Picture Carole King singing, “C’mon, c’mon and doooo, the cocoa-motion with me.” This is the still-stalled hot cocoa-inspired shawl of hand-dyed Malabrigo baby merino, waiting its turn in the knitting lineup.  I’ve got the pattern ideas all written up, I just have to finish actually doing it.

And yes, I do like my mug of hot cocoa in the brisk foggy mornings here. No worries about lacking cocoa anti-oxidants.

When my husband was living in France for two years as a missionary, he learned to appreciate blue cheese, Brie, and good European chocolate (not necessarily together), and the waxy Hershey’s type never had the same appeal for him again. Gradually he got me to see the light. And then, after we moved to California, two men decided that their latest start-up venture was going to be collecting antique chocolate manufacturing equipment from Europe a la Sandra Boynton‘s book “Chocolate: the Consuming Passion,” (you have SO got to get that little book, we laughed till we cried, over and over), to research the process, select the best cocoa beans, ferment them in the sun longer than Hershey’s lets theirs do, and to create the best chocolate in the world. Beat Valrhona! Go team go! Yay!

And so they did. Scharffenberger was set up in a building in Berkeley built just before the 1904 earthquake–how it survived that, I’ll never understand. Our friend Tom gathered up I think it was 30 interested people (it wasn’t hard; free samples?  Twist our arms) to carpool up together by appointment one Saturday as an official tour, and they opened the factory doors to us and took us through.

At the time, they had an employee whose job was to wrap every bar by hand: they’d bought a wrapping machine and been unable to fit it through the doors of the old place. Oops. Looking up at the ceiling, it wasn’t flat across, but rather an artsy wavy line in an up-and-down pattern, the likes of which I’ve never seen anywhere else–made entirely of bricks. I just heard everyone in California wince. Yes. Bricks crumble in earthquakes. Watch your head. And this is close to the San Francisco Bay, where the sandier land is more likely to amplify the shakes.

Anyway, I thought I’d never touch a Hershey bar again. But I took the kids on a tour of the Hershey plant in the Central Valley, where you pass by almond orchards on the way there, and I do have to admit that an extremely fresh Hershey almond bar eaten in the context of such an intensity of chocolate fumes is quite good.

I was at Trader Joe’s after Scharffenberger finally got a bar-wrapping machine going and their sales volume was markedly increasing, and a worker was wheeling over cases of the very first-ever Scharffenberger bars they were going to sell in that particular store.  Just as soon as the guy got those boxes open. I stood next to them, waiting (standing guard, if you really want to know) while he ran for a box cutter, and I got the very first bars to come out of the very first box.  Mine!  The guy handed them to me with the biggest grin on his face, watching me: I was like a little kid on Christmas morning. Timed that shopping trip right!

Later, trying to break into the upper-end chocolate market, Hershey’s, after swearing absolutely not to touch Scharffenberger’s way of doing things, bought them out, so I guess my Hershey count is greater than zero after all, not to mention that Sandra Boynton was right again. So far, though, still so good. So very good.  My daily morning mug would be Scharffenberger, too, but I can’t afford it.  Gotta leave some yarn money in the budget.

Blood test results:

Hershey’s: 0 (0%) Normal.

Scharffenberger Dark 7.2 (2.0-8.0) K/uL Normal.

Valrhona: 0 (60-80%) (We’re out, and so was Trader Joe’s) Definitely deficient.

Bergenfield’s Vintage Lacewood Organic Cocoa: 1200 (150-400) K/uL Heh.

I called Frances–five minutes, it turned out, before her scarf arrived in the mail, so she was at the happy anticipation stage. It was wonderful to hear her voice and say thank you more personally than an email can convey. You know how, some people, you meet them and you’re instantly friends? It felt like that. Thank you, Russell, for encouraging me to call, you both totally made my day.

————–

Time to go get the latest blood test. Hang on just a second, though, I’ve got this post to write first.

I was answering emails from that last post, and one friend back East was reminiscing over going to rodeos in Arizona. My husband had a good friend who grew up in the mountains above Salt Lake City, who rode the professional rodeo circuit for awhile like his dad had done.

Richard met Zane when they were both serving missions for the Mormon Church in France in the 70’s. Imagine being from a town so small I don’t think it had a stoplight, finding yourself in southern France–can you say culture shock?–and finding yourself assigned to work with someone from Washington, DC, whose parents had gone to parties at the Eisenhower White House. Who, it turned out, though, had worked on his grandparents’ ranch several summers growing up–in the next town down from your own. Who knew the places you knew, who knew some of the people you knew, who could swap stories on them with you. Small world.

We were visiting Zane at his folks’ ranch one day back when we were newlyweds. He wanted to show us his dad’s new buffalo. There was a field with a tall wooden fence and a sign on the gate saying that that buffalo could cross that field in X seconds. The owner could cross it in so many, and it was definitely fewer than X. Enter at your own risk.

I tell you, that beat any “Beware of dog” sign I ever saw. I was not at all sure about going in there. I mean, I was REALLY not sure. They had to talk me into it. Zane laughed good-naturedly at my city-slickeredness. I knew my husband actually knew how to milk a cow and rope a calf (he described it as, in his case, pointing the horse at the right one and letting it do most of the work while he hung on for dear life, it was the expert, not him), but it was all very exotic to me; the two men were having a grand time chatting and catching up on old times as we went in.

People! Feeding time! The buffalo way over yonder started ambling happily in our direction. I tell you–I catapulted over that fence faster than I knew I could go, I didn’t even open the gate, I wasn’t going to take a risk with fumbling over that latch, I was out of there! While the guys were cracking up. It just wanted a scratch behind its ears or some such thing, don’tcha know? Zane was calling after me. It’s friendly! Honest!

No, I don’t know thankyouverymuch. Nor was I waiting to find out.

You know, looking back all these years later, I could draw parallels to all sorts of things in life that have happened since then. I think I’ve learned how to wait and scratch behind the ears of things that used to frighten me, and keep on walking across that grassy pasture.

This Concert scarf is a little greener in real life, as is the pendant. I dyed the baby alpaca I used for it, adding green to what was a very light blue, and hoped it would match many a turquoise stone for her. I only wish I had handspun that particular yarn as well, but the lack of feeling in my fingertips makes spinning that fine a yarn a completely visual and very tiring task. Factory milled is still nice, soft stuff; I made the color my own.

I have for a long time aspired to own a piece of Frances Begay’s work. She is a gifted and well-known Navajo woman who creates jewelry the old way, selecting and then polishing her stones by hand, cutting and shaping her silver using 75-year-old traditional tools of the trade that others now pass on, nothing machined, nothing pre-cut. Turquoise and sterling from her hands is a work of finely-wrought art. As the daughter of an art dealer and as a handspinner, I appreciate the extra craftsmanship she puts into each piece.

I wrote to Frances and her husband a few times before I finally went ahead and bought this, and learned a few more details about how she goes about her work, letting her know how beautiful I thought it was.

Emerald Valley turquoise, greener than other pieces I owned (and then how it appears here), which I wanted. It’s large, and at 18 grams (I hesitate to say that; the sizes vary to match the stones), it’s quite hefty–my bluer turquoise pendant, for those who remember that post a good ways back, is 4 grams. Wearing Frances’s against my upper chest, it has a solid sense of presence, like the hug of a friend.

And this scarf is what I put in the mail in return, by way of thanking her, the price of the piece not reflecting at all how much I value what she made specifically for me after my order arrived. I like how the open zig zag areas of the scarf echo the shaping of the silver edging her stone, the more solid areas to the sides echoing the solid silver surrounding her circular coil. It seemed just the right pattern. Artist to artist. And now, friend to friend.

First, a quick bit re knitting: finished last night, church scarf of the week. One strand Geisha kid mohair/silk/nylon by Blue Moon Fiber Arts, and one strand of laceweight Zephyr silk/merino in I think Ruby, stretching some leftovers by knitting them together and using a larger needle.

Now, on to the rest:

Travel. See the world through the eyes of others.

I’m writing this down for the sake of the old friend from very way back that I talked to yesterday; you know who you are.

My cousin’s daughter was in India on a trip, and along the way had a host family that was naturally curious about this young foreign woman and asked her personal questions.

And then couldn’t bend their minds around the concept of being single: “You’re *twenty-six*? Don’t your parents know any nice young men?!”

She was, I’m sure, caught off guard, and tried to explain the concept of marrying for love: you know, you meet someone, you find you like them, they like you back, you find you have things in common, you come to like each other in that way… She described herself as blathering on, I’m sure feeling very awkward in the face of their stunned disbelief.

“Don’t you have friends?”

“Sure I have friends! I like lots of people! It’s just…”

They threw a feast, invited their friends, and the host introduced her to all: “I now understand why it is so hard to get married in America. This is F. In America, she likes lots of people, but nobody likes her back.”

To L. May I say in the greatest of innocence, lots of people like you back. Always did, friend.

Been awhile since the fingerpuppets from Peru made an appearance on the blog. I replenished the supply in my purse on impulse yesterday, just before I headed on over.

I’d called first. Could I borrow 30 seconds of his time, and when would I most not be getting in the way? We set a time. I came early. I wanted it to be at his convenience.

I’d dropped off that scarf for Dr. V a few weeks ago, but, as I explained to him yesterday, after blogging about Jim’s family driving six hours round trip to thank the medic/ski patrolman in person, I felt I ought to drive the six miles across town to thank him in person. When he’d spoken to our lupus group, he’d given me infinitely valuable information I’d needed to know, and it had made a difference. My eye doctor’s nurse had told me to put drops in my dry eyes, but I’d shrugged it off; mild discomfort didn’t bother me. Part of ordinary life. Nobody had ever drawn the connecting line for me between that and how my cornea had simply torn one day two months ago. Oh! Dr. V did. Drops it is. I owed him, bigtime.

He came out, we spoke just a moment; yes, I was the one that had dropped off the Carlsbad scarf. He smiled warmly, and said his daughter loved it. I chose not to ask him her age: I could picture a fourteen-year-old showing off to her friends a cool handdyed scarf knit by the actual designer, and I could picture a four-year-old playing dress-up. Either one would be happy with it. Either one would make me happy, being the mom of four myself, but I knew he wouldn’t know that and that he might feel put on the spot if she were indeed at the dress-up stage, so I simply said, “Cool!” And meant it. She liked it! Hey Mikey!

I opened my purse before taking my leave and gave him a small handful of those fingerpuppets. You’ve heard my spiel here before about the womens’ cooperative in Peru, the knitters putting food on their tables by making these, how I carry them around for crying babies met along the way and how easy it is to make them and their parents and everybody in a waiting room happy–everybody wins.

I told him, these were for cheering up small crying patients. He was charmed.

I didn’t take his time to tell him my own crying-baby-at-the-doctor story:

I was a young mom. My older son was pitching an all-out inconsolable, screaming, kicking fit, as only a two-year-old can do. He’d climbed onto the bottom shelf of a large coffee table at the doctor’s, a nice spot where he couldn’t damage anyone or anything, and went at it. I tried my best to comfort him, but he would have none of it, and I finally thought, well, he’s loud, but he’s not hurting anything.

An old woman watched, horrified, got up, came over to me, and declared, in a hissy fit to match my son’s, “That is the worst-behaved child I have ever seen in my life!” and left.

I sat there open-mouthed, speechless. But I got a rare chance that day: as we were leaving the clinic, she was sitting waiting for a prescription, and we were going to have to go past her anyway to reach the front door. I had by then had quite a bit of time to calm down myself, and I was sad for her at the fear I saw in her face as I walked up to her, my small children in tow.

I explained that my son (he was very tall for his age even then, and people were forever thinking he was older than he was) was two, and that I had been taking him back to the surgeon who had taken him away from his mommy and hurt him. And he knew it.

That was all. I turned away. I figured she just needed to know the context, and to see that I wasn’t mad, or she would stew all day, and why be burdened with that? I’ve got to admit, though, it felt good to tell her off, however nicely.

Going out the door seconds later, a middle-aged man I had never seen before nor noticed upstairs brushed past me, getting my attention, and he turned back to me and said, “I saw the whole thing. You were justified.” My eyes went wide–I had no idea!…Who?!… Someone out there who’d been a parent, who saw, who understood, and who took the time to make me feel better.

And in his honor and memory, whoever he is out there, I carry those fingerpuppets around for crying children. And remembering that surgeon, I gave some to Dr. V.

My original supplier has disappeared, but there are plenty to be found via Google or Ebay middlemen, still very inexpensive.

And everybody wins. Heck, I’ve given a few by now to little old ladies in waiting rooms.

I laughed out loud at the beginning of this video in recognition, thinking, were all dorm rules the same everywhere? I was warned in advance by my older siblings that the only cooking-type appliance that was going to be allowed in my college dorm was going to be a popcorn popper. The hot air poppers were yet to start appearing on the market in ’77; we’re talking the old-fashioned kind. Getting a popcorn popper was a rite of passage into college life. Plug it in and warm up some emergency-rations Campbell’s soup (remember when Campbell’s was pretty much all there was?) on a snowy night when the cafeteria was closed.

So I got me one. There was actually a small closet on the floor of the dorm where we were required to keep them, near the elevator door, I suppose to help the firemen get quickly to whatever idiocy some kid was likely to commit. I don’t remember anything else being stored there except vacuum cleaners. Build a room for popcorn poppers. What a concept to take to an architect.

I read a BBC article by a British journalist commenting on the amusing insanity that is the presidential election season in the US: like the campaign workers in one town in Iowa getting campaign funds to buy up all the snow shovels in town, so the other side wouldn’t have access to them, and volunteers using them to shovel out anybody whom they thought was going to vote for their candidate that night, bad weather not being allowed to get in the way. Of their side.

But one thing the guy wrote made me go google, and yup, it’s on video. What he did with his popcorn popper in college. I can’t imagine ADMITTING to it, much less *doing* it. Here, go see for yourself.

(Edited to go directly to the YouTube page.)

I talked to Nicholas’s mom at church. She filled me in on the rest of the story.

Nicholas got the rod taken out of his leg in January, got a follow-up later, and got the okay to go–okay, picture me starting to look wide-eyed at her, thinking, you didn’t! You are FAR braver souls than I!–skiing again.

I am *so* not a skiier. Never mind. On with the story. Jim emailed me so that I could have it in his words.

“I had contacted BT, the ski patrol/medic who had helped Nicholas at the scene of the accident. He was working that day, and we met him at the lift after we got our ski equipment. Now, I don’t imagine too many people come back and look up ski patrolmen. And yes, he was just doing his job, but we choose to believe that it was not entirely coincidental that he was very close by when Nicholas fell and was at his side almost immediately. He skied with us for about an hour, and it was fun getting to know him. He’s not your average ski bum: he has just been accepted to Stanford Medical School (among others)!

We went to tower #10 and took some pictures of where Nicholas had fallen. We have always said that it was a 30′ drop, but it’s actually a little higher than that, maybe 35′? Yikes! We loved riding the high-speed chairlift. BT showed us a few runs we hadn’t tried before, and then had to take off for work at a Reno hospital. We hope he ends up at Stanford.”

Boy, I do too. If ever/the next time that/ I’m a patient at Stanford, I’m hoping he’ll be one of the students that stops by so I can thank him too.

Imagine seeing that eight-year-old child falling off that ski lift. Imagine tending to him, knowing his parents are stuck on that lift and there’s nothing they can do but give their child up into your hands for the moment. Imagine seeing them flying down the slopes as soon as they can, with the boy’s little brother. Imagine radioing for an airlift helicopter, seeing Nicholas lying there, badly hurt but conscious and able to answer you.

Imagine, a year later, those parents bringing their son, alive, whole, with no brain damage, back, a three hour drive each way, to show you the outcome of the care you gave that day.

Imagine having that to look back on, later in your life, should burnout ever threaten your outlook on your giving care to others.

I looked at Nicholas, who was running around like any normal kid last Sunday, and thought in gratitude to a year ago when he’d fallen 30 feet off the ski lift just to the side of where the picture in that link was taken by his dad. Look at that shot of light there. That’s how it felt, seeing the grin on his face. You would never know now what he’d gone through, what his family had gone through.

I never did get to find out who this knitter was to thank him or her, though I did hear from a member of a knitting guild in Reno who was asking around, but whoever you are out there, thank you for giving a huge amount of comfort to everybody here; you made a tremendous difference when it was urgently needed, to Nicholas wrapped up in his afghan every day and to every person who saw him with it. And you will likely never know.

Time to get ready for church.  Happy Easter!

(Picture taken with my camera phone while that was all I had that was working. Pattern is the smaller version Water Turtles, knitted on size 6mm.)

I blogged awhile ago about the bright red cashmere yarn that Karen and her daughter Amy told me I had to buy when we were together at Stitches East last October in Baltimore. About my reluctance to buy something so expensive so very much not my color vs my internal struggle in thinking how perfect it would be for my friend Marguerite (but it wasn’t her turn!) and finally just going along with the peer pressure and buying it…not knowing that Marguerite had been diagnosed with breast cancer three days before and had told not a soul other than her husband.

Sometimes you find out fairly quickly like that. Sometimes it takes awhile longer.

The second day we were there, I saw some Fleece Artist merino fingering weight yarn that was just lovely, and had a hard time choosing between two colorways; I was only going to spring for one shawl’s worth. What I wouldn’t do now to have bought that bright blue and green in cashmere, too, though I don’t remember seeing any in stock there. So, sitting there debating and debating, I finally asked Karen, with the booth owner’s permission, to take one skein of each colorway and walk about 20 feet away from me. Karen walked towards a solid black curtained-off area, which made the perfect backdrop. As soon as she did, it was instantly clear: *that* one. Emphatically. Sometimes you need a little Claude Monet effect and to look at it from a distance.

Later, another friend saw a nearly identical merino yarn in another booth and nearly dove headfirst into it, much to my amusement. She totally loved it, exclaimed over it, fondled it–and then reluctantly put it back, saying something about budgets, it being the end of a day at the overload that is Stitches.

Heh. Guess what I had. I recently finished knitting it up, thinking how perfect it was going to be for her. I’d seen her reaction to it.

And then every time I went to the post office, intending to run multiple errands, I kept forgetting to take it with me. Dumb. I mean, really dumb. What was wrong with me on this one?

Wednesday afternoon at 4 pm I got an anguished email. Masses. I reminded her of Marguerite’s five masses, and how only one had turned out to actually be cancerous and that despite all that they had expected, it had not spread. I think everything’s going to turn out okay for her, too. If I have any say in the matter! Knitting as cancer cure! (Hey, it’s not biopsied yet. Might not even be what they think.)

This time, when I went to the post office, there was no question and no forgetting. And maybe I see why I did before. The timing now was right, the comfort it could provide was perhaps more intense by sending it now.

Steve, one of the clerks, waved hi and then looked at my face and asked, “Having a hard day today?” That surprised me; I didn’t think it was showing. I took a deep breath, knowing that he would want to know (I’ve lived in this town awhile, I prayed for him during his recent surgery) and explained to him what was in the package and why, and pleaded, “Please get it to her quickly for me.”

Priority mail, cross country, and this morning, a day and a half later, I got her email that it had come.

Go Steve go. Thank you.

Made me cry.

I think she did too.

Standing in the aisle at Costco last night, I called her name. She didn’t hear me. I yelled it–my voice can run faster than I can. She looked up with a start, saw me, ran over, and we threw our arms around each other for old times’ sake.

I’ve never had to meet C professionally. Thank goodness for that; she’s an ICU nurse. But we both have big families and our kids went to school together from kindergarten on up. In a state where the school buses pretty much disappeared with Proposition 13 in the ’70’s, most of the parents who are able to, meet their elementary-school kids at 3:00 and take them home. And those parents become good friends as they wait together for the bell to ring, year after year.

I remember running into Albert one day, which was a little unusual, and asking him where his wife CH was; she was home with pneumonia. I offered to bring over a dinner and make life a little easier for them for the day. Yes of course I think you can cook perfectly well, Albert, but wouldn’t it be nice to have one less thing to have to worry about just now?

He couldn’t get over it, as he happily accepted the offer; he kept asking why would I bother over them like that?

I blamed it on my church, and told him, If you were in my Mormon ward, that’s what I’d be doing, so, hey, what’s the difference? It’s what Mormons know how to do, culturally, to the point that we make a joke of it amongst ourselves sometimes. Bring dinner. How many to change a lightbulb? One to change it, three to bring refreshments.

I went all out on that one, bringing homemade bread and a chocolate cake to make their kids happy. Life is for celebrating, along with the chicken soup for his sick wife. Part of that was a nod to some folks at church who’d taken turns and had brought my family dinner three nights in a row, back when I had had a bad bout of pneumonia myself a few years earlier, each one bringing a gloriously-frosted cake; one of my kids a few weeks later had asked me if I could please get sick again–not really sick!–just enough that someone would bring them a cake like one of those again. Sprinkles on chocolate. Yum.

So I made chocolate cake for CH and Albert’s kids. Dessert comforts kids. Pay it forward.

That closeness in the elementary school days led to a sense of loss as our kids got older; we let go not only of our kids being little, but of our getting to see much of each other in the day-to-day as time went on. At the high school graduation of my youngest and C’s second-youngest, there were of course a bunch of us old Fairmeadow Elementary parents all in one place, and C pronounced, “We need a reunion party!”

And then she threw one. It was great fun. One of the old Fairmeadow teachers came, too. So C threw another party the next year, but Richard and I were on a plane that didn’t arrive home from Baltimore quite early enough that night last October and we missed it.

There at Costco, without a backyard full of guests for her to have to attend to, we had some free moments to talk, C, Richard, and me, and she stood back, took me in a moment, and allowed as how good I looked now and how so many of us–including me–never thought I’d live to see the day. But here I am, still.

Richard said something about how my book was doing well. I’ve got plans for the next two. I told her happily, “I’m not going anywhere!”

She mentioned that that scarf I’d knitted for her and given her at that party a year and a half ago, when she’d put it with a favorite dress of hers, it went so well that it looked like it had been dyed to match. She just loved it.

And you know? That’s it. It’s the tiny little miracles like that, day to day, that come when you try to make use of whatever you’re good at to make others’ lives a bit brighter, that help sustain the life and the love in us. I think every time I’ve seen someone’s face light up like that couple’s faces did on Sunday, it adds a year to my life.

C, it turned out, knows Ann’s parents well, and was blown away by the randomness of their granddaughter having met and now being about to marry our son. Small world. You knew, coming away from that conversation, that she was going to go tell them what a good kid their granddaughter was marrying.

Come to think of it, she might very likely have been one of the nurses attending to Conway, Ann’s father-in-law, after his heart attack. I don’t know that she would specifically remember him now, but he was in her unit, and he would have been in kind and good hands with her taking care of him.

It IS a small world.

Life is SO good.

Don’t miss the caption on that first picture. And hey, Lene, that stalk to the left? That’s the second one from your bulb.

There were a few years way back when where my knitting needles were on an extended vacation. But I did do a lot of smocking back then: I bought a pleater to gather up the fabric, which I then embroidered over to make fancy outfits for my babies and for my daughters for awhile longer.

When my youngest boy was just starting to walk and talk, I got in the mood to make some more smocked baby dresses, even though at that point there were going to be no more baby girls in this family; we were done. I made three. It somehow felt important to do.

My oldest sister, whom I’d thought was done too, suddenly announced she and her husband were expecting; I waited, wondering, and, yes, she had a girl. Tadaah! I forget now who got the second dress–it’ll come to me–and the third one was the most important of all.

A foreign student at Stanford found out she was about to become a single mother. She was from a culture where you didn’t, didn’t, didn’t do that. EVER. She didn’t know if or how she could return to her home country or what to do next. She could probably never marry there now. But she decided she couldn’t possibly give up the daughter she loved for adoption–that was her child. No. My friend Renee, who found out about her, found out that she took the baby home from the hospital with only a shoebox for a crib, and Renee asked around at church and managed to round up some essential supplies for her and, we dearly hoped, a sense of emotional support as well.

And I had that smocked baby dress, brand new, to give her for her baby girl. Something to celebrate her birth. I sent it via Renee with a card with the message that I felt that every new child in this world deserves to be celebrated with something handmade with love just for them. And that it had been: I’d just had to wait to find out who that baby was, at the time I was making it, and now I knew. It had been for her.

Renee moved, and I never knew how life turned out for that woman and her daughter. She would be about 18 now.

So often, life is like that. We don’t get to find out. We only get to know we played a part that mattered at the time when it was most needed.

Sid Schwab over at http://surgeonsblog.blogspot.com/ and his fellow doctors are talking about hospitalists and the changing roles of surgeons in the healthcare field.

I had never heard of hospitalists until the first one visited me at Stanford, five years ago. I saw several: the first one was warm and kind, but one was a young guy who refused to make eye contact with me; he simply mumbled a few things and beat it as fast as he could, leaving me feeling like he couldn’t wait to ditch the scene–I was an interruption and a bother and definitely not his patient. If this was what hospitalists were, I was upset at my own family practitioner for not showing up when I needed the comfort of her presence.

But the first hospitalist, Dr. C, made up for it. He came back. He saw me when I was too ill to sit up in bed for more than a minute or two, and again when I was doing somewhat better as the then-experimental Remicade gradually kicked in. He also happened to show up at a moment when I was trying to walk across the room and he was shocked to see how far gone my muscles were from the prolonged Crohn’s flare. He was determined to help me turn that around.

My older son, home from college, needed a doctor appointment about six weeks later, but had outgrown the pediatric department at our clinic and hadn’t yet picked out another doctor to go to; how do you know, when you don’t know them… He did know he wanted a male doctor and that my family practitioner therefore wasn’t going to do it for him. His dad’s doctor’s practice was full.

So they simply assigned him to whoever had an opening. The kid got off the phone and told me who it was, and I exclaimed, “REALLY! Can I come with you?” So the guy *did* have some regular patients as well as his hospitalist practice! I promised the kid I’d sit in the waiting room with my knitting, if only he would let me come in with him for the first minute or so.

Dr. C. opened the door and there was a moment of utter confusion in his face: the first thing he saw was a gray-haired woman sitting just inside the door knitting away on some lace, not the 19-year-old man his schedule had said. (He had not seen me as a knitter before; I’d been too ill to hold the needles.) And then it hit him: “It’s YOU!” Hair neatly combed and in place rather than askew, nicely dressed rather than in a hospital gown, doing just fine now, thanks–“LOOK at you!!!” He about danced on the spot, he was so excited. He just couldn’t get over it. Wow!!

I got a chance to tell him thank you for taking good care of me. Then I left the examining room and let him take care of my kid, who needed a physical, nothing exciting there.

And then to my surprise, he came out with my son when they were done and exclaimed over me some more; he needed to express again how very glad and very relieved he was to see me looking so well. Again, he exclaimed in delight, “LOOK at you!!” I noticed that even the receptionist was beaming; he was thrilled, and it was contagious.

Yeah, hospitalists are okay.

Me, my reaction to all that, was, I went home, picked up some laceweight merino, and knitted a thank you scarf for his wife. Wedding-ring fine, meaning you could pull it through a ring when I was done. Nothing less would do. And later, a handspun, super soft hat for their baby who arrived not too long after.

Aversion therapy in public. Can I help it if I (now that’s a little kid’s phrase if ever there was one) have short stumpy fingers?

Okay, credit Dawn at Because I Said So for sparking this one. I’m writing it down for my future grandchildren, who will, from about the age of six to 12, find it hysterically funny. (From 12-19, nothing from an adult is allowed to openly impress them and eye rolling is a required part of the code.)

I was at the DMV in Maryland, getting my license redone with my new name after I got married. They required an updated picture at the time.

I had a pair of somewhat bashed-up glasses that didn’t fit terribly well anymore, and I was forever mindlessly pushing them back up my nose. Only, I had a habit of pushing at the bridge.

The guy snapped my picture, looked at it, and in deepest sympathies told me, “You don’t want to look at this for the next five years, lady, let’s take it over.”

How often do you get a do-over at the DMV? But what was the problem, sir (there’s that “sir” again) , was my hand in the way just then?

Um, more than. He just silently waved me over and showed it to me.

It looked like I had my finger up my nose.

And now I readjust my glasses at the sides.

There was a bit of a buzz on the Knitlist about things to knit to donate for a silent auction, and someone said, make a felted bag; handbags are always in demand, and a one-of-a-kind one would be doubly so.

Ah, yes… (Cue to Back In The Day.)

It’s worn out and a bit flea bitten and I don’t know where it is at the moment, although I know it’s safely inside a plastic bag somewhere, but I have it. In its honor, here’s a photo of a handwoven wool-and-wood plant hanger I bought at a craft fair, the planks having been the roof of a circa-1800’s barn falling in on itself and recycled, that I fell in love with when I was 18. I used it for many years, and looking at it here, I think maybe I should bring it out of retirement. Anyway.

My husband was in his first post-grad-school job in New Hampshire. We had bought our first house at the very best interest rate then available in several years: 12.5% fixed. (It still makes me shudder. But we had neighbors with an ARM that hit 19%.) We had small babies and not a spare dime anywhere.

My folks, meantime, went to a craft fair in southern Virginia. Dad being an art dealer, they always love to see what people are creating, and they came across someone selling handbags from wool that I believe was handspun from their own sheep (right, Dad?) and handwoven, with a twisted-cord strap, done in the natural colors of the sheep. Dad bought Mom one; Mom had once tried handweaving herself when they were newlyweds and had made herself a couple of handbags, but had long since worn them out. Dad bought me one, too, in a slightly different pattern, probably thinking of my plant hanger and knowing I would like it; they sent it to me for my birthday.

I was thrilled. I was inordinately proud of the thing. Something made so much by hand, something nobody else in the world owned anything like, something that spoke to my upbringing in a household that valued the artist, and I took it with me quietly proudly to church and tried not to hold it up in the face of every person I encountered, demanding that they admire it too. (Joyce, do you remember this?)

The second week I had it, our Mormon bishop’s wife happened to walk into the chapel and one look at her stopped me dead in my tracks. I got her attention, church not having started yet, and barely able to speak the words for disbelief, asked her, “Where…did you get that?”

“Oh, isn’t this nice? My husband and I were on vacation and we were driving through southern Virginia, and we stumbled on this craft fair.”

She’d picked one in I think it was the same weaving pattern as mine, with a slight variation in the coloring; probably done on the same warp at the same time as mine, I’d guess. Out of all the people in all the places on all the planet, and all the choices at that craft fair, for that matter, what were the chances…

One could say God definitely has a sense of humor. And a tendency, like any good parent, to tell me not to get too full of myself. It still makes me laugh, all these years later.