The baby hat (I love saying “for my grandson.” I’m going to be saying that so many times!) is something my hands can only do a few rows of at a time on those tiny needles.

But it was so hard to put down when I had to!

And so a stalled-out shawl project on 5 mms is off and running again, something far easier to do as my hands finish recovering from hauling luggage across airports and an arthritis flare. An hour Sunday, an hour and a half yesterday, two and a half today: making progress. You practice. You build the hand strength back up again.

And it got me thinking on an old thought.  Of how, all those years I studied piano under Louise Kupelian (I remember how much she used to love a good bilingual French/English pun), I was learning how to translate symbols on a page into movements of my fingers–and how, having learned that first visual-to-motor language, how much easier it made it to learn to knit complicated things, reading the knitting-language symbols across the row while my hands played in time.  And then eventually to compose my own.

When my visual memory was damaged by my lupus, charts were gone (I’ve long since made my peace with that) but those written-outs, closer to piano notations, they stayed.

About five more hours of work and I’ll be done with the knitting that the bear scowled at.

My folks had no idea how much more than piano they were giving me lessons for as they sent me off to Somerset.

(And this is so much not what I expected to blog about when I sat down to write.  I wonder… And I wish my old teacher and her family all the best, wherever life has taken them by now.)

——————-

Added Wednesday morning in response to Don’s comment: muscle memory is when I can sit down with a music book open at some piece I had not thought of in 30 years, start playing it by sightreading and then within a measure or two, my fingers are off and playing the thing exactly so, book free (as long as I don’t think about it too hard: the moment I start paying attention to what they’re doing, I need those written notes!)

This goes deeper–this goes to learning new stuff entirely in a new language for having learned the first foreign language well. Mrs. Kupelian used to say that if she never taught us anything else, she wanted us to learn to sightread.  This, now this, now this, read read read.  I left at high school graduation with a very large pile of books of different composers. (And the only thing the movers lost when we left New Hampshire in ’87… It pains me still.)

I remember reading a study once about stroke patients that said that those who learned a musical instrument in childhood recovered mobility far better than those who didn’t–and the more that instrument made you use the two hands and ten fingers independently of each other, the better. (The piano wins! Oh, sorry, Jim, no–the organ does!)

I watched the warm glow that came over her as she said it: “Elaine would be so pleased.”

Indeed she would.  And we both knew we both felt Elaine knew as well as we did.

Jean and I were talking Tuesday evening when I told her the news.

It was while I was in Washington DC for my 20th high school reunion that my friend Conway, my uncle’s friend too from WWII, had another heart attack, this time at the swim therapy pool where, on a normal day, he and I would have been chatting together as we exercised.

Someone called his wife Elaine.  The lifeguard did CPR.

Jean was their neighbor and old friend whose children had grown up with their children; she was home when she was struck with the sudden, intense feeling, Elaine needs me!

This was in ’97. There were no cellphones.

She got in her car and drove, first towards the pool, and then no, and turned the car towards Stanford Hospital. All on the strength of that feeling only.

And so it was that Elaine was coming out the door of the hospital at the very moment Jean was coming in to look for her. Conway’s flattened-out vital signs had kicked in briefly when his wife showed up–just long enough for her to feel he was trying to tell her goodbye.

The two women threw their arms around each other. Their children and grandchildren and all who love them will forever be grateful for that moment.

After his death, Elaine packed up and left the house they’d lived in for so long and moved to southern California to be closer to her sons; she passed away not long after.

One of her sons sent his daughter off to BYU, not many years later…

…Where she started going out with this tall kid from, it turned out, the town where her parents had grown up.

And when he mentioned her name to us (we assumed, rightly, that the very fact that he did meant that they were becoming seriously interested in each other) I said to him, not quite daring to think it might be so, Ask her if…

He called today with such a twinkle in his voice.  I’d been so sure it was going to be a girl.   Heh.  Ultrasound says it’s a boy, Mom.

Better go get out that superwash merino in blue after all.  And yes, this is an announcement: our first grandchild is coming. He will be the first grandson on both sides. He should arrive soon after the first of the year, and to tell you we are excited does not even begin to touch the unfathomable degree of love we feel for this new little person on the way.

Conway and Elaine must be so pleased.

You know? There was a time when we’d been married about a year when we were moving out of an apartment that had landlords who were infamous for treating their tenants poorly. The chances of getting our cleaning deposit back were not high, no matter what condition we left the place in, but we were dirt-poor students who needed what was our money anyway.

Which is how (I think Richard was taking exams) I came to be scrubbing down the place all day on a ferociously hot day with a deadline right on my heels: the electricity was going to be shut off at 5 pm and the utility account switched over to our new apartment in town.

There were outside doors in opposite directions and I had them both open in hopes of getting some kind of breeze going through there as I mopped and swiped and cleaned the tops of doorframes standing on a chair, and on and on.

Everybody in that apartment complex was like us: young, newly married, and students or grad students at BYU. Or had been: a plump woman my mother’s age appeared in my doorway, looking into my kitchen and at me halfway across the place, and asked me, Oh! Are you the cleaning lady? I’m moving in today and thisthisthisandthis were not properly done in my apartment and I’d like you to take care of those now and

And she just went on and on, ignoring my efforts to go Yo! No! I’m not! Sorry, but!  By the time I finally got that through to her, I knew her name, where she was from, her recent divorce, the fact that her kids were all grown, when all I wanted was simply to be left alone doing my thankless-enough task, knowing the landlord would probably stiff us anyway–we were friends with the managers, three sets in one year, two gone because of those owners and the third set trying to make them honor their contract.

She seemed okay with finding out I wasn’t the maid after all, probably glad just to have someone to talk to, but I was young and dumb and my frustrations were such that I truly never wanted to see her again. (The landlords didn’t have faces. She did.)

We went to church on Sunday.

Guess who was there.

One of the leaders at church met her, she being new, and knowing nothing at all of any of that, called me on the phone the next day and asked me if I would go visit this new woman on a regular basis as her Visiting Teacher.

Inwardly, I winced and guffawed all at once–okay, G_d, I hear you. You’re trying to set me straight here, and yeah, I guess I needed that; but, really, do I have to?

I had to.

And you know? We were different generations with different experiences and I tended to feel like just a kid around her at first, but by visiting with her we came around to actually being good friends, one I was sorry to move away from a year later–which would never have happened, I would never have spoken to her again, had not that Relief Society president asked me to do that.  I totally would have missed out. And so would she have, for that matter.

I thought of that today when, for the first time ever–today of all days–my Squirrelbuster birdfeeder refused to do the little bouncy bounce I always give it after screwing the lid back on. Darn thing jammed.  For no reason I could figure out.

Richard looked it over when he got home and said the rubber linings around the seed openings were coming loose.  He would see what he could do once it’s empty, but since I didn’t want to pour all that seed I’d just put in there onto the ground for the squirrels (and I’m sure not going to tell them it’s free for the grabbing up there right now, presently the thing won’t close under their weight like it’s supposed to…)

Yeah, you got it. A cosmic message of, Make peace. Even if we do succeed in fixing it ourselves and don’t have to take it to where that clerk might be on duty when I ask about the lifetime warranty on that thing.

But it just might be the rubber makes me hit the road and I’ll have to make that 50-minute round trip again for the sake of perhaps not just the feeder.

And you know? I think it would prove a very good thing. I’m ready.

Somewhere, a woman thirty years older than me would be smiling…

Ya gotta love a date like that. The lazy days of summer… An amaryllis opening up four months early or eight months late, whatever, just because today seemed a good day for it.  A twined-twinned-stemmed avocado plant,  two  for the price of sprouting one.

My arthritis has been flaring for the first time in a long time–too much sun, I guess, and some heavy lifting I shouldn’t have done–and I knit one row today and stopped for fear of doing damage.  Ice and (I hope) tomorrow for that.  But I got day-t0-day stuff done that needed doing, watched the squirrel watching the day, and all the while you could almost see that flower opening up; it looked like the bud above it, this morning.

And I went off to buy birdseed to take good care of my flock.

Where I encountered someone I’ve seen just a few times who, when I said, with no previous conversation, that I’d like the patio mix and the sunflowers, expecting her to ring those up too, tried to tell me, rather tersely, that those three and a half inch square suet cakes I had at the counter were not my 20 pound bags of birdseed.

Wait, come again?

Yeah, that confused me as much as it does you.  What on earth?! I smiled sweetly and said, Yes, I have a suet holder. I feed lots of birds. (I didn’t add, a suet holder plus three kinds of birdfeeders and a giant sugar pine cone the chickadees love to dance on and I have nuttall’s woodpeckers–a male today at last, so there’s a pair now!  And juncos and titmice and house finches and goldfinches and Bewick’s wrens and pine siskins and bluejays and  chestnut-backed chickadees despite being at the edge of their range and drab California towhees that let you in on the secret by seeing they really do have a lot going on when they’re up close and a brightly-colored Eastern towhee going neener neener at its cousins and mourning doves and the occasional brown-headed cowbird that had taken over the bedroom and the fridge at some other bird family’s nest and a yellow warbler and what am I forgetting here, bright erratic hummingbirds, the Cooper’s hawk and a red-tailed hawk, the brief lamented budgie, the Golden Eagle next door–and then a mockingbird, the day after our trip last week, finally showing up on the porch for the first time after all this time to stand there staring me down from right there at the other side of the glass to demand, So where are MY favorites?  And so I’d read the packages and had picked out two suet cakes this time, one, my usual, and one that had dried mealworms in it. Mockingbird? You’re welcome.)

If I can’t be outside, bring the outside to me.

If only I understood why on earth she seemed put out, still, that I was buying that suet.  Huh.  Here, hon, I wanted to tell her, maybe you need to learn to knit. Maybe some feathery lacy patterns would be just the thing.

Or to take some time watching a black squirrel happily birdwatching on a perfect 72 degree Bay Area day.  Eight, nine, ten… And that’s just the ones on the feeders.

(I really needed some knitting time afterwards to bring things back to normal, a book wasn’t enough. I may just push my hands into it tomorrow anyway and maybe it’ll even help them recover.)

I can finally show some pictures of what I’ve been talking about. Here’s what the elk looks like as you come up the stairs. There’s a game room (ain’t that the truth) up there, and glaring across the room is this moose, held forever in the velvet-antler stage. And then in the bedroom to the right is this nice little cat that got its tail dunked in the Die! pot.

Yeah. All friendly-like.

Downstairs was my motivation for learning that black bears shed their paws in the spring as they grow new ones; this one, and being so thin, too, seems to have been caught right at that point–here, let’s do a closeup. And yes, that snowman in the background is–well, the place was full of kitsch like that, plush and resin snowmen in winter garb with cheerful sayings everywhere. One of my children described it all as painfully rustic.

I looked up at the pointy tips on the antlers on that elk and had the Californian thought, I do not want to be here in an earthquake.

Now, my grandparents bought a small, cozy A-frame cabin up by Brighton ski resort near Salt Lake City maybe 60 years ago or more. I remember seeing it as a kid and being gobsmacked at being told why the wrought-iron rails around the patio above the creek swooped down in scallops like that: it was from the weight of the snow up there. Wow.  I tried to understand how snow could possibly bend metal (well, no, actually, first I had to argue that it was unreasonable to expect me to believe that and that it wasn’t possible.)  I learned what stinging nettles were–and the butterflies! So many butterflies!

We kids were not to splash in that rocky creek: the local drinking water was taken straight from it. We could, though, touch it briefly to see just how cold the newly-melted snow was in the middle of July or August. And the chipmunks! Adorable. And if memory serves, ground squirrels too.  We would feed them peanuts from that small patio.

There was a mounted antlered deerhead that came with the place when my grandparents bought it, across the small room from the fireplace. I remember being eight years old and asking about it and my grandmother kind of shrugging her shoulders, conveying the impression that it was not to her taste but it had been there for many years before them and they had let it stay.

At the cabin (pictured) for last week’s family reunion on my husband’s side, a chipmunk found its way onto the highest wooden porch up there at the one point at the front where it’s near ground level, but the poor thing found itself surrounded by humans near where the person in the red shirt is sitting and the only thing it had to duck under for safety was the bottom of that railing–with a view straight down and no way out.  It kept putting its nose over the edge, checking.  No can do. Yikes!

It brought back so many memories. It was so cute.  I managed to gently, gradually herd it back towards safety. To that side of the house, now turn left, that’s right, little one, go away from me, thataway, get away from all those people, keep going, alright.  There you go. Home free.

Later, at my uncle’s house on Sunday, my daughters mentioned the taxidermied excess where we’d stayed and my cousin grinned and decided to tell a story on her brother.

Now, my husband and I have our skunk story, which we gleefully told her.

Bob had asked if he could borrow the grandparents’ cabin for his honeymoon. I imagine other relatives were discreetly told in no uncertain terms not to show up there unannounced.

So. He and his new bride were snuggling in front of the fireplace, the fire snapping and crackling just past the stony hearth. Summer or no, it’s often cold enough at night up there for it, I can tell you from experience.  The outside would have been very dark in the brisk mountain air, the fire very bright in contrast. They were together at last in their own new world, away and alone at last from all else.

In all its decades there had never been any sign of trouble with the thing. But suddenly that mounted trophy came crashing smashing down behind them unannounced.

Oh deer.

Imagine looking at a Claude Monet painting up very close, or any other pointilist painter’s, examining all those tiny dots that make up the picture.

Now imagine those dots are all shades of green/graygreen and they’re all moving, constantly moving, shimmering gently in the mountain breeze, countless thousands of individual hanging circles amidst the whole of the trees. Those are the aspens. It was gorgeous up there. We were at a cabin in the Utah mountains at 7950 feet. (Thank you GPS unit!)

I had a good case of altitude sickness–every morning I started to pass out, every single day I got offered to bail if I needed it, but I just didn’t want to miss anything. I googled: if the headache doesn’t respond to the analgesic, get off that mountain! Oh. Okay, then. I could stay.  (Somewhat… But I stayed.)

For the record, I knit really really slowly on low oxygen. On the other hand, what I knitted was done and didn’t have to be done again.

And who knew when we might get to all be together like that again. As I told one nephew, I would have loved more one-on-one moments and it was all so short, but on the other hand, it was better than a wedding for that.

My sister-in-law made her trademark decadent fudge sauce and some brownies and got some ice cream to  go with them for our last night there. Celebrate!  When everyone had been served, there was just a bit left in the pan–you can’t throw away that good stuff, you just can’t. It’s chocolate! I scraped out as much as I could onto the large serving spoon and went looking for someone with a little ice cream left.

I spotted a nephew, a young adult. A victim. I asked him.

Sure! he grinned.

Then instead of trying to pour the mostly-solid-by-then chocolate into his bowl, I simply put the spoon in his bowl; we’re talking a large mound of chocolate over a very small lump of mostly melted ice cream here.

Just then my son came up from behind, having  spotted that spoon in my hand a moment before–but it was gone now.

My nephew grinned up at his cousin and in a singsongy neener neener voice declared, “Your mom loves me more than youuuuu!”

We laughed so hard. SO hard.

And I would have missed that and so would they have.

I’m so glad I stayed!

I remember my mom once mentioning to me, while trying to read a  book to one of my then-small children, that it had gotten hard for her to read the pages that were in black print against a dark background.

I didn’t want my young mom to sound old.

Last night my niece started opening Cat in the Hat to read to her little girl and my husband immediately chimed in that I used to  read that to my kids while I was driving them around: I would chirp “ding!” to tell them when to turn the pages they were holding in the back seat.

The mom grinned: I was on.

I’m out of practice. About a third of the way into it I had to glance at the book Jana was holding to prompt the next lines out of me–but I still remembered how to make the story jump up and down on that ball along with the Cat.

That black print on dark blue background on one page, though–how the generations ease forward. But we had a fine time, and the little one was totally cool with it when I went, oops, I think I skipped a line, while bouncing right to the next.

Speaking of our story. The owner here likes wildlife too; I think it is safe to say not quite in the same way. I might want to argue that he’s practicing the ultimate anti-Darwin: nonsurvival of the biggest and fittest. There’s a black bear in the living room, a massive elk head and a moose’s across from it glaring it down upstairs, and in one room, big as day, a mountain lion.

Now I gotta tell you, what surprised me is, that lion is bigger than that bear. Here, kitty kitty! But if looks could kill, that bear would have our heads. It looks a lot fiercer. They sure caught him on a bad day.

On the other hand, if one of those bears were to try to come crashing through this cabin… I’d switch sides in the argument fast.

One nephew, a teenager last I saw him, is a grown man who walked in the door and exclaimed “Whoa!” at the first sight of me. Short auburn hair? Young mom? Not quite the same anymore. It’s always a shock. And back at him; it was so good to see him and all of us and to start to catch up.  Been too long.

The generations take a few more steps towards the future, we swap stories together on our pasts, shared and newly shared, we dance and there is great joy.

As we anxiously wait to hear more.

Let me start off with this link from two years ago to tell Natalie’s mom she’s not alone. My daughter was in school at BYU at the time; her daughter’s on an internship here, the same distance away from home.

Michelle is very protective of me re germ exposure and my impulse to jump in the car with her wasn’t worth the time the argument was going to take if I pursued it.  But I thanked her as she walked out the door.

She stopped in her tracks and shot back in her worry, Mom! To do anything else would be unthinkable and immoral!

Well, yes, of course, and she saw that clearly and dropped everything during a heavy day at her job; that’s why I was so proud of her.

She had met Natalie at a church young adults party. Natalie asked if she might have a ride home to where she was staying for the summer, and it turned out to be right in our immediate neighborhood anyway, so it went from sure, glad to help, to, oh cool! They were friends on the spot.

That made it so Natalie had someone in a town she didn’t know that she knew she could turn to.

Good thing.  Last night there was a call; she had a fever. The older woman whose house she was staying at was out of town.  We knew Natalie had no car, and a bike gets you nowhere when you’re at 102.  So when she said she had no aspirin or anything, did we, would we mind terribly? It was an of course and oh honey and I heard Michelle on the phone insisting that she call her any time in the night or day if she needed any help as she rummaged through our medicine cabinet before dashing over.  We found the meds. We sent along a new pillow for her, too, trying to make her comfortable.

We all had a feeling that wasn’t the end of it. I told Michelle last night not to worry about the car today, just assume it was hers if Natalie needed her.  We all said she was welcome to spend the night here, as a matter of fact we’d rather that than having her be sick and alone… But she did not.

The call came this afternoon and the very sound in her voice got Michelle’s instant attention. I know from an experience of mine at about that age how hard it is to go off to see some doctor you’ve never heard of in a town you don’t know, but it had gotten to the point that she knew she had to. Michelle was out the door in a flash, stopping only long enough to make that protest of but of COURSE!

Urgent Care took one look at her and said, Stanford ER. Go. We think it’s appendicitis.

Shirley, meantime, the woman she’d been staying with, came home from visiting her grandchildren and is now off at the hospital to be there for her–where I dearly wish I were, too.

I owe that.  But I am so grateful to her and Michelle, too, who took up the cause on all three mothers’ behalf as well as Natalie’s from the start.

I hesitate a moment to let the chickadee grab a last sunflower, the goldfinch, too.

I open the glass door.

The chickadees are always the last to leave and the first to come back. Also the most likely to fly right up by me while I’m at work and then veer off at the last second; they are as close to fearless as Darwin will allow. Upside down and hammering at the suet like a woodpecker, testing out the prickly elephant leaf for a toehold, flitting fast but never, ever hitting the glass, they’re my favorites.

Those and the Bewick’s, the little wren flipping itself around by the tail like a living helicopter.  A juvenile Bewick’s! Cool! I guess we’re raising them right!

The jays, though–they’ve completely disappeared. It surprised me when I realized how long it had been since I’d seen one.  Huh.  I guess the Cooper’s hawk showed them who was bossiest; they clearly nested a few backyards away this year, and the young seem to have imprinted somewhere else–not like the last few years, where the parents yelled at me for jaywalking if I went out my own back door. They kept it up at dark o’clock, too, screaming at only they knew what and off and on through the night.

Michelle slept better this spring.  My mother will recognize this phrase: joy and raptor.

I stand on a chair and pour the seed mix into the feeder.  Forget what the bags say: finches do not thistle while they work; nyjer, and safflower, too, stays put.  Back to the usual.

I love seeing the juvenile finches with their long skinny teenager look trying to land like a kid with a learner’s permit, their wings flapping furiously an inch above the patio,  sweeping them slightly backwards like a stickshift on a hill, then a hoppity-hoppity-hopp-phew-I-stopped! at last.

Lovebeads of millet in there too for the sun flower child, the dove mourning peacefully.

Looking up, I see a waiting line above me on the telephone wires and over there on that one tree, every top branch beperched.

It’ll be a moment before the squirrels come back; the finches and titmice, the towhees and occasional warbler or cowbird will have the patio to themselves a little longer because I stamped my foot at the squabbling furrytails. That’s one more peanut for dove, one less sunflower for squirrelkind.

I put the lid back on the Squirrelbuster–heads above me turn a little at the sound–scoot the chair back under the picnic table, and go to the sliding glass door.

They wait to hear that latch click. (I’ve experimented to see if they would take longer to come back if I don’t click it. It’s true, they do wait for that–but only so long, dinner’s ready!)

Click.

Time for LaughIn. Flock it to me flock it to me flock it to me flock it to me.

Thank you, everybody. Your taking the time to offer all those kind words means much.  Karen got down there and reported that Dale looked peaceful, joyful, in a way that took her back to their childhoods. I can just picture their mother smiling and waving hi at them from the kitchen in that brick house in the woods that she designed.

And it makes perfect sense to me. He had loved. He had been loved in return and at long last in his life even married–no small thing to a man nearly blind who knew what it would take for someone to take him on in her life.

I imagine his pension meant that his new wife would be taken care of as any good husband would wish for if he couldn’t be there. His small family of sister, brother, niece and stepmom meant that Sally would have a loving family wrapped around her in her grief, just as they’d rallied around their stepmother, who had married their widowed father shortly before his own passing.  Dale leaves his wife with their love as well as his.

And when her own time comes, he will finally get to introduce her to his parents.

I’m so glad they had each other and the time they did!

I keep sitting here staring at the screen, wondering, but what on earth do I say?

My childhood and lifelong friend Karen, proud owner of the original Water Turtles shawl that I knitted for the turtle that swam alongside us at the C&O Canal as we walked the towpath there like old times: her brother Dale was ten years older than her and a thoroughly-confirmed bachelor.

Who stunned the heck out of everyone by announcing about a month ago that he was getting married and then, three weeks ago, going right ahead and doing just that.

*Dale*? Is getting *MARRIED*?

Their wedding pictures looked so happy, and I wondered whether Karen did the classic sibling thing of are we talking about MY brother? when her new sister-in-law said that Dale was so sweet. I mean, teasing is what siblings are for, right?

I wondered how the newlyweds were doing when I got a message from Karen Saturday night: Dale had pneumonia. ICU. Didn’t look good.

Butbutbut he was just fine just last wait I don’t get it!

She was visiting her daughter a thousand miles away but threw herself in her car first thing in the morning for the long, long drive, picking up her oldest brother along the way and stopping at her home for the night before continuing on for the rest of the drive south to see Dale.

Or not.

Her phone rang at 1:35 this morning.

I am unfathomably grateful to a woman who took a chance on a long-distance relationship and showed Dale, for the first time in his life, that not only was he so lovable that someone would actually take a chance and marry him in order to spend the rest of their days together, she DID.  It was such a great gift she gave him.

Karen, Sally, Paul, Amy, Helen–I am so sorry for your loss.

A woman I didn’t know, about my age, was sitting in the back by herself before the start of the women’s meeting at church today, so I picked myself up and moved over there.  There’s enough aloneness in this world; this moment, I could do something about.

You’re Katie’s mom, aren’t you? I asked her.

Yes! She brightened.  We chatted a little.  This was her third grandchild, eleven days old now, she’d come to help out.

(Someday I will get into the baby knitting thing and I know if I do I will never stop, but we’re not there yet.)  I asked where she was visiting from, and when she said Cincinnati, I asked if she knew Gary M…?

(Right.  What are the chances.)

“Well YEAH!” She looked at me in delight and explained how she and her husband knew him.

I told her, very pleased, “My husband’s cousin” –not adding in all the details like how Gary and his siblings and my husband and I had gotten to know each other better going to college together, etc etc.

And yet again the world shrinks down to people size.

Johnna and her husband just bought a house. In this city of single-stories, they bought one someone had added onto going upwards and that second story is designed for entertaining.

And entertain they did tonight, with musician friends of theirs performing in the space up there that, looking out the windows at the trees, made me realize how very much of my life in California is spent at ground level; it’s just one of the idiosyncracies of the place.

Wow. You get a new appreciation for seeing a flock of finches zooming by and poplar leaves waving at eye level. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed having height in my life.

The first fellow was a Stanford professor whose specialty is computer music.  The second, a pianist, the third, a trumpeter–New Age, jazz, traditional, they were having fun, playing by turns and then the pianist and trumpeter a few duets together.

It turns out the professor had studied under someone whose research my husband’s then- work group had sponsored in Boston. A mutual friend, definitely.  Small world.

But then the best part was at the end:  they all decided to jam.  The professor said, “I’ll start with something, like this…” and riffed. The pianist took it on, the young guy joined in with the brass, and listening, you would never know they hadn’t been practicing that piece for years.  It all just naturally fell into place, till the thought struck me–how would they ever know when it’s over?

And then immediately, but why would anyone ever want it to be?

My husband and I drove across the Bay today to a funky import place that is emphatically a guy’s answer to my love of yarn stores to buy more tennis-racquet-style bug zappers.  Looked around; didn’t see any. (Managed not to say about all these clearly Highly Desirables, why on earth would anybody ever…? And did you know you can still buy those cap cages to run your beloved baseball cap through the dishwasher for cleaning when your wife’s not looking and exclaiming ewww? You could be, like, all domestic and stuff!  Are you ecstatic yet?)

I was thinking, you bought these how many years ago, dear? But while he kept looking, I did the not-a-guy-thing (Richard later said something about almost compromising his masculinity and trying that himself–we were having a good time teasing each other) and I found someone who looked official and asked.

Oh, sure, we have those! And the guy disappears in the back and comes back out loaded down with like two dozen of the things, his face almost disappeared behind them.

He tells us they’re ten bucks.  Richard, who’d found me by then, goes, Nah, I can get’em with AA batteries for that much.

Oh. $7.99, then.

To which I pipe up that he (pointing at hubby) had gotten’em for two bucks each here last time. I did not mention how many years ago that had been.

“Do these things really work?”

Yeah, they do! I have all this wool around and knit and yeah, those things, they are really useful!

The guy grins. “Two bucks!”

Our old ones had had arc attacks (do not hit the furniture when flailing around with one, and I’m not talking electric arcs) and they’d died one by one.  We bought seven. Bugs shall fear me again.

She appeared to be his caretaker. Wife? And honey, she was pretty but she looked tired.

He was maybe in his 40’s, happy as a clam and very extroverted.  He greeted whoever moved and thereby caught his eye: How ya doin’!  He told the woman with him all about the fish in the wall aquarium they were looking at.  I don’t think I ever saw him sit. He was all about being up and lively and chattering away.

It was striking how she seemed patient but resigned. Not upset, more like a mom at the museum stuck with her small child in tow after the babysitter bailed. Because as the minutes went on, watching her watching him, I think I understood–when he turned and saw me looking his way as I reached into my knitting bag to pull another length of yarn, I got a happy, How ya doin’!  too: in the way of a small child, utterly harmless. I got an impression of lack of memory and of a soul distilled to its essence.  Its goodness.

I thought, if you’re going to have a brain injury, a cheerful one seems to me a very good one to have. But I did not ask.

They called his name and he went back for his scan alone while she got a few minutes to herself.

One of the nurses who popped out the door to call off names, the second time I saw her, took a moment to come over and comment on my knitting before disappearing again. Later, she came out again and talked a little more. She mentioned a local yarn store. When I said I’d heard Louise had had a stroke and had sold the shop, she brightened–so I did know the place!– and told me how sweet the new owner was. I confessed to not having been in in awhile; I tend to go to my favorite, Purlescence.

Which was a new one to her. I didn’t think (I was on Benedryl!) to give the context, in case she might be a longtime knitter like me, that it was in the former Carolea’s Knitsche. So I’m writing it here in case she sees this; I gave her my blog addy.

She said something tentatively that–I was sure I heard “Stitches” and it was! Oh yes, I know about Stitches, I signed books there! (Been going since Tess, the namesake of Tess Designer Yarns, was a preschooler, and she’s in her early 20’s now.)

You know what the result of all this is: I couldn’t put down my knitting. I had cast on and done maybe three rows before leaving home, and there I was growing it as fast as possible for showing off.  No reading my Newsweek for a hands break, no way.  Knit knit knit! On this cool idea I’d had a month earlier, when I’d bought the Camelspin at–of course–Purlescence.

I was trying to figure out the details of a new pattern for it while on Benedryl. Dumb, but that’s what motivated me so I did it.  I made it look terribly complicated, counting stitches, running my hands through my hair, tinking back stitch by stitch over and over, wondering why something so easy wasn’t intuitive–DUH! It’s the drug, stupid–making slow progress  anyway.

It’s not finished but it’s a goodly way along and I am very pleased. And very pleased to be nearly done. Post-Pred crash tomorrow and then that is that and it’s a race to see which is completed first.

One other thing: a couple came in and as the woman’s name was called, I looked up as she passed me and I smiled and wished her good luck.  She relaxed at that and smiled too for the first time.  A few minutes later, as she and her sweetheart were leaving, she turned before the doorway and called across the small waiting room to me, “Good luck to you too!”

Totally made my day. And you know? It was that cheerful man before, whom she’d arrived too late to see, who’d set the tone so that I felt comfortable speaking up like that.

Richard left work early to take me home. (To be fair to him, he’d offered to stay with me but hey, he works just up the street anyway.) There was a box waiting at our door.  Who…? The Sibley Guide to Birds and The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior, hardback, even, with love from Dad.

My folks had no idea I had been seriously coveting those very books. Those exact ones. I couldn’t justify them, I hadn’t bought them, and now here they are anyway.  Wow.

I tell you. I have the best parents ever. And they have perfect timing.  Speaking of which, and? My friend Debbie, who lives near where my Dad grew up, emailed me pictures yesterday of what she’d seen while birding over the weekend.

Dad? Pelicans in Nevada? You never told me that!