cannot WAIT to hold my first grandson next month!

The cheerful, tiny Bewick’s wrens are some of my favorites of the bird world.  One of the things I’ve been doing lately is keeping a small suet cake inside and breaking a little off with the edge of a spoon, taking it outside, and smushing it into crumbs on a wooden box out there where they like to go check out whether the woodpecker working away above on another cake in a holder left any gleanings yet; it’s just a step or two outside the glass door.  I often make two little taps with the spoon as if to call them to dinner, hoping for a little Pavlovian effect. I can play woodpecker too.

Today I was still at the smushing stage when, to my surprise, one of the Bewick’s swooped by in an arc right past where I was bending over, then quickly away to the edge of the patio, waiting expectantly.  Then swooping in to eat as soon as I stepped back inside the door.

And here’s the thing, the most mindboggling thing to me: as it zipped by, I HEARD IT SINGING.

Not the whole song, just a flash of cheerful loud–loud!–notes that disappeared fast between its motions and mine and the near-instant distance away. They’re not only cute–but wow, what a voice!

To the engineers at Sonic Innovations hearing aid company, if you ever see this, thank you for giving me a memory I never expected, with a now-110 dB hearing loss at 8Khz, could be possible again. Wow!

Not a teenager to be found anywhere in the house these days. Who am I supposed to embarrass now? I’ve been aged out of the job.

I was thinking that tonight at Costco as I found myself turning down an aisle full of pasta of all kinds. I wanted to break out into song and dance, maybe holding my cane up by either end, waving my arms in time to the music: “Udon oh! what it’s like…”

Cheerful embarrassings create the memories the kids tell to tease their parents with in their old ages.

I think my kids have a good stash socked away by now, ready for needling.