We bought a new washer/dryer set 13 years ago.  Kitchenaid.  The washer went through every kind of problem from year one and finally kicked the bucket last month.  No-Blog-Rachel to the rescue!  How many friends have a spare three-year-old washer to sell you?

So I have a question to put out there.  Is my dryer mourning its mate and refusing to play nice with that hussy Whirlpool?  Do I need to replace the thing?  My dryer has never been a really hot one, and it has a brand new hose, so that’s not it.  This blouse was not caught in the door, and it’s definitely not the first one, just the most agonizing to me.  It’s just the no-iron cotton shirts that do this: they come out of the dryer with little burn spots. This was very dark, and the picture here is after much scrubbing of the scorched collar.  Is it the coating they put on those shirts? Would another dryer just do the same thing?  Has anybody else had this?

Some of the no-iron cotton shirts are terrible–they cling like clumped-up plastic wrap.  This one had it exactly right: it was a cotton shirt, by golly, the fabric relaxed and smooth as if it had been pre-ironed for me, but first and foremost for this natural-fibers fanatic, it was emphatically cotton.

So I showed that dryer who’s boss.  I spent yesterday afternoon working out a new lace pattern, grabbed my Potomac colorway Geisha that Tina dyed for me, and cast on to knit the C&O Canal and the towpath alongside it in the fall back home where she and I grew up.  Dancing in the leaves and seeing them flurry up from our feet.  Storebought can be replaced.  Our time and our knitting can never be.  Onward.

(Note: I will be at Green Planet Yarn in Campbell tomorrow night at 6:30 for a booksigning. Not sure what I’ll wear, but we’ll have fun. See you there!)

We were at the Mormon Temple in Oakland this morning, and as we stepped out the door, there was a wedding party gathering in the garden with parents shepherding their little ones forward for the family photos.  We passed a young dad with an adorable toddler, I’d say two years old if that, in a stroller.  She was perfectly well-behaved, but such events have a tendency to require little ones to be perfectly well-behaved for a bit longer than the child is made for; I reached into my purse and gave the dad a smile and a back-up plan.  He was blown away and then delighted.

You all have heard of the handknitted finger puppets from Peru before.

The grounds are built into the Oakland hillside, and there were steps going up from one section of flowers to the next; it’s perfectly designed for people to line up in rows and be seen by the camera, surrounded by gorgeousness, which is what those two families were doing.

And oh did it bring back memories.

Four years ago, when our oldest got married there and we took family photos in the same spot, our new son-in-law had a toddler niece with Down’s syndrome.  And clearly and cheerfully, strong ideas of her own.  Her mother tried really hard to hold her still for the pictures.  The photographer got our two families scrunched in together, okay you, step forward a bit, you, you, go here, you, lean a bit to the right, right there, okay, got it, SMILE!

At that the niece, who was a good size for her age, broke clean away from her mommy and ran straight to the photographer, arms outstretched, and launched into him with a bowl-him-over bear hug.  He had smiled at her! He loved her!  YAY!!!

He thought it was great, and hugged her back with a chuckle and scooted her back towards her mom.

Her mother was flustered that her daughter had ruined the picture, but no, no, not at all: she had perfected it. She had captured exactly what the whole day had been about to the two families coming together:  I do not know you well yet. But you are part of my family and therefore part of me as of this day, and we are going to celebrate!  That little girl had it exactly right.  She knew joy when she saw it.

And I thought of her as the happy groom and his beautiful bride in her long white dress swished past us on their way.  Whoever they were.  I reached blindly into the bottom of my purse, my fingers closing on what turned out to be one of the most colorful, bright fingerpuppet birds you could ask for, and I gave it to that young dad today.

I wanted that couple’s day to be a celebration of joy like that, too.

As we got in our car, I saw a very small arm waving her hummingbird hi, high in the air, at the happy couple her daddy was taking her towards.

The woman looking at the package next to us at Costco yesterday had her glasses on but they were dangling down around her chin as she was trying to read the fine print on the ingredients list. She looked vaguely like someone I knew, and although she wasn’t that someone, that probably helped me to respond as if she were, and she was frowning.  Costco on a Saturday is a crowded hassle, so that was certainly understandable.

I laughed, “I thought I was the only one who did that.”  I tend to hang my glasses by one ear dangling downwards when I want to see way up close myself.

I startled her out of her reverie, and she chuckled that she gets strangers telling her, Hey, lady, did you know your glasses were about to fall off your face?  But she’d never had anyone else say they do the same thing.

About ten minutes later, I bumped into her again and went, “There you go again.”  She burst out laughing.

I never did see her frown again after any of that.

(Background: a brushed baby alpaca triangle shawl gifted to me by Laura in Alameda that I like to wrap around me when it gets cool in the evenings. Thank you, Laura.)

It was eight years ago that we got the call that woke us up on a chilly early Sunday morning, Thanksgiving week.  Long expected.  It had been eight years since my husband’s older sister had been told on her 40th birthday that she had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and that it was metastasized.

The last time Cheryl had been well enough to run around and do errands like anybody else while we were visiting, and we then having teenage daughters, we stopped in at a little shop in some mall that sold all kinds of girly frills and hair doodads.  Where, among a few other things, I happened to buy a threesome of hairbands.

One went off to college with my girls.  One, nobody remembers just when it disappeared.  And the last, the plastic well aged by now but still holding up, in a color to go with the auburn my hair had mostly still been when I’d bought it, perfectly comfortable on my head and a remembrance of Cheryl that I wanted to keep close, I took careful care of, knowing I could never replace it.

But this summer it vanished anyway, and it bothered me more than I thought it should.  No little piece of plastic will ever make any real difference re my memories of Jessie‘s mom.  And yet.

So, go buy another one! Easier said than found. Why do so many of them try to be head tourniquets?  Part of me hung on to the instinctive response of a small child, of, But I want MY headband, not some other one.

Fast forward to two days ago.  It had been carefully wrapped and super-cushioned so as not to be broken by airport workers rifling through my luggage.  I was planning well ahead for my upcoming Stitches East trip, and there it was, safe and sound.  Next time, I’m going to wear it on my head on the plane: I found it! I found it!

Coming home from San Rafael yesterday, it was amazing watching the fog blowing in fast and hard in the bright afternoon through the top of the Golden Gate Bridge as we were rounding the corner from Marin, and then on the bridge itself, you couldn’t see the next arch ahead.  These pictures were taken at about 3:45 pm.

More pictures when I get the time to tweak the large ones; I’m under heavy knitting deadline.  Later.

My friend Michelle of the Monterey shawl fame, talking to me once about high school reunions, told me she’d gone to all of hers: that at her fifth, people were still showing off.  Some showed up in limousines.  At her tenth, some people were still finding themselves. At her twentieth, they were the selves they’d grown up into.

I missed my first few, wanting to go, but being thousands of miles away, it just wasn’t going to happen. But I kept saying I was going to my 20th.  Nothing would stand in my way. I would go.  And I did.

It was worth every penny of the airfare: I got to see friends I hadn’t seen since graduation, and  I have kept in touch with some of them ever since, never again to let them disappear from my life.  And I got to see…a guy who had tormented me my first two years of high school, and then after that we had pretty much ignored each other’s existence as we went from class to class.  I was surprised our senior year to find out he was turning out to be an okay person after all, though on my part that was simply a quiet observation from a distance.

And at the reunion, there he was.  I took a chance and called him on the early-on behavior and the torment I’d gotten over the things he’d said, and he apologized.  We’d been, what, fifteen years old then? What had we known about anything?  Twenty years long of needing–well, not needing really, but only in terms of any future interaction with each other–that out-loud reconciliation.  And we got it.  I found myself delighted that he actually lived now not only in the town just north of mine here, but that his commute on his bicycle took him within two blocks of my house here every day.  Wow. Small world. And we’d had to fly to Maryland to find out we were both right here in California.

He’s apparently moved back to Maryland since then, but one of his brothers was here in the area too.  I found out because today the headline screamed about the Cisco executive, such a nice guy, with such a sense of joy in his life, on a business trip to Detroit: shot and killed.  A city street, and, apparently, a life for a wallet. The face in the paper looked vaguely familiar. The name did too.  When I read “grew up in Potomac, Maryland,” I gasped: that would be MY high school!  I turned to see if there was an obit with more information. There was.  He was.  The family’s names.  Oh goodness.

And the only reason I have any right to do what was imperative for me to do under such horrendous circumstances, to reach out with a quiet note of condolence that is going out tomorrow to a widow with two small girls to raise unfathomably alone now, is because I made peace with her brother-in-law eleven years ago.  Even if she could never have known anything about any of that.  I did.

Going to that reunion had given me the right, now, to care out loud.  The note is written and ready to go.

I had no idea, when I was booking that ticket.

My friend Phyllis called yesterday: “Alison! Your favorite potter is at the art fair here, come see her! She’s at the corner of…”

I asked what time the thing ended. Six?  Sure, I can do that towards the end of it.  I went.

Kris saw me and was thrilled: “I was hoping you would come!”  She knew I would understand, besides the fact that she just plain wanted to see me.  She stepped into the shade for me–she’s a good friend–and we talked.

She had a dear friend who was a regular blood donor.  The friend was cooking dinner for her guests coming one day about seven months ago when the phone rang.  (I think Kris and her husband were to be the guests, but I missed part of it there and didn’t want to interrupt to go back and ask.)  It was the hospital, in desperate need of immediate O negative blood, would she come?

She dropped everything, hoping her guests wouldn’t mind the delay, and ran.

The trauma victim who’d lost half her blood was Kris.  The transfusions and superb medical care saved her life.

The hospital had Kris’s friend’s phone number only because she’d donated, and donated often.  One good choice after another led to a lifechanging good moment where it all came home.

(Edited Friday to add this picture of an Ostrich Plumes shawl I did in gray laceweight a year or two after theirs.  It too will fit through a wedding ring, hence the name.)

Today I got to see a doctor I seldom see and told him that there were only two people mentioned in my book whom I hadn’t given a copy to yet.  And that I needed to fix that.  I hadn’t referred to him and his wife by name in there, I said; last page, second paragraph.  I was a brand new laceknitter way back when and I’d made them a wedding ring shawl on size 3 needles in white laceweight Ostrich Plumes.

Dr. M was the ENT who, eighteen years ago when my lupus was diagnosed, finally put together what had eluded everybody else for all those years: that my progressive hearing loss was due to an allergy to aspirin.  I’d apparently triggered it with an overdose when I’d climbed into the medicine cabinet as a toddler and had eaten not quite enough baby aspirins to have to get my stomach pumped.  It was a new bottle and Mom counted pills and fed me baking soda instead on doctor’s orders to neutralize the acid.

With the lupus, I had a new diagnosis and meds to have to take, but I went completely deaf on the prescription-strength Aleve.  I have to tell you–you can close your eyes and try to see what it’s like to be blind, but you cannot close your ears.  It was like nothing I could have expected: when someone talked to me, I felt waves of pain in my ears.  But no sound.  Nada.  Except for the roaring white noise in my ears that didn’t respond to anything but itself.

Apparently Aleve (called Naprosyn then) was different enough from aspirin that I lucked out, but whatever, my hearing came back to what it had been when the dose wore off, and under Dr. M’s directions, I never took NSAIDs again.

And what he told me meant my kids wouldn’t go deaf in their teens too.  And they did not.

And what he told me meant I didn’t have to go any more deaf.  And I did not.

The man was right.

There is more to the story, related to when my Crohn’s was diagnosed ten years later, but this will do for here.  Suffice it to say, I owed him, bigtime; that wedding ring shawl felt absolutely imperative to do.  And it became one of those projects that I will forever rejoice that I knitted it: both for my own sake, and for the great joy of their reaction to it.

I signed and gave him a book today. And he signed my copy for me.

Came across this and found it important enough to pass along to those who want to know how to help when someone has a very ill family member.

I would not have joked about PCC lines yesterday had I known what was going to happen last night. An intense thank you to everybody who signed up or tried to sign up for the bone marrow donor registry.

I went to go blog this morning, but the words I’d been going to say just kind of trailed away from my fingers and left me; at the time, I didn’t know why. I thought, okay; it can wait till the right time.  Many a knitting project has shown me that.

But, though I know we will all see each other again in a place where there are no more tears, mine are flowing freely right now.

(Edited to add: http://www.bobgreenberger.com/ for those so inclined.  Thanks.)

I have often thought that my experiences at Stanford were a time that changed everything for me; I’d never want to go through them again, but for the sake of some others as well as myself, I’m glad I did.

Out of the blue, and it’s always in the middle of the night,  the inflammation process decided to switch on.  I was telling it firmly around 3:00 this morning that my writing about Noel and his co-worker was NOT an invitation to come back and NOT to think so highly of itself.

There is a level of pain where all you can do is determinedly live through it.  I did.  Pain as an intellectual exercise in curiosity about what it means to be alive.  And, go figure, I’m doing okay now–nothing to see, nothing to see, move along, move along, and I wonder if I should I even be mentioning this.  I’ve been sitting on this draft.  And then I just got a note from someone worried over a relative with lupus: yes, I told them–life does go on and it does get better and it is worth the wait to get there.

I don’t like these wake-up calls, but they always make me focus on what’s most best to do next with my time. And I honestly hadn’t thought of this when I set up the first picture, but I just had myself a fine glass of fresh-squeezed cliche.   Pure evaporated cane juice added as necessary.

I love my skylights.  I love walking down the hall and being startled by a bird in flight over my head.  I love that I can see the neighbor’s tall redwood tree, the sense of being connected to outside.  I love having clouds and sky from the inner parts of the house.

When we were remodeling, we had a house (“Eichler” in California-speak) where all the plumbing lines had been run underground.  This is perhaps not the swiftest move in earthquake country, and ours failed.  This is what kick-started the project.  We were going to have to replace the lines by putting them on the roof, meaning there would be lots of work to be done up there.

One of the first things one contractor did, blueprints in hand, was to cut the ceiling in the bathroom and put in a skylight.  Which, though perhaps entertaining for him, was maybe not the best move for us.  The other bathroom, having been jackhammered where the pipes had broken, had been ripped out to be turned into a hallway.

The plumber saw me taping newspaper over my head, and asked me what I thought I was doing?  Dude. What do you THINK.  “I can’t see anything! Those skylights are frosted!” he protested.

A few days later, the main contractor’s kids had a day off school and he brought them to the job with him.  The nine-year-old above my head made a game of it: where is she going next?  And he chased me from skylight to skylight, waving “Hi!” in delight every time he caught me.  Where are the comics pages when you need them?

The plumbing contractor who came a few years later to fix the problems left behind by plumber #1 wrapped his New Improved Bigger pipes with the wrong kind of materials–which, it turns out, the birds absolutely loved.

Have you ever seen a bird in the spring perched looking into the outside mirror of a parked car?  I did once: it kept smearing the mirror, trying to either feed or court the bird it saw there.  Take that effect, add pecking, multiply by umpteen birds, and you get the idea: we could always hear them up there, but we weren’t quite sure what was going on.  There are trees reaching over the house, after all.

The roof leaked.  There hasn’t been much rain to worry about it anyway, but we finally got around to calling the roofer back. He looked at it and pointed out the woodpecker holes in the pipe wrapping.  Uh, oops.

Oh, and while he’s at it, his company now sells the most advanced of the solar power systems on the market.  Hey.  The idea of getting a loan hurts, but the idea that the loan payment will be less than the current electric bill and then will END… Hey.  The idea that we could buy an electric car at some point and plug it into the house…double HEY!

We haven’t started installing the solar yet, but it’s going to happen. Meantime, there’s a college-age kid up there, wrapping those pipes in white, non-reflective, boring, non-bird-enticing insulation: sorry, guys, the mirrors are gone.

I asked Randy, the boss, as he helped drop off materials for the next day, what time to expect his guys to show up and why.  He said with a totally straight face that he wouldn’t want to have to sue me for traumatizing his workers.

I have half of one bathroom (that didn’t used to exist), the important half, that has no skylight. No sky nor tree nor birds to be seen.  I have never been quite so grateful for a well-placed door.

Someone just introduced herself over at KnitTalk, mentioning her career in a neonatal ICU, and I wrote her a note hoping that the parents of some of her patients had brought their kids back for her to get to see.

Which reminded me of Beth, one of my favorite nurses during my 10-day stay at Stanford, who, when I was about to be discharged after having been in critical condition, I promised I would come back to visit.  The intensity in her reaction surprised me: she exclaimed, “The patients always say that. But they never do!”

Well, hey.  I could do something about at least one patient.  It took me a few months and several trips to find everybody, but I knitted for sixteen people–doctors, interns, nurses, nursing assistants.  Beth got a Rabbit Tracks scarf in a soft merino.  Brian got socks as a thank you for walking in his patients’ shoes. Franklin and Noel got hats.  Robin got a lace cashmere/cotton scarf to match her scrubs.  And on and on.

One nursing assistant had been terrible to me, had hated being assigned to a GI patient and had let me know it.  I was there long enough to go from, why on earth do I have to be stuck with her, to coming to realize, how much pain must she be in, greater than any physical pain of mine, to be treating people like that?  There is more to her story, but this is not the place for it.  But I decided the only way I could handle her and hold onto who I am was to pray for her: to recognize her need to be cared about by somebody, anybody.

When I did go back to Stanford to visit, I came bearing those knitted gifts to convey the depth of my appreciation for everybody’s work and for their caring.  But in their faces, I got to see the great joy for them in simply getting to see me walking back in there, on my own two feet, no IV pole, no longer so gaunt and definitely strong again.  I was coming to thank them in person. That was all they needed.  The knitting was just the icing on the celebratory cake.

And on the visit that I found that one nursing assistant, who knew nothing of the knitting, she saw me first and RAN to me and threw her arms around me and wept.  I held her, too, and then pulled out the bag that was for her…  Knitting is time and love made tangible and undeniable, and of all the people there, she’d most needed that.  And that I could do.

When we care and are cared about, all things that matter can be healed.

Last fall, I was surprised at Stitches East by my friends Deb and her daughter Kate presenting me with this pair of lace socks that they had knit together, one doing the feet, the other the tops, so that the differing gauges wouldn’t matter.  They’re glorious socks in my favorite shade of maroon, and the three of us spent I don’t know how long together, laughing till we ached.  After years of exchanging emails with Deb, and then with Kate, it was such a treat to come together like that and to really hit it off like we’d been so sure we would. We did. And how.

Shortly thereafter they got hit with the first of the out-of-the-blue news.  The followup now is that Deb’s son and Kate’s brother Robbie is in need of a bone marrow donor for his leukemia, and he needs it like, now, and there is no good match in the registry yet.  Here is Robbie’s dad’s blog, a mix of work and their current situation.

I checked, and I’m not eligible to even try to sign up.  Given that I’m waiting for the trials at Stanford to progress so I can sign up of lupus patients’ receiving blood stem cell transplants from their adult siblings, this is hardly a surprise.

Here is a list of FAQs on the bone marrow donations.  It can be a lot more gentle a process than it used to be: it is often done now like a simple blood donation.  Speaking of which, and speaking as a parent with a child also in need at times of platelet transfusions–Robbie needs them far more often, though–the supply in the blood banks is real low right now; if you donate platelets, the process takes longer, but you can do it more often than whole blood because they return the non-platelet parts back to you.

Picture yourself, ten years from now, twenty years from now, knowing that you’d saved a life.  Maybe even getting to see a little of what that person did with that life to thank you for the one gift higher than any other that one human being can give to another.

How many hours of your days can you spend that well?

“I smell fire.”

“I do too.”

Yes, there’s been this generalized omnipresent smoke all over California for a month now, but this was a far different intensity, and it hadn’t been there at all a few hours earlier when I’d been outside. I got up and investigated. Not in this room so much, strong in that, strong in that…I opened the back door and sniffed. Fire! I shut it quick. I opened the front door: fire! But I wanted to know how close. I stepped to the sidewalk and looked around: the strongest browns in the air seemed definitely to be towards the east, and they were not a sunset. Between us and the Bay, most likely, probably not way across the Bay, it was just too intense for that. But wow, look at that stream of smoke. It was comforting, at the same time; it wasn’t the neighbors’ houses or anything immediately discernible. It was hard to breathe, though, and I hurried back inside, wondering what on earth we would grab and go should it come to that, even if I didn’t think it would, and how on earth the holdouts around Carmel and Big Sur had done it, had hung in there with theirs so close by for so long.

Twice, we heard helicopters overhead. I googled. Must not have used quite the right search terms. Nada.

Our city, about ten years ago, set up a reverse-911 call system to notify all residents in the event of an emergency; it’s slower than I’d like, but it gets there. The hubby, being on both the Red Cross and the city’s emergency communications volunteer teams with his ham radio license, got called well before the household phone did. But the recorded calls did come.

It’s between us and the Bay (called that one right!) although, to the north by a few miles and across a major freeway, a natural firebreak. It’s the city’s mega-compost pile, with no structures threatened except the ones in our lungs.

I’ve been sitting here the last two hours thinking that sometimes life hands you, if you’re one of the lucky ones, just a taste of what others have to go through so you’ll have some idea of what it’s like when they need you to listen, some day in the future.