I’m usually not one for memes, but I’m going to use Sheila’s as a jumping-off point. Maybe I’ll answer another of her questions tomorrow. This is a bit stream of consciousness, but here goes.

What was I doing ten years ago? Driving, constantly driving. No school buses here, and I had four kids in three different schools, soccer games (we may have given up on soccer by that point, I’m not sure) and oboe, piano, piano, piano, clarinet, and saxophone lessons, later organ too, and for that one summer, trumpet tutoring thrown in as well. “Make a joyful noise.”

Ten years ago, we had a big family reunion coming up. When my Grandfather Bennett had died, Gram, at 94, watched all of us cousins having a grand time being reunited en mass for the first time as adults and asked us when we were going to do that again. Nobody could bear to say out loud, When you die, Gram.

Two years later, what was left of her hip, which had been replaced at Johns Hopkins when I was a kid, crumbled, and she became bedridden. My cousin Katherine’s husband, a cardiologist (trained here at Stanford), quietly told us that in general, once a very elderly person can’t get out of bed, they’re gone within about six weeks.

Gram would last about twice that.

Gram told her oldest son she wanted money not to be a reason why any of her 29 grandchildren couldn’t come to her funeral: he was to send $5000 of her money to each one right now, and promise to reimburse them for any hotel expenses they might incur as well. He did, and about two weeks later, after considering living to see three different centuries and deciding it wasn’t worth the hassle, she slipped away.

We came.

We had such a lovely time together. We lined up by order of year born, and everybody pulled out cameras and snapped pictures of each other.  (I had at the time, for a winter coat, my Kaffe Fassett’s Big Diamonds in two strands of wool and mohair knitted on size 9s, quite dense and warm, but it definitely seemed a bit bright for the November occasion, happy/sad as it was. I have no doubt my cousins remember me standing in the snow at the gravesite wearing that 86-color piece of clothing. I later bought a somber charcoal coat, a little too big, not realizing immediately that it was a horse-after-it’s-left-the-barn effect. Once I did, I gave it to my tall daughter to take to college in the snow, where she needed it far more than I, and it fit her better anyway. I had my handknit one; in my climate, why would I want more?)

And so, a few years later, it was decided that we needed another reunion, one with no funeral attached to it, just purely for the sake of joy. It was July 1998, the year Grandpa would have been turning 100. As a central gathering place in the country, Katherine decided to schedule us at an offseason ski resort that was within a stiff hike of where our grandparents had owned a mountain cabin near Brighton. (I can see the ski afficionados nodding their heads.) That cabin had a small back patio overlooking the creek with an iron railing around it, deeply bowed in; my grandmother had once told me that it was from the weight of the snow there.

Grandpa used to like to go that cabin to get away from the pressures of his US Senate seat; to get to a phone, he had to walk a mile to the little general store. Nobody could reach him unless he chose to be reached. When he was on vacation, he was on vacation, walking that mountain, listening to the icy-cold water of the creek going over the pebbles, seeing chipmunks dart and eagles soar. I used to feed those chipmunks, the times I got to go to that cabin in the summer, growing up; it was a lesson to an antsy child in being still and waiting, trying to teach a tiny animal not to be afraid of me.

My sister Anne and her six boys decided to drive from Atlanta for that reunion, and since they were coming that far anyway, went further and came here first. We got to spend a joyfully noisy week or so with them at our house before they continued to Yosemite and then on over to Utah with us joining them there. Muir Woods, Chinatown… That was the visit where I gave her copies of my photos, and she asked her identical twins gleefully which one of them was in this picture in her hands. They both claimed themselves. “See! You can’t tell you apart! Now you can’t get mad at anyone else!”

My kids had loved Tim Robblee, the best music teacher any school ever hired; Tim announced ten years ago that he was leaving to go back to school himself. He had led our high school’s jazz band to a national high school competition in Monterey, where they did so well that his kids were invited to play as professionals at the famous Monterey Jazz Festival in the fall!

I knitted Tim an afghan in many colors, a picture as best as I could do of the Monterey Bay, complete with waves of water at the beach, in remembrance of how he’d believed in his students and what he’d helped them achieve. I took a roll of pictures of it before I gave it to him.

I later found I had a roll of film that had been double-exposed: Anne’s kids at Stinson Beach. Tim’s beach afghan. Superimposed on each other, so that in one wonderful piece of kismet, Anne’s boys were reaching down into the water, their feet submerged in wool and water in the tide. I got not one single good picture of the afghan, in the traditional sense, but the ones I got–after the initial disappointment, because Tim had moved by then and the afghan was out of my reach–delighted me.

Oh, and, one funny thing about the reunion? Katherine, the one in charge, kept emailing me re the arrangements and kept getting antsy about getting no response. I heard through the grapevine, and protested that I had received nothing. She insisted to my brother that the emails didn’t come back to her, so clearly, I was simply not remembering. (This is often a very valid thing to say about me.) But no, I’d been waiting and looking and getting nothing.

Christmastime, five months later, Katherine sent out an extended-family email, and at long last she got a response: from an Alison Hyde in England, saying she’d been enjoying all the emails, almost felt like a part of our family now, and how had the reunion gone? Had we had a good time? And where in the world were we? Were we in Spain for that vacation? (I guess it was all those Californian place names when Katherine wrote to me.)

It let me off the hook, at least!

If you remember this post: on Tuesday, I was knitting an early portion of a new lace pattern, ie a part where I had to pay attention to the instructions I’d written out because it wasn’t visually established enough to just wing it yet. My kids had just planted that plum tree (did anybody catch the earth shoes caption on its bucket?) and the whole wide world just felt so…joyful. And I found I suddenly couldn’t see the page clearly for how my eyes had watered up. Silly eyes.

It took about the space of a heartbeat, and then it hit me: wait. My EYES watered?!

And then yesterday they did it again. My eyes haven’t been able to water for at least five months due to inflammation, which is how I tore my cornea so badly a few months ago.

One more piece of remission slowly catching up to me. One more splash of joy.

First, the plums. This is two stories, really, but a lot happened yesterday.

Our house came with an ornamental plum tree that a previous gardener had experimented with and had grafted in a branch of a producing plum tree; it was the oddest looking thing. Burgundy leaves, a graceful shape, and then this one awkward green thing shooting happily off to the side like a two-year-old brought to a formal adults-only party. After a few years, though, that branch got what looked like the mumps and died. Some kind of borer, apparently.

I missed it, so a neighbor gave us some of his plums, and I returned the favor with a jar of plum jam. He thought that was great! So he went back in his yard, picked more, and I made more and gave him a jar from each batch. I had to weigh those plums first, I was dying to know: 45 pounds. His wife was appalled when she found out and apologized to me, while I just laughed it off, saying, hey, I would never have had them to play with otherwise, don’t sweat it!

I’d ignored the recipe that had come with the jars specifying that one had to laboriously remove the skin from each plum. Bag that. For me, everything but stem and stone: the tartness of the skin adds so much depth to the flavor, like sour cherries, only better. You take the bitter with the sweet.

I’ve wanted my own plum tree for years. It would involve digging and putting in a drip system to a far corner of the yard that didn’t have water. We never got around to it.

Part two, written last night:

All the times I’ve said a prayer that I wouldn’t forget. I’d planned this for a year; well, actually, ever since I first got my manuscript accepted.

And yet somehow, on the actual day, I forgot. Given the circumstances, that’s breathtakingly awful, but I did. But I got saved, and so by extension did E, by an offhand comment by my son, who’d called in the evening after the phone had been busy all day yesterday.

Isn’t that the way it so often is? We ask God for help, and He nudges some other person to do some random thing that was just exactly what we needed, while they have no clue and often never will if you don’t speak up and tell them. Although, in this case, it was immediately apparent to both of us.

“Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!” And then my son happened to mention that he’d found out that his future mother-in-law had gone to high school with my friend E.

E!!! Oh my stars, and it’s nearly 8 pm!!!

From the other end of the line, there was the sudden, “‘Bye, Mom, you need to go.” He knew. And go I immediately did, without stopping to comb my hair, just run!

E’s son, who had gone to elementary and middle school with my oldest, while he was away at college, his folks had gotten the phone call no parents should ever have to get. The rest of that story is theirs to tell, not mine. My oldest and I attended his memorial service.

After a great deal of thought as to what would be appropriate, I knitted her a lace stole in navy blue: a color that acknowledged the darkness and the hurt, a color that spoke of the dawn that I promised with each stitch would still be able to come, however long away, and yes, it would be a long way away, I understood that. I wanted to be there, an arm reached around her in warmth and presence whenever I was not. Her son had been artistic and giving, and I wrote a note to go with it saying that I was sure he wanted to comfort her, too: I wanted to be his hands for him in creating this.

That soft lace was nothing, it was everything: it was what I knew how to do to say I cared.

I wasn’t sure when the most appropriate time would be to give it to her, and somehow I dragged my feet. But one day, after praying to get it right for her sake, the answer came in the sudden strong feeling: NOW. Go *NOW.* So much so that I made my kids wait on the lunch they were preparing for me till I got back, and I simply rushed out the door and made that delivery right then.

It was Mother’s Day.

The following spring, I was at Kepler’s for a booksigning by Rachel Remen. I bought an extra copy of her “My Grandfather’s Blessings.” One of Dr. Remen’s patients had gone through similar circumstances and I knew it would help E to feel she wasn’t alone; someone else out there somewhere knew what it was like, more than I, with all my best intentions, ever could. I explained briefly to Dr. Remen, who inscribed it just for E, hoping, along with me, to offer her comfort.

I brought it to her on Mother’s Day.

And every year since then, I have gone to her house on that day with something by which to say, I remember. I’m thinking of you. I want to see you and I want to be with you for a moment on this day. The first time I ever got an amaryllis to bloom in May, its timing was just right, and I took it to E. On Mother’s Day.

Some pains are forever, but over time, the years add up, and E has the delightful distraction now of two small grandsons and the fact that her daughters live nearby, so she gets to see them all often. One of them pulled up with her family as E and I were talking. The joy has been quietly growing, and it’s been good to see and to be just a small part of it by making sure I visit on that day. Without fail. For this year, my plan had been to bring her a copy of my book.

“‘Bye, Mom!”

E had a vase full of flowers ready and a waiting dish of food she’d made me to gift me back with, and thank goodness I got there in time before the day was up. There was still daylight outside. Thank you, God, for speaking to my child when I wasn’t paying attention.

My attention might slip. But His hadn’t.

And now, what my children gave me for Mother’s Day: my own plum tree. My older son is flying in tonight and will be installing the drip system. It is a gift not only of fruit but of the attitude of looking to a future it once seemed I wouldn’t have, a chance to make plum jam from my very own tree again.

I absolutely can’t wait to bring some to E with the first crop that’s big enough for a batch.

I just spent five minutes outside at 10:30 am, talking to the guy working on my roof, and my left eye sight was starting to get wonky. It’s a very good thing we didn’t try that walk to the Faire, however badly I wanted to.

This faster-version Julia shawl took about eight hours to do, and it’s a good pattern for when I only had a single skein of Casbah merino/cashmere/nylon 80/10/10, because it repeats every right-side row: so you can stop at whatever row you need to and still have it look right. Since it’s a superwash-treated yarn, I’m thinking of it as the Eight Hour Mom Surprise (I’m suddenly picturing Elizabeth Zimmerman fans pelting me with small leftover balls of yarn.) Celebrate the mom as well as the baby, with something that won’t get outgrown. I do feel every new human that enters the world ought to have something created just for them, but I also know how much it can lift a mom’s spirits to have something pretty but that doesn’t require babying–she’s got enough on her hands. Although I would put it in a pillowcase before throwing it in the wash, definitely, and no dryer.

Meantime, yonder elder son is flying home shortly, but the letter just beat him to it. I was shaking my head, going, how can they summon a kid at university in the middle of their studies, when they’re a thousand miles away? How can they require the kid fork over for the plane ticket? He told me the real reason he was flying home now was, he was coming home to play with his mom for the little time we could have together and to “drive you to your little yarn stores and take you to see your little knitting friends.” Kid. 6’9″ you may be, but, I used to be bigger than you…

The letter came. He had me open it and read it over the phone as he waited. Dear… You are hereby excused from jury duty.

I guess they agreed that sequestering him during his honeymoon was going to be a bad idea.

Thank you, everybody, for your kind words and thoughts. I could picture my doctors breathing a sigh of relief that I didn’t get out into that crowd after all. And yes, I could really relate to Lene’s comment: there are occasional days where I just want to demand, can’t I just chuck this lupus/Crohn’s thing? Just for one day?! I used to walk miles every day at a brisk clip for the sheer enjoyment of taking in the world on a fine day out there. I might have risked that walk from the parking anyway, if it hadn’t been for the worry and pain it would have caused my Richard. But I just couldn’t do that to him.

But hey. All the more reason to look forward to Stephanie’s next book. She sent me encouragement when I was going nuts during the final proofs stage of my own book; she’s such a good soul.

I woke up this morning and looked up at my sweetie, already out of bed, and announced, “I’m going to pout.”

“Because you didn’t get to see Stephanie?”

“Yes!”

He hunched down so we were eye to eye: “Here, I’ll pout with you.” And he put on this little-boy face–you know, eyes narrowed down to here, lower lip stuck out to there, that made me burst out laughing. I’ve got me a good one.

I try to take good care of him, too.

(Added later: if you’re curious to see some of what was going on at the Maker Faire, these photos were taken by the family of commenter RobinM.  I want to see that helicopter fly–with me in it.)

First, the technical stuff. After I dyed that Fino in amaryllises the other day, I threw in a 25 g ball of Elann’s Baby Silk, the last one from making the original Peace shawl. There was still some color left in the pot, and when I had a few more wilting red blossoms a few days later, I threw them in to boil too. I don’t know if it was the aging of part of the batch, but the pink was gone and what was left was a deep rust color. Not much of it, but enough to do something with. This time, using merino sock yarn, it took up very nearly every bit of color. Does this mean wool takes up amaryllis better than alpaca or silk do? Seems that way. Silk always takes up dye a bit slower anyway, which is one reason I love dyeing a silk/animal fiber blend: you often get a heathery effect with zero effort.

Meantime, I got permission to share this from Tunie, one of my readers, as my son’s wedding nears. This is the best piece of advice to a bridal couple I think I’ve ever heard; I really like it. She specified after sending this that no words need be spoken, the gesture is understood as is:

“We are celebrating our 40th anniversary in June and I think being good friends (we’ve been best friends since age 16) is one of the keys to a happy marriage.

Something a friend told me when we were engaged helped a lot when we were first married. If during an argument you want to say you are sorry, but are too stubborn, angry or are afraid it will continue the argument, give the other person a glass of water (we used a special silver goblet). It means I want this unhappiness to be over and we can resume discussion when we are calm at a later time. But let’s not continue holding the anger. If the other person drinks it, the anger is suspended. Believe it or not, it worked for us. It didn’t matter who was at “fault”, just that the feeling was not what we wanted to continue.”

Then she mentioned that they used the silver goblet just to make sure a crystal one wouldn’t get broken. We’re all human.

I was going to blog about the silk shawl yesterday. The one I’d started Monday afternoon–I was going to finish that last purl row, do the cast off, and block it Thursday night and brag about it the next day. But I didn’t. I did take its unblocked picture Friday when I did cast off, but it stayed in the camera. Nancy sent me her amaryllis photo so I could post it, and thus, yesterday I ended up talking about her turtle instead; her turtle had always charmed me. You had to look carefully for it every time you walked into her house through the atrium, thus, every visitor was invested a little bit in its well-being. Cactuses just don’t have that same hardshelled charm; I miss it now that it’s gone. Fifteen minutes after I put its story up here, Nancy, not knowing I had, called me out of the blue and told me more about it, and that last line got added to yesterday’s post.

A friend of a friend lost her friend to an untimely death, and I followed the link to go offer my condolences. Nobody should have to suffer such a great loss alone, and it doesn’t matter if she knows me or not–I knew what that kind of pain is like, and that is enough. It behooved me to speak up, however briefly.

She followed the link back to my blog and was gobsmacked. She wrote to me about her friend’s having gone out of her way to rescue a turtle in the roadway. She told me she herself had seen a turtle in the roadway that morning, at a place she never would have expected, thought of her friend, and had rescued it, grateful for the chance to put it out of harm’s way.

And here I was writing about Nancy’s small box turtle. She took great comfort in that. It had somehow survived, it had been taken in, and it had continued long and well loved. I imagine it was as if her friend were wrapping her arm around her shoulders going, here, read this. It’s okay.

We’re all in this life thing together.

Meantime, this is noise by comparison, but, here’s yesterday’s photo, short and bunchy straight off the needles, and longer and smoothed-out and blocked, above. It’s the Michelle pattern from Wrapped in Comfort, in a 7/2 kind of crunchy-feeling handpaint silk, downsized and knitted on size 7 (4.5 mm) needles.

Someone was raving over their Addi needles, so I have to tell you the story of my Addis. My husband and I got married in 1980, when gold hit its then-all-time-high of $380 an ounce just at the time we were shopping for rings. We were students, romantically and completely broke like all young-in-loves ought to be. “Teaches you to live frugally,” my favorite old high school history teacher told me about starting out that way–my mom worked at that school, and I’d stopped by to say hi for old times’ sake before the wedding. (Hi again, Bill Cormeny, wherever you are out there.) Then he guffawed–“Teaches you poverty!”

Richard and his dad each had a bum tooth that had gone through a number of gold fillings, and his dad had collected the gold each time they’d been replaced. Dad Hyde had wanted to try playing with them for some time, and this was his chance. Their dentist went in on the project with him: they got our ring sizes, got some casts, melted those down–it was 20k, quite soft (22K?)–and created wedding bands for us that were plain and simple and like nobody else’s anywhere as far as we knew. It was quirky, it was creative, it was frugal, and I found it totally charming, other than that it felt like cheating that I wasn’t really giving him a ring from me so much as permission to wear that one.

So, with that mindset in the background of Richard feeling like gold was still somehow stratospherically expensive, when I found out that Addi was selling gold-plated knitting needles (which have since been discontinued), I plotted with my daughter, who’d been wondering what to give me for Christmas. They actually cost less than my beloved and now-also-discontinued Holz and Steins, and I could just picture knitting in waiting rooms and the like with them: talk about a way to open up a conversation with one’s knitting! Good as gold!

Not to mention. I opened that present on the day, trying to play innocent and not grin too hard at my frugal husband’s expense.

He totally fell for it. GOLD knitting needles! He was trying to bite his tongue, and totally failing at it. Isn’t that taking this knitting habit of yours a bit too–I mean, how could–Michelle…!

If only I had a video of his face just then to show the future grandkids. It was so priceless.

I’m writing this post as a message hopefully long into the future for two of my sister’s sons. This blog is, in many ways, my version of Randy Pausch’s book, having had an it-could-kill-me-tomorrow-and-nearly-did-yesterday disease for 18 years now. A friend of mine once remarked to me that the best gift a person could be given is a life-threatening disease and then to keep on living, and I would add, and to do so quite happily at that.

Speaking of Randy, I was watching his video about a month ago and my Richard came home from work, looked over my shoulder, and marvelled, “I know that guy! I sponsored some research at Carnegie Mellon, back at DEC…” Small world. Randy, if you see this, our prayers go out for you, your family, and your doctors, and I’m grateful for how you live your life.

Okay, back to the nephews. My sister and her family were visiting here from Atlanta back when those boys were four and a half, ten years ago. They are identical twins. I, being the doting aunt type, took lots of pictures of all her kids and gave Anne copies.

Anne looked them over–Chinatown, the redwoods at Muir, Stinson Beach, you know, got to get all the good touristy spots done–and she got this big wicked grin on her face, went over to the twins, and asked them, “Which one of you is in this picture?”

“Spencer,” said Spencer, in a tone of, like you even have to ask, Mom?

“TREVOR,” said Trevor, in a brotherly tone of, boy am I going to set YOU straight, dude.

“See! *YOU* can’t tell you apart! Now you can’t get mad at anybody else!”

And now, since I tend to see the world in wool or amaryllis, I want to show you guys: someday, one of you is going to get sick. It happens. It’s an ordinary part of the process called living. And the other one of you will wonder when that same Mack truck is going to smack you broadside too.

See these flowers in these two pictures? Born on the same stem, on the same plant. Identical twins. Do they have the same number of petals? Do they curl the same way? Are they even the same color? Do their stems bend the same degree? (Notice that I had to get under the first one to shoot it, while I could stay above the other.)

Trevor. Spencer. You have identical genes. Not outcomes.

(p.s. See those azaleas in the background? The nursery promised me they were all the same purple variety, cloned from the same original stock. I think rather those were fraternal twins at best, what would you say?)

Once upon a time, back before there were cell phones, children, back before there was IM or email, if you wanted to talk while on the road to someone outside your car, you pulled off the freeway looking for a phone booth, you stopped and propped your hood way up in the air, preferably with a white flag pleading for help attached to your car’s antenna–wait, don’t go away, let me tell you what those were–or, generally…you were a truck driver with a CB radio.

CBs had their own culture, so much so that I greatly hesitate to write about them, not being in on it, and when my husband bought one for our car when we were newlyweds, I wasn’t quite convinced I wanted that thing near us. It was kind of like getting a tattoo for your car. He talked about safety issues, and he really really wanted one. And so he bought one. I suspected, and time proved me right, that a good part of it was, the man does love his electronics–and his grandfather happened to have been a member of the Federal Radio Commission and was later chairman of the FCC, so, radio issues were near and dear to his heart to begin with.

So. We got married, he finished his master’s, we were moving across the country to the next grad school for him to start work on his PhD, and we were driving across the mountains in Nebraska with a decrepit old station wagon missing a few cylinders trying its level best to pull a small U-Haul.

Level best is fine where it’s flat and it’s sea level, but it didn’t work in the mountains. It did not help one bit that the highway was down to one lane for road construction at the longest, steepest uphill stretch of the road, so nobody could go around us, and the long-haul truckers were steaming. Richard flicked the CB on…and heard the guy right behind us tell his fellows exactly what he was going to do to that bleeping little matchbox in his way.

I wonder if the guy had noticed our extra antenna. Richard picked up the mike and said into it, “I’m peddling as fast as I can,” turned the thing off, and floored it as best as he could. Not that one could tell.

We are finally over the mountain. I have never ever finished the taxes so late. 1040, good buddy, over and out.

Maybe if he googles, somehow he’ll find this and I’ll get to reconnect after all these years and say hi. But I’m not going to breach his privacy by adding his last name in.

I was following some of Stephanie’s links, and came across this one. Scroll to the gorgeous steeked Norwegian sweater that the blogger had bought at a thrift store, even if it didn’t fit her–it was such a notable work of art, and for two dollars! My first thought was, your little girl will grow into that before you know it. It’s a cliche, but they do, little ones grow so fast.

My second, was, Jonathan.

I have no idea where in the world he is now. Jonathan was a lifeguard at the pool at the Betty Wright Swim Center, a place where you could only get in to swim with a doctor’s prescription to do so. I mentioned (shameless plug alert) in my book my going to swim therapy–Betty Wright is where I went for four years. Since everyone there had something going on that had brought them there, the place offered a deep sense of community; if a regular didn’t show for awhile, people started asking each other and the more outgoing ones would phone, just to make sure you were all right.

Most of the clientele was elderly. I was one of the babies of the group and my kids were little back then. My lupus diagnosis was quite new.

Then one day I happened across a garage sale at a church in our neighborhood and found a handknit Aran sweater, in the long lean style of the late 70’s at the time when the oversized 80’s had not finished fading into the future: knitted for someone tall and thin, well made, densely handknit on small needles proportionate to the yarn, quite warm. I had a 6’8″ husband and a 6’7″ uncle, so our kids were going to get height from both sides and our older boy looked like he had definitely gotten the tall genes. I looked at it and thought, I could put it away for ten years and wait, sure. At twenty-five cents? Goodness, if it only fit for ten minutes during his future growth spurt I’d still come out ahead!

So I bought it and carefully put it well away. There was certainly no hurry.

We were remodeling our old fixer-upper soon after. We packed up and moved into one end of the house while tearing apart the other, then six months later reversed the process. Everything not in immediate use was inside cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling. I’d written the contents on the outsides, but it seemed like every time someone dug through to retrieve something, what those boxes said and what they had no longer really matched, especially after a year.

One of the first complications I had had with my lupus had been the equivalent of a stroke that to this day messes with my visual memory, which before had been superb. It’s nowhere near as bad now as it was in those early days, when, on days when I was really tired, I wasn’t sure I could pick my own husband’s face out of a crowd if he held still–but give me the cues of his mannerisms, though, make him start talking and moving, and I had it. I remember my rheumatologist’s incredulous, “You recognize me by how I *WALK*?” I shrugged, Doesn’t everyone? When you don’t have the cue of the person’s voice? Worked for me.

So. I had one day where I was swimming laps, minding my own business, having a quiet morning and a little time off from the kids while my friend Lisa babysat them, when the thought came to me that I ought to offer Jonathan, one of the lifeguards, that sweater.

I resisted just a moment’s worth of strokes through the warm water, the thought passing through my mind in response, as if I were having a conversation, that, well, hey, I had been going to save that for my older son. The tall one. But the thought persisted, and it felt a happy one; okay, then. I’ll do it. I’ll offer him.

As soon as I decided to, I felt instantly quite cheerful and–this was so striking to me in the context of the recent and brutal-to-me agony over my new memory deficits–I knew EXACTLY where that sweater was! The box, the location, the sweater inside it. It had been moved, too, it turned out, from where I would have expected. But somehow I could picture it and I absolutely knew that my inner image was right. I couldn’t wait to see to confirm that. I mean, I just absolutely knew it was so, but, how, how could, and how did it get there… I hurried out of the pool, thanked Lisa, and ran to the spot.

Exactly there. Exactly inside. There it was. I wanted to jump up and down and shout for joy. Only thing is, I didn’t….really…know..why.

So now I was excited, but then how do you tamp that back down and go make the whole thing a reality without making a fool of yourself? And why should I? That, I had no idea of. Huh. Well, whatever, here goes.

I went back to Betty Wright. Jonathan was still there. I told him I had a beautiful handknit cream wool sweater, my only regret being that I hadn’t knitted it myself–I would have liked to have. But I thought it might fit him. Would he like me to get it? Would he like me to see if it might?

He was surprised, and touched, and said, warmly, Sure!

And so I gave it to him. I watched him handle it reverently, stroke its cabled textures, admire it, and put it on. And that moment he and I saw! If only its knitter could somehow have seen him. If only the knitter could somehow have known. It fit his long, tall, thin young frame absolutely perfectly. Not too tight on him at all. Not too long, not too short, not in the body, not in the sleeves, he totally Goldilocksed it. It was just right. And he loved that it had been created by some individual somewhere out of love for someone, and that he was somehow now the inheritor of that.

It wasn’t till awhile later, till he’d gotten over the surprise of it all, that he told me. Right before he left the second time.

His father had been a Jew from Iraq who had ended up in a WWII Japanese concentration camp (yes, Japanese). His mother had been English. He, with his lovely British accent, had actually been born and raised in Singapore, where, his parents not being native, he was not accepted as such either. He had no country to claim as home, no place to belong.

His father had come away from his wartime experiences angry at the very idea that there could be a God and if so that He’d let such things happen in His creation–no, there couldn’t be. And a loving God? With what he’d seen? Gimme a break.

Meantime, Jonathan got accepted into Stanford, got the lifeguard job as an internship part of his training, and hoped to settle in the US for good. This is a country that he could happily call home, if he worked hard enough.

And yet. He got a phone call one day from a friend in France, calling to say goodbye: calling to say he was about to kill himself. Jonathan desperately pleaded with him, no, no, wait till I can get there, I’ll be on the next plane, please let me see you, you’re my friend, I love you, you mean too much to me, please! He called whatever version of 911 there is in Paris, he called social services, he called everything he could think of, and then made good on his promise, spending every dime he had on the very next plane.

It worked. He saved his friend’s life. Last I heard, the fellow was hospitalized but at least had come around to see that he was glad for the intervention. Severe depression takes time and work at recovering from, but through Jonathan, he finally wanted to want to get better.

Jonathan returned here after a week and came back to his lifeguarding at the pool. The weather was getting cold. He told me later that he had looked in his closet wishing he owned a jacket, something warm, anything, and he simply didn’t own one. He had no money now to his name and no hope of doing a thing about it in his present circumstances. And he wondered, as he had many times in his life, if his father were right. He wondered if there was a God.

The very next morning, I was swimming those laps and suddenly picturing that box. That was the day I presented him with a custom-handknitted (even if the knitter never knew) warm, thick sweater that for this climate would work well for a jacket. From God’s hands to the knitter’s to his.

Jonathan’s abrupt departure caused a rift with one of his co-workers, and the upshot is that he lost his job. He lost his chance to stay at Stanford. He was forced to go back to Singapore, and where after that, I never knew. He lost everything he had been working towards, but he’d saved his friend’s life by giving his all for him.

I have prayed ever since that he would look at that sweater, wool from the hands of someone neither he nor I knew, each of us playing our part, and know who, at long last, he really was.

(This swatch’s worth isn’t a great shot of the colors, it’s still a bit damp in the blocking so I can’t move it near a window yet. It’s more a soft peachy-pink overall in real life.)

In the end, my pregnancy of this project only took two months; no back aches, no morning sickness, I’ve got nothing to complain about. I bought the superwash wool for it from my friend Karen the day she was closing up her shop for good, and I told her who I was going to knit it up for and why. She liked that. It gave her something to be happy about that day.

Which meant I felt obliged to make good on my word to her so that I could show it off to her and she could feel she’d played a part in the joy of the sharing. Which she had. I am debating blogging the little aside that the yarn was terribly splitty and thin and needed tiny needles and took forever and it was like knitting the world’s most monstrous sock for the tightness and it drove me nuts and hurt my hands. This baby was kicking me. Note that I did buy a competing superwash merino from Purlescence after I’d started and gave myself an out–I’m no angel. Heh.

And yet… Every time I stopped and really looked at the fabric that was coming out of my needles, I pictured it wrapped around Kathy’s baby. The Kathy in my book, my friend I grew up with, who’d just had her second baby. She told me that after the death of her father when we were in seventh grade, it had taken her awhile to learn to finally trust life enough to marry, to start a family. She was so glad she finally did. They had a little boy. And now they have a daughter, born near the time of my 49th birthday.

They named her Rachel.  After the grandfather she will only know through those who loved him, Ray. But that love is a powerful thing, and it does carry down through the ages, whether the person is present or no.

I have a lovely bit of wool here in its finished form, worth every minute of my time it took for it to come to be, to say so.

(Okay, this was actually funny, I had a mysterious ghost of a post when I hit publish–where did most of the text and one picture go? Cut and paste, let’s try again. Hey, up there, I hear you guffawing. This is what I wrote:)

Hey, Albert up there (don’t we all do that?) if you’re looking: it’s done. Not finished–it needs water, it needs the blocking wires to stretch it and show more clearly the pattern that is already there, in each stitch following along its proper path as it connects to the next one over, stitch by stitch, row by row–but the knitting part. It’s done now.

Thanks, friend.

I’m grieving, and today’s entry is sad. There’s a hero; there are villains. Skip it and wait till tomorrow’s, whatever it may be, if you’d rather; I certainly understand.

I wrote recently about my friends whom I brought dinner to when the wife had pneumonia, back when our kids were in elementary school together. Some may have noticed I put their first names in, when I did not do so for the other person in that story. It’s because Albert would have loved it, because that part of the story was complimentary to me. Writing about dinner is one thing; writing about the time in their lives when a caravan of satellite-uplink news vans was stalking their front door is another, and I have edited his wife’s name out now.

Albert would have been abashed, though, if he’d heard me mentioning the day they were late coming to our then-kindergartner sons’ school parade way back in the day, protesting that anyone else would have done the same thing: they were late. And when their car came to the tracks for the commuter trains that run up and down the Peninsula, the lights flashed and the warning gates came down, so they were going to be even more late. Well, crum.

There was a young mom with a toddler in a stroller on the sidewalk next to their car. Suddenly, she decided she was in too much of a hurry to wait, she could beat that train, just go. Albert and his wife stared in disbelief a moment, and then horror–the wheels of the stroller had gotten caught in the tracks. Stuck. The mom looked up at that oncoming train and froze, knowing full well in that instant what she had just done.

Albert instantly leaped out of their car, exclaiming, “She’s not going to make it!” while his wife sat frozen herself, sure she was about to witness the terrible death of all three. But Albert was an athlete, and he grabbed that stroller upwards and out while shouting at the mom, “I’ve got the baby!,” pulling her as well as her strapped-in child away just in the seconds the train was bearing down on them. It was right there. They were right there. Somehow they survived.

And they went on to the kindergarten parade. And the toddler, whoever it was, lived to see kindergarten himself. (Herself? Don’t know.) Plain old ordinary life. He would be in high school now. I wonder if his mother ever told him who saved him, and whether she saved the newspaper clippings of that day. I so much hope so. We all need true heroes, growing up.

When I was so ill at Stanford Hospital five years ago, I found comfort in praying for my friends, trying to keep my focus from being entirely centered around myself, that being one of the occupational hazards of being sick. I specifically prayed for Albert and his wife and their kids. It felt important that they be on my list. Enough so that I remember that, and I not long after that was marvelling over it with his wife.

What I’d had no idea of, was, Albert was in the emergency room at Stanford Hospital being treated one of those first few nights that I was doing that, probably at close to the same time. Because: that night, someone had reported a suspicious-looking man. The rookie cops had driven down the street, found a man sitting in his car, and decided he was clearly trouble. Because he was black. He was also 59. They later told the judge their behavior was justified because, when they’d ordered him to get out of his car–without cause or warrant or legality for the search they had decided to do–he’d opened it “too hard.” They beat him so viciously that, when he was finally able to tell me about the experience a year later, choking and tearing up at the memory, “I was sure I was never going to see my kids again.” His teenage kids needed him, and he hung onto that thought as the blows rained down, as they broke bone permanently out of his knee.

One of the by-then-grown kids he had once been a volunteer coach to happened by and saw it happen and recognized his beloved coach and testified against the cops. One Palo Alto Weekly newspaper account noted that half the children in the southern half of this city had had Albert coach them as a volunteer one time or another. He was good at that, he was a good man, he was actively committed to this community, and he cared deeply about all his kids.

Those two cops tried hard to find something they could charge him with but found themselves on criminal trial instead. Good. Albert worked hard at forgiving them completely and without reservation, actively praying for them, not half-heartedly; I told him I wanted to be him when I grew up. I think he did a far better job of that forgiving than I did. Me, I kept hoping those two cops would at least gain the basic human decency to apologize for what they did to my friend.

Last summer, Albert was playing basketball with his buddies, suddenly keeled over of a heart attack, and he was gone.

I still can’t fathom it. I still keep thinking I’ll run into him at the grocery store sometime. Or that I ought to stop by the high school.

He’d run our high school’s academic help center. I’d gone in there from time to quite infrequent time just to say hi for old times’ sake, and he loved the visits but the kids always came first. If any of them had a question or needed help, I had to wait. As well it should be. I remember his daughter coming in one day and watching his face light up when he saw her.

They are planting an oak tree in his name at that school today where my kids used to eat lunch outside. I want with all my soul to be there with them. I want to hug the family. I want the reunion and the tears that I know will be going on amongst so many old friends so dear and far too far with our kids now grown, to have the solace of company in my own grieving as well as to give solace. But you can’t rightly go to part of a memorial service, it’s got to be an all-or-nothing. I thought of all the things I can do, all the layers and sunscreens and shades and and and to protect me from the effects of the UV rays on my flaming autoimmunity, and I know from many years and many experiences with this lupus that I–just. can’t. go. Can’t be there for them. Not in person. It could be suicidal. It might very well cost me my eyesight. It could so easily put me back in the hospital with the Crohn’s when I’m on a last-ditch med already for it. It’s not *if* going would make me sick, it’s whether I would survive how sick it would make me.

His wife got a soft kid mohair lace shawl from me, large and cuddly and intricate and warm, probably half a dozen years ago. I will wrap thoughts of my dear friend Albert, of his wife, and of each of his children around me, and I will knit in his honor during the time of the ceremony, knitting on behalf of a young couple he would have loved had he gotten a chance to meet them. Two young people who have been through a hard time themselves and have been coming out the other side now to light and love. I will knit to continue the support that shows them they are deeply cared about. Albert would have loved that. Maybe I should bring them a chocolate cake, too. With sprinkles.

And I had not realized till I typed that last paragraph, I am knitting it in yarn that I dyed the same color as what I knitted for Albert’s wife. Somehow, that fits. And I did not realize till after I’d saved this draft to come back to later, that I had, for that matter, started the new shawl for that young wife in the same pattern as CH’s. Wow. We ARE all in this life thing together.

Goodbye, Albert Hopkins. You were a true friend always. This planet needs far more men like you, not one fewer.

“But, officer, it was really just way too big a stick for her, I was afraid she was going to trip and break her beak and then where would her babies be, I was just helping her out, honest…”

I put some wool roving out on the back patio a few weeks ago in anticipation of nesting season and waited. It stayed there. I thought that perhaps the dyed wool of previous years had been snatched up sooner (or was I trying too early), that maybe the red caught their attention better–I wondered, are birds colorblind?

Today I sat down to my emails and found myself being constantly distracted by jays and doves and shadows of who-knows-what flying sideways over and over across my vision; there are floor-to-ceiling windows to two sides in this room and a translucent awning on the patio just outside. And then suddenly I realized: the wool is gone.

I stopped and watched a mourning dove struggling with a stick that looked so big I didn’t see how she could possibly lift it, much less use it in a nest. But she wanted that one. She tried again and again, stubbing the end of it on the ground, not quite getting it balanced in her beak, not being able to simply open her wings yet and take off with it, not being willing to let it go despite the abundance of tiny twigs under that olive tree.

Then a large and brilliantly blue jay flew right in front of her, squawked loudly with its wings wide open, and rushed her. If that mousy little gray thing wants that one so bad it must be the best one in the yard. Mine. The dove spat out the stick, scuttling away fast. The bossy jay grabbed it in triumph and flew gleefully in the opposite direction. See? Not too heavy. Piece of cake. Mine.

Jay, honey, you are going to have fun when your kids are teenagers, with that kind of example to grow up by.

I went looking, then, and found some samples of carded wool so old that the sheep they’d come from had probably died of natural causes by now. I opened the little packages and pulled each one out. Sheep 101–now there’s a poetic name. 102, 103, …109. I pulled the almost-felted-by-now cottonballs of cotswald and romney and merino into fluffy bits and put them out on the patio.

The mourning dove watched me and who’d. Alright, bird. I hear you. I went back outside and moved some of the fluffs over to where that stick had been, safely further away from where the resident human perches.

So far she hasn’t come to it. But the jay did. It flew down away from the wool, *picked up a stick in its beak, dropped it, hopped closer, picked up another, repeat from * till length of time desired. It hopped to just shy of the wool, finally, considered a moment–what the heck was a herd of moorit and albino gophers doing here?–turned its head away, grabbed a tiny stick, and flew back off to the left like the first time.

Since I started typing this, I’ve seen two jays fly at it and consider it. Almost ready for it.

I’ll get you, my pretties, and your little friends too.

p.s. Lene, your amaryllis’s second bud just opened up. Here’s today’s shot of it. Happy spring!