Old story, but… Our honeymoon, in a comic strip. For us it was marshmallows being toasted over a fire. Just one skunk at first–but it came up right between us and was brushing its tail against my new husband’s arm as it reached over the fire and settled our surprisingly emphatically held opinions over whether a fast burn-and-crisp-and-melt (me!) or a slow browning (him) was the proper way to campfire the thing.

His slightly browned one was it, thankyouverymuchdon’tmindifIdo.

While his face silently begged with everything that was in him at me not to laugh. Pleeeeeeeeeease?!!!

We left the bag on the picnic table as we edged away after it was done. It called its best buddies over and the four of them threw a party. They ate them raw. Heathens.

Good times.

We did it, we finally did it. We talked about it at Christmas when they had a good deal but there were too many unknowns in the air re the other lines on our account.

Verizon has non-stop promotions, says he, they’ll still have this up after Christmas.

Nope. They had offers, just not of the ones we wanted anymore. I checked almost daily.

Yesterday they changed that.

The one thing I needed to know was, would the heavier phone be too much for my hands.

It was raining. That is absolutely when you want to go to Verizon during a good promotion. We learned that lesson long ago.

The display models were leashed to the wall with a bulky apparatus covering most of the sides so you couldn’t really tell what the heft of the phone itself would be, and I lamented that fact.

The saleswoman, who was clearly enjoying the fact that we were the only customers in there so she didn’t have to be pulled in multiple directions at once, thought about that a moment.

And said, Well, I can’t hand you a 16. But I can hand you a 16 Pro: mine, and she did.

It has a better camera, it has better battery power, it’s a little longer but not much wider–but it’s an ounce heavier and the moment I hefted it I instantly knew the one thing I’d had to know: would holding those 7.03 ounces, like during the two hours of reading captions in church, damage my ability to knit as many hours as I wanted to.

The answer was yes. I thanked her very much, gave her back her phone, and she rang up the 16. Which currently is free with my trade-in (which made her laugh when I told her it was an iPhone 6) and that three-year commitment not to switch to their competitor. Fine by me.

But we both upgraded on memory (but it doesn’t have to be teal! You wanted teal, get the teal) which means the models weren’t in stock. (The future Otterbox will cover that teal right over.)

Well, if you’re going to twiddle your thumbs while you wait for the mail you might as well be using them to knit. Got six rows done today.

Earworms: the music memes of the brain. After being stuck with one long enough, he transferred it to his mouth and then I got stuck with it. I hadn’t heard that one in decades.

Thus the following conversation:

‘Old Screwball was a racehorse,’ he sang.

Stewball. I still heard consonants when I was a kid, that’s a t, I told him.

I always thought it was Screwball, he insisted.

I went and looked it up. Nope. Stew not screw.

He was trying to remember some of the words in a later verse.

It’s, ‘I bet on the silver, I bet on the bay, if I’d a bet on old Stewball, I’d be a free man today.’ I always assumed that meant a slave wishing he’d been able to buy his freedom.

Is THAT what it means?!

I always thought so. (There are reminders of that hellish institution where we grew up, including a blacksmith shop just down Seven Locks Road that was used by George Washington.)

Turns out it’s an old folk ballad about a real race. Peter Paul and Mary recorded the version we knew growing up, but Stewball was an actual racehorse and the song was sung by, among many others, slaves in chain gangs dreaming of freedom. My heart broke a little reading that.

1741. How many horses, I asked him, have been so famous that 300 years later we know what year he was born?

Not many, says he.

He’ll even sing it as Stewball, just for me.

Remember that truly brilliant idea someone gave me to freeze a paper cup of water and then put a penny on top, so that if you ever had a power outage happen while you were away you could check to see if your frozen foods had thawed and then refrozen and were unsafe?

I kept thinking the last few months that evaporation was getting to mine and that I really ought to refill that cup, but the penny was frozen onto the top and, eh. It’s cool.

The door on our garage freezer bounced slightly open and was apparently like that overnight–on a night that hit 31F. (Unless we had a very small earthquake that shook it ajar. Dunno.)

There was this moment of horror, followed by the realization that I could actually know something about the effects: check the penny!

It had slipped to the edge of the cup and then slid down the side and was frozen in place upright. The door had not been closed yet but the ice seemed solid. The food seemed solid, even the bag of cranberries on the door right next to that cup. Small things thaw faster, exposed things certainly do, and they weren’t.

Lucked out.

Never seen them before.

Old enough to walk. Not old enough to talk. Starting to be fussy.

(Let’s see, I’m overdue to order more but, checking, oh good yes I do.)

Then I saw her brother.

Then her dad walked up with the oldest and they, too, sat down in front of us, along with what were clearly his wife’s parents, given that their ancestry was multi continental. Three kids in five years with one on the way.

The second kid started fussing a little too to match his sister and the meeting hadn’t even started yet. You know I had an answer to that, (oh good I did have three in there) and I reached over the pew and told the mom, Happy Birthday!

The middle kid, half an hour later, did something I’ve never seen any kid do before with one of those finger puppets: he worked out the woven-in end on his ladybug, got it out to a good foot long and yo-yo’d it and then hey, better than that, let’s twirl it around and around and around!

Which was fun. But. His mom intuited how quickly that could escalate on a three-way matchup and put a stop to it. Awhile later he got his ladybug back and obediently did not twirl it. Except once. Because that is what you do when you’re three. You experiment to see if your parent meant it and are relieved to learn that they did and that a rule is a rule to live by. So you could know what to do and not do and what to expect even if you didn’t yet know all the huge WHYYYyyyys behind everything and the world felt a little safer.

When the meeting was over (eternity o’clock by little kid time), she turned to thank me and we introduced ourselves.

I told her she reminded me of me our first year here. I told her they were doing a great job.

We drove home with me remembering time after time when some older person had said that to me, back when my kids were little, and how much I’d held onto that, knowing they were just being their new-to-this-world selves and driving me quite bonkers. I hoped those good folks knew I’d someday be thanking them by passing it on when it came my turn.

They’d made my emotional world feel a lot safer.

It’s late, we’re home, and we got to listen to a Tongan choir tonight.

One thing I like about living here, you get to meet people from all over the world. Sometimes you even get to hear them sing, in a language I do not know nevertheless fully shared in the music and the faces of the choir that was giving of themselves and their time to bring those notes to the rest of us.

It’s been in the low 30s at night and in the morning the family room has been very cold. Jacket required.

Richard got a box that came with much-regretted large pieces of foam and styrofoam padding. Non recyclable. Has to go in what is a very small trash can out there. I could drive it to another city and pay for it to go away, or we could just break off pieces and squish them in there over the course of at least a month if not two because man do those take up space.

I started with the two smallest pieces that didn’t need breaking down.

On impulse Monday night I put one of the big ones against the doorframe to the garage. We’ve never had mice in the house, but that rubber sweeper piece across the bottom of the door surely wouldn’t be enough to stop them if they wanted to badly enough so why not. The block came an inch short of filling the frame so I jammed in a smaller piece sideways at the bottom and what the heck, went and put another big piece on top of the first. Costco-sized un-rice cakes for rodents.

It did not make me the top home decorator of all time but at least it amused me.

I walked in that room the next morning and to my great surprise it was nearly the same temp as the bedrooms.

Huh. We don’t have that problem with the front door. But we do there. I had always thought it was all the window space, but those are double-paned and it’s clearly the door.

I stopped throwing away the foam for the moment while trying to decide: how on earth do you insulate a door for real? The freezer’s right on the other side, so we go through there all the time with our hands full and minds preoccupied; you wouldn’t want a wallhanging swinging in your face and catching on your frozen foods.

Meantime, that foam effect is definitely being real (I was starting to get cold at 8:00 pm and went oh, right) and I set them back up every evening now. So glamorous. Just don’t look.

I gotta do something about this. Somehow.

It was a do you know somebody who knows somebody question, and in fact I did and they were happy to reach out and offer info and I’m hoping that works out.

Meantime, from someone else, did I have this person’s number? I did, and would you help this other person with…? He would.

Next: Would you say a prayer for, and of course I would and did and suddenly had a thought of something I could actually do that sounded really good that hadn’t occurred to me but was so obvious once I did so I did, and I’m hoping that turns out well for person four (or whatever number we’re on at this point.)

A busy day of logistics. A day of people looking out for others, some they knew, some they didn’t, just because they could.

A day of increasing hope.

Judging, wrote Carolyn Hax recently, is carbs for the ego: so satisfying at first but so easy to overdo.

And yet.

It is unfathomable that the day we remember and celebrate all that was good and noble and idealistic about Martin Luther King and his appeal to the best in our natures was the day we let the felon-in-chief back into the White House.

I do not want to see that face again. I do not ever want to hear that voice again. And yet, he’s managed to guarantee himself endless hourly media attention–again.

Any time he says something outlandish, the latest being wanting to steal the Panama Canal or invading Greenland–pay attention to what he doesn’t want you to see that he’s actually doing. It’s a tell, and it always was.

So to avoid all that I put in hours on the afghan. Six rows is the most I’ve done in a day, given that it’s such slow going. But in between I had to rest my hands, and would find email notifications; some, I just had to go look.

The richest oligarchs across the front row and the average joe left outside in the cold weather, no surprise there. Elon Musk, South African son of apartheid who came here illegally on a student visa because he never showed up at Stanford but stayed anyway, raising a Nazi salute–twice–not only in public but on camera in celebration of our newly sworn in racist-in-chief: that is staggering to the daughter of a man who put his life on the line to save the world from Hitler.

And it is so deeply sad to see those two in particular who have forsaken not just all those wives but the sense that we must all matter to each other in their zeal for power and money. If they had been in that Pacific Palisades fire like my sister, would they have cared what color the firemen who rescued them were? What *their* immigration status was?

In the end, which will come for them, too, everything they’re grasping at will become utterly nothing, and what on earth will they have then?

Nina threw herself a birthday party and invited her friends. She told me to bring my knitting so she could work on hers. So I did.

I pulled mine out first, a white lace cowl in Malabrigo Rios at about the 2/3 mark, and then she showed off her much more elaborate project. Gorgeous. Another friend there was also a knitter. And one said with some regret that it had skipped a generation and she didn’t–but she took a picture of what I was working on to send to her (daughter I think? It was loud in there) because she so admired it.

Turns out she was the woman who had translated all those letters Nina had found in her mother’s closet that had been sent back and forth between relatives in concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Pattern repeat #12, done. (Checking the time) it really needs at least one more after that, all I can hope for is she doesn’t leave early. She and someone else got quite into a conversation–good, good, keep talking, guys.

Repeat #13 got done. That’s shorter than I normally  prefer but it was just long enough to look okay to my eyes. I cast off.

Sitting next to me looking the other way as they talked, she didn’t notice at all.

I retrieved my purse, where there’s always a yarn needle in the change pocket of the wallet. I sat down on the floor in the kitchen where I knew her view of me would be blocked and wove those ends in. I should have some folding scissors in there somewhere… No sign of them. I asked Nina. She got hers and snipped those two little umbilical cords to its beginnings off and the thing was born.

The interpreter of those letters was dumbfounded. And ecstatic.

I explained that its nubbly texture would disappear and the lace lie flat and stretch out the moment it touched water, it’s the nature of the thing.

Totally fine by her, and she put it on and hugged me.

She took it off again to stroke the softness of the Rios.

And at last she did leave a little early, like I’d had a feeling she might.

I was a little wistful that I didn’t have one to give to any of the other friends but they all said that for all those hours she’d put into doing that great gift for our Nina and her family she had earned every stitch of it. And she had.

Nina said as we were leaving, That was the right person for that. That was perfect.

Like several hundred thousand others, I canceled my Washington Post subscription when Bezos interfered as he had promised the Graham family on buying it that he would never do, and killed its editorial endorsing Kamala Harris.

And then he flew to that place that had had the stolen–they were, they belonged to the National Archives, ie us–top-secret documents in strewed boxes in a gaudy chandeliered bathroom. To go kowtow to autocracy in person to show that he meant it.

But Jennifer Rubin, a fine legal mind, still wrote there. So did Dana Milbank and Alexandra Petri and Eugene Robinson. Robin Givhan, I want to read anything she writes. Monica Hesse, too. Oh wait they just eliminated her position.

Milbank wrote a passionate piece in defense of continuing to support the Post in spite of its owner (who let them publish that.) With very mixed feelings, I resubscribed.

It’s my hometown paper. It’s the one that reported NIH’s weekly press conference on the latest discoveries in the world of medicine when I was a kid and I looked forward to that every Wednesday. Watergate. Meg Greenfield. Didn’t find out till after she died of cancer that the reason she’d always had the inside story on what Washington insiders were thinking was because she regularly threw grand parties at her Georgetown house in DC and mixed all kinds of people in politics together at the table. Katherine Graham’s autobiography. Woodward and Bernstein. This was and had always been MY paper.

But now it’s the place that fired Wesley Lowery for writing too well about a white cop killing an unarmed black man.

So I was thrilled today to find out–not from the Post, which still hasn’t announced that Ann Telnaes angrily resigned after they refused to run her editorial cartoon blasting the obsequiousness of the various billionaires seeking the felon-elect’s approval–that now Jennifer Rubin is out.

And not just resigned! A new (online) paper! Norm Eisen, her co-founder of The Contrarian, was legal counsel to the first impeachment hearing. Look at this list! (scroll down to see it) of people who’ve signed on to write with them!

Completely subscriber-funded.

I know a quarter million like-minded people who would be interested, just for starters…

It’s like Katherine Graham, who embarrassed her atheist parents as a kid by asking one of her friends who this Jesus guy was and why was he a big deal because she’d heard his name but had no idea, just figured out how to do this resurrection thing. Of something she’d made her life’s work.

I am really hopeful about this. I hadn’t quite realized how much I’d needed that. Man, it feels good. Power will be met by truth after all.

The microphone wasn’t working and I couldn’t hear a thing and the Zoom seemed to be turned off during the second meeting because the mic wasn’t working and there was a borrowed temporary setup and the program’s attempts at captions earlier had been utter gobbledygook.

I got pulled away a moment and on coming back in at the rear found myself sitting in the way back so as not to interrupt.

Not at first, but eventually, I pulled out my carry-around project and hoped I wouldn’t bother anybody but there was no reason to waste the time and just sit there. I don’t usually knit in church. I knit in church.  Just not the main meeting.

Later I put in my two rows on the afghan and then played with colors to see what should come next. The sun sneaked off with their intensities though and I put the project on hold till it brings them back tomorrow and apologizes for the theft. Sunsets are like that. You’ve got to watch them.

I did my knitting group Zoom with my carry-around project in hand till my wrists needed a rest.

I sat at my computer awhile thinking, but nothing happened today. I didn’t do anything.

And half a merino cowl sitting there eyed me with a wry, And what am I? Chopped sliver?

It had such a pull on me and I tried to figure out why. Yes it had the curved shape I prefer: for twenty years now I’ve used a shepherd’s crook-style cane and twirled it like a cheerleader with a baton to shift it onto my arm when I need my hands free; it’s just an extension of my body by now. Plain, practical–and the wood was starting to crack at the curve right where the weight of my hand goes.

So I ordered a pretty one. I love it. But you can’t twirl it, you have to hold it, and I find it easy to accidentally drop. (Not a friendly-looking move.) Reluctantly I find I save it for church. As I said to Richard today, Sometimes you find what you need by buying the wrong thing first. (Although I do not regret that one, even if it’s unwieldy when you’re not actually walking.)

So yeah, this one was cool and it reminded me of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and it had a long enough of a curve–hopefully–not to fall off my arm doing cool cheerleader moves.

But since its artist was in Ukraine there was no way to try it out without paying for it.

There was a video on one of the listings of the guy whittling away at the wood to create his designs: the (sold out for now) Great Blue whale at the crest of a wave. There’s a shark with teeth, a more simply carved killer whale.

Or a gentle blue dolphin.

I didn’t *need* this. Although, for the price, I could get another cheap rustic crooked crook probably from China just like the old. Meh.

I debated for a week before finally caving.

It wasn’t till ten days later after checking the tracking many a time that I realized why it had been so compelling.

That was three days after I had finally started working on the abandoned afghan again. The indecipherable red blob whose chart and plans were long gone had by then morphed into a fish I really liked, the whole thing finally taking on life and becoming delightful to my hands and eyes. I had needed that for so long.

It was the cane that did it. And I hadn’t even laid eyes on it in person yet. Maestro Syvatoslav Lashkiv’s art had at long last offered the spark to revive my own. Since I began it several years ago I’ve thought this afghan would need a dolphin near the top of the water, like the previously knit ocean, because, well, I like dolphins.

I kind of held my breath hoping the cane would live up to my hopes, too.

It came today. The blues swirl down its back like light on the movement of the waves. Like the ocean itself laid out before the eyes of all those grieving homeowners in LA: the Pacific is still there for them. The tides, the sounds, the water, stillness and motion all in one.

It always will be.

Unasked for but included was an unobtrusive arm band to attach if I wanted to, or not, so that this cane will never have to be dropped. But the choice is left up to me.

Our niece’s childhood home, per fire reports given the family, is gone.

My nephew has a mother-in-law unit downstairs that walks out to their garden, a beautiful spot; last Monday my sister and her husband were there from Atlanta helping our mom to move in. Mom is great at taking care of herself but at 94 she needs not to be alone anymore. Her young great-grands are looking forward to having someone who’s not their mom helping them with their homework and reading to them, and my niece-in-law is a treasure. So’s her husband.

They also own a house in southern California that is a rental, which I totally get: it is an aphorism here that if you ever sell your house in California you can never afford to move back. So. It had a plumbing problem.

So said nephew left Gram in his wife’s good hands and flew with his folks to fix that thing and my sister was looking forward to a little California in January.

Which is how she found herself taking pictures today as the smoke came closer and they were packing the car and then suddenly the fire itself leaped over the mountain top and came barreling down at them from less than a mile away in the Santa Ana winds as they rushed to evacuate. They were turned back three times because of the spreading flames. Official guidance: Go this way! No, no wait, don’t! Traffic was gridlocked.

It took them four hours to get off that mountain and get the wildfire behind them. But they did it. Our niece, meantime, had booked them a hotel room from the get-go so they had a place to land.

I debated adding one of my sister’s pictures here and thought, nah, the last thing she needs right now is me pestering her for permission, that is just not something she should have to worry about right now.

I don’t know how long it will be before we know if the house is gone–but they are safe. As of this typing there are zero known deaths from the fire. Praise be.