A year ago, we were delayed after boarding, it was raining, there were accidents on the freeway coming from the airport, and we finally pulled off at an exit and went looking for a food establishment, any food establishment.

We found an ice cream shop. Richard hesitated a moment and I said, Calories. I didn’t care what kind at that point, just, we needed to get something in us fast and get back out on the road. The app said that under current conditions we had an hour to go.

There was a young couple waiting while our order was coned up trying to manage two small children, and the usual finger puppets came out for a happy distraction.

I mentioned that other than airline pretzels we hadn’t eaten since 11:00 a.m.

The dad’s eyes went big: nine hours, if I remember correctly. I could just picture him imagining trying to get through that with his kids as he went, Oh wow.

So. Not doing that again.

It’s easy to find small packages of junk food, but I was hoping for at least some protein. There’s a brand of Korean barbecue jerky that doesn’t use nitrates or nitrites nor is it tough (usually). Costco sells it in mega-packages. I wanted single serving.

There they are, they do exist!

It came today. Amazon said so, with a picture as proof.

I picked up the small package that had USA added to my address, wondering, what on earth? Who is this from? Why?

I just hope the person who ordered the zipped hardshell book holder wristlet with an inner compartment for a wallet substitute (that’s all I can figure this thing is) isn’t being a horrified vegetarian right now.

Baked my own answer to the dilemma. Now I just have to figure out how to get my cranberry/orange/almond flour muffins onboard (like I have enough space for that?) without having them fall apart. Probably way healthier anyway.

And the answer: not cancer. No worries.

And then I got so caught up in looking at my children’s Christmas wish lists that I forgot to post this last night. ‘Tis the season. Happy Thanksgiving!

The New York Times had an article on how to talk at Thanksgiving to people that you want to get to know better–basically, that you want to hear something positive from. Mercifully, it did not directly reference Nov. 5th.

One could ask things like, Who is someone you only ever saw once who made a difference?

It was a year ago, wasn’t it? We were flying into Seattle. The woman next to me was studying my hands as I knit, every motion–affirming when I caught her eye that she had long wanted to learn how.

She lived in San Diego. Her son, an adult now, lived in Seattle. She was so proud of him; she missed him so much.

She admitted late in the flight that he had offered to take her the next day to shop for a hat. It was going to be quite cold and she simply didn’t own one. She’d gotten the jacket in time at least.

Which matched the hat on my needles. I scrambled to finish it and work the ends in before we landed and I did it. I did it. They could enjoy their time together without having to work through crowds and cashiers and all that if they didn’t want to.

She is the one who made so much of a difference to me.

Every time I see the Mecha skeins in the store now, I think of her deep appreciation and want the next person to be that thrilled. With the colors, with the soft wool, with being thought of and found knitworthy.

I want to ask her if she ever took those knitting lessons, to revel in her successes. I hope that she gets to experience from someone else how she had blessed me.

A week ago, needing a new carry-around project now that the baby blanket was too big for that, what landed on my needles was yet another boring old plain washable wool Mecha hat. It’s like type O- blood: the universal donor.

I finished knitting it a few minutes ago and I’m about to start another. Even around here, a warm hat on a cold day can make all the difference to someone.

Maybe she’ll fly to see her son this year, too.

We saw the truck a few days ago: not the classic moving van, but bigger than, say, an Amazon truck, so who knows if it was a washing machine or a household.

Their cars arrived and the lights came on. Hey.

You don’t get in someone’s way on moving day. Or the day after, or after, but, but… A few minutes the Saturday after that might do?

The husband opened the door. I was certainly not expecting blond, and I don’t know what he was expecting but it clearly wasn’t a white-haired woman holding out a bag, but we got past that quickly.

I’d misheard in that brief moment meeting his wife in the dark on the sidewalk last month: the baby is actually two now, and he is adorable. There is no smile that melts a person like a toddler’s who is running towards you.

I told the little guy’s mom that if she’d prefer a shawl I had two more skeins and the dye lot was almostalmostalmost a total match to the baby blanket.

The husband grew up about 150 miles from where we did.

And she’s a knitter! Oh my heart. We DID get the most perfect neighbors!

Appointment: Monday. Yay.

Meantime, I was thumbing through the city’s Adult Ed class brochure they sent everybody today. Knitting classes! Meant for beginners and the more advanced alike, the latter being asked to bring their projects to work on. Fee: $160.

Now that’s called paying for a compliment.

Cooking classes. Learn to make Belgian chocolates? How to temper on a slab of marble? Sounds like fun, but I could fund a lot of trips to Dandelion in San Francisco for that much, and I already make my own actual chocolate bars. Sometimes. (Flips page.)

Python cooking.

Staggered doubletake.

Python CODING.

While Richard is already grinning, Yeah, you have to fillet it yourself.

Where could you even lay out 18 feet of such a thing. I know! You could wrap it around the kitchen. Avoid Florida-ted water. Don’t forget the Everglaze.

I remember as a kid being warned to put sunscreen on or I’d get skin cancer–at a time when nobody I knew actually wore it and getting a tan, which I could never have pulled off even if my freckles had decided to unionize, was something of a social requirement.

Sunblock was not even the word yet.

Whatever anyone said to me about sun exposure hazards at the time, I remember a mixture of inability to believe in it because being actually old enough for that to happen was beyond my imagination, and of feeling a little bit indignant at this vision of a future me I’d never met who was old. Which I most emphatically was not.

But who would want to hold me accountable for what I was doing as a kid, ie, running around and playing outside. As one does. How could I ever be her? And who was she to boss me around? Or to make me feel guilty?

Granted, Sandy down the street liked to sunbathe on that vinyl chaise-lounge by her mom’s rose patch and I knew all I would do is fry and hurt if I tried that. Not to mention I was not one to hold still. Hiking in the woods was my favorite thing.

I wonder if this would have worked better: laughing at pictures of how funny future me could look like. Still with my hair below my shoulders (go me!) but with this scar at the top of my scalp, imprinted like a baby’s fontanelle. (Here, feel that. Like a thumbprint!) And what it does is, any remaining hair there starting a new round of growing shoots straight up into the sky. Which looks really weird while the rest is mildly curly. Finally, months later, it gets long enough to flop over but it still wants to go left instead of right.

I happen to be sporting the hedgehog look just now, conditioner additions notwithstanding.

The photos of me holding Parker as a newborn nearly 14 years ago show that that basal-cell was present nine months before I finally let Richard talk me into taking seriously this spot that wasn’t going away, and got it looked at. I’d thought it was discoid lupus. I lost a fair amount of hair to that procrastination.

Two weeks ago, I found myself scratching at night at maybe a mosquito bite on the side of my head.

Today I finally asked Richard to look at it for me and take a picture (nah, you don’t want to see it.)

I’m sure the thing my dermatologist most wanted to do during the countdown to T-day was squeeze in one more patient appointment and a surgery when she just saw me last month.

Last time it rained as much as it’s supposed to tomorrow, a year ago, I had an appointment with her but the roads were closed and the floods were high and there was no way to get there.

I’m getting ahead of myself. She has to see the message first.

All I can do is wait. (As my brother waits for his melanoma recovery to attain five-year status. One of my children had it at 29 and is fine. Nah, mine’s just going to be basal again if anything. Looks the same as last time.)

She was tired. She is maybe three by now. She was on the floor, arms wide, making herself as big as she could. The dinner part of the potluck last night was over and her daddy had her baby brother in his stroller quiet and content, while he sat at a little round table with a small group away from most of the crowd getting some adult in-person time.

Since she was lying there quietly and in view he wasn’t paying the least attention to her, or as far as she was concerned, and I could see her watching him with his face turned half away and her wheels turning and the meltdown that was just about to start. If she was going to be tired enough to lie down it was going to be in her own bed with her own nighttime rituals and this would not do!

I had a new baby and a two year old three times in a row. I remember.

I apologized to her mom this afternoon, saying, I broke my own rule. I always give to the parents, not the child, but I handed that tiger directly to her.

She laughed and said it was great and thank you and that they had several of those finger puppets by now.

Their little girl had LEAPED up in excitement holding it high, running to show it to her daddy.

I love how easily and instantly little kids can cheer up. She helped me be a bit of a one too last night.

Just slow, steady progress on that bright red.

I told him in the course of the conversation, I have enough yarn now that I could actually do three more repeats and make it beyond a baby blanket to a real throw. But would they want that, I mean who needs their neighbor decorating their house for them and if I leave it baby size does that obligate me to make another if they have another child so I’m not creating jealousy and yeah I don’t expect they’re going to have half a dozen more or anything but this could get expensive. And this other neighbor didn’t get any when her kids were born because she was having hers at the same time our kids were having some of theirs and what about hers being left out. But oh well.

He was smiling at this point: “You’re overthinking this.”

He told me just do what you planned to do, let life play out however it’s going to and take it from there when it does.

Of course.

I guess all I really was asking was did I have permission from myself to cast off now, which looks like it would leave it an inch or two wider than it is long (as far as I can tell pre-blocking), or do one more set.

That shape bugs me. The number six bugs me–the eye is pleased with odd numbers. Request denied. One more set. Because I’m the boss of my knitting (my stash just guffawed) and I said so.

I wonder how her life turned out. She would have been able to reach people nobody else could have.

When I was at the end of my first semester of college in 1977 at BYU, facing my first finals, my dad surprised me with an amaryllis bulb kit in the mail for my birthday.

He had given one to my mom every year for hers. To be included in that celebration felt like my dad telling me quietly that I was an adult now in his eyes. And that because of his faith in me, I was. Finals? I could do this!

One of the girls on my floor in the dorm asked me about that box with the pretty flower picture on it and was so taken with the idea that my dad would do that that we got to talking.

And talking.

We found ourselves walking the campus. Around town. Walking, walking, till hours past our bodies ached to be sound asleep. There was no way to stop.

I was her first witness. She had to tell someone.

When she was younger, her parents had lost a child in a house fire.

Her father, well regarded in their community which had rallied around the family, at home was someone who beat her mother. Often.

The day came when Becca stood between them to make him stop. He knocked her out.

And again.

At one point, and I don’t know how she met him, some older man told her he loved her and would protect her and brought her home to his place, where she was his plaything for a week. I think she was 17.

At the end of that week, though, she considered all the Sunday School lessons about waiting for marriage and knew she hadn’t done that and the ones about loving your family and she knew her father hadn’t lived up to that–but that this wasn’t how she wanted to live, either. She went home. College was coming soon anyway.

My father had sent me a flower bulb, simply to surprise me and make my day, and because he believed in me. There were actually people out there who loved their kids and lived that way. That, that was what she wanted ahead of her in her life. Love. Kindness.

She confessed to me then that a few nights earlier it had all become too much and she had sat in a tub with a knife in her hand, looking at her wrists, prepared to do the deed.

But something had made her hesitate. She felt an intense empathy reaching out for her personally, with a question, and I will never forget her saying these words describing how it felt: Yes. This life *will* be hard. Do you want to continue it?

She felt a promise holding her in its loving arms that she was not alone, that it would be so hard, but worth it, worth it, worth it, if she did. And so she lived.

Then she saw my amaryllis box.

And knew that good, loving people were out there, that they were more than just a Sunday School wish, that they were trying to live up to what they profess about following the teachings of Jesus to love one another. They were real. That could be her. She could want others to feel that same sense of being offered rescue that she had.

Yesterday morning, surely from the stress of what last week’s election means for the whole world and worried sick over my friends in Ukraine, I woke up from a nightmare. In it I had relived the pain of her telling me what had been done to her.

Becca–her parents had called her Rebecca when they were mad at her, which had never made sense to her because they had in fact actually named her simply Becca–had, shortly after our long nighttime walk, gone home at Christmas break to her folks in the South and she never came back. She told me just before she left that she had decided to go home, trying to reassure me that it was okay to now.

I never heard from her again.

I have never known if she was okay, and all my adult life I have wanted her to be, wherever she is out there.

She could be there for others going through what she had had to in a way I could never know how to. We opened up each other’s worlds. If we saw each other now we would be throwing our arms around each other and telling how this whole life thing had all turned out for us.

I told Richard the gist of that long walk.

It was a hard story for him to hear on top of the overwhelming grieving going on re the election outcome, wherein half the nation had returned to its abuser.

I had a thought–and went and pulled out the Nautilus puzzle of a sunrise at the Grand Canyon.

Pouring out the pieces. Getting out the cookie sheets to sort them into. Heads bowed together, turning each one over to see its true colors, searching for the edges, finding where it turns its corners, slowly, slowly over two evenings going from setting up the boundaries to filling in the center, the rocks and the sky and the river coming to be, slowly and painstakingly at first and then faster and faster towards the end till the picture was complete.

The laser-broken pieces now a glory of a view.

That was the question I wanted to ask.

So.

That third of a ball: in the sunlight, it just wasn’t enough of a match.

(Tap tap tap.) Yarn store number one in that color: zero inventory.

Yarn store number two: three skeins. It was a long way to go to check dye lots for that little of a chance.

Yarn store number three, and the one I’d most want to go to anyway even though it’s a trek. I knew I would have to call to find out, but Kathryn has a lovely deep voice that is easier to hear than most on the phone.

Rios in Ravelry Red? Wait just a minute while I go check. …Lots!

So I gathered up my project, my last skein attached, and headed to Cottage Yarns. Where they don’t have space for classes or gatherings because there’s just too much yarn to squeeze them in. Wasn’t it Mae West who said, “Too much of a good thing is wonderful”?

They had a full bag all ready for me when I got there. I explained that mine was a couple years old and I knew Malabrigo tends to shift the shades slightly from year to year so it was a bit of a long shot.

They were a bit too pink. Mine was more on the orange side.

How about this bag?

Oh, much closer, and I almost bought two of those but then Kathryn’s husband found three skeins that had found their way into a bag with another color altogether (so that they would stand out and could be found while staying mothproofed) and once again stepping out into the sunlight and back under the store lights for comparison, that was what I wanted.

Meantime, while I was focusing on that, the shop’s phone rang.

He went off to wind the two balls for me while she was answering the call, which didn’t take long.

They wanted to know, she told me, trying really hard not to laugh because everybody’s a beginner at the beginning and sometimes non-knitters buy presents. Did we have any red yarn?

Just, red yarn.

(Photo from two years ago. I had no idea this one was going to be so huge when I ordered my first gerdan, I had no frame of reference yet.)

I wore all-black to church today. I’d asked after one of my friends in Ukraine and had gotten an anguished message back wondering where would they go, whether they would even live, how would they get through this.

I knew in my bones that only the color of mourning would do. And my very large, bright yellow sunflower gerdan: there have been Ukrainian refugees living next door to that church and I wanted them to feel seen. I wanted to bear witness to the importance of supporting the innocents whom American voters just sold down the river. It was my I Protest outfit. But anyway.

There are two people in that congregation who–well, one once showed me her official socks with that name on them.

The monthly senior potluck was this evening and I looked around and thought, hey, look–we’re not the youngest ones anymore!

People were chatting, the hostess was trying to get people to get started; Richard motioned me over to where he had a seat at a table ready for me.

Ms. Socks was to the other side.

Note that she and I do not discuss politics because it would do no good–but I have noted that as her guy’s behavior got worse and worse over these past few years she avoided me more and more, which is a shame, because other than that one (very big) thing I consider us old friends. More and more though with a sense of wistfulness and loss.

Why should I let him of all people call the shots in our personal lives. So I turned to her and asked her about her house and how the remodeling was going.

She seemed surprised that I would want to talk to her, which struck me as terribly sad, but answered my question and we went on to have a normal conversation like it should always be and she enjoyed a bit of my blueberry cobbler, too.

I think Bill of Penzey’s Spices has a point: Cook. Feed people. Love them.

It helped.

May I borrow four and a half minutes of your time to contemplate Beethoven’s Fifth–if Beethoven had grown up in New Orleans. Jon Batiste released this a week ago.

In every note I hear his joy at the success of his wife’s bone marrow transplant two years ago. To life!

Airports and wheelchairs, it’s the thing, especially at Salt Lake airport, which has more art every time we go. The three-dimensional fabric rolling cloud formations waving out of the upper walls near the ticket counters? (Surely dust hell!) Those now go along most of the mile-long underground walk between the gates and the exits. And the ceiling now. While the floors have sparkle embedded in the bright light blue, a unicorn’s dream.

My brain does not love the visual intensity. Sit. Stay.

Wheelchair story the first: an older woman and I were being pushed side by side while the pushers, clearly friends, were enjoying each other’s company.

About fifty feet before the end of the tunnel I saw and they nodded to each other towards a toy on the floor so as not to run over it. It was a rubbery pink whale, about 10″ long. With sparkles. Some very small child was clearly going to miss that but what could you do.

We got to the elevators, where a young mom was struggling alone with a large stroller trying to get it to go over the gap. I figured the chances were surely zero but asked her, Did you have a pink sparkly whale toy that’s on the ground back there?

She gasped, looked at her toddler, saw it gone, the doors about to close, and did this flustered mix of knowing she needed to run/being sure it was hopeless/trying to teach her daughter not to throw her toy away while knowing a stage is a stage, they just don’t know that young/what do I do! while holding the door open.

My red-headed attendant (who looked to be about 18) took all that in in a heartbeat and went running. Retrieved the toy and brought it triumphantly back. Yes that was theirs yes that was the one thank you thank you thank you.

I reinforced her toy distraction quota with finger puppets for her two kids.

Wheelchair story the second.

Being at the front of the plane, we did our usual of handing a finger puppet (hand knit. From Peru) to every small child. I sat in the middle seat, Richard on the aisle, from my bag to him to the parents to the children. (With a few to the flight attendants just because they were enjoying this so much.)

One dad had seen us boarding and was ready for it: he held up a tiny tiger we had given him on the flight out and laughed, joy in his face. He still let us give them a new one.

A family came on with kids Richard thought were too old for them–maybe six and nine–and he didn’t want the older child to feel insulted, nor left out if his brother got one. So he just quietly let them pass by. I wasn’t so sure about that, but then I was also worried I might run out so I let it be. There were more kids on that flight than we usually see.

So. We land, there’s the wheelchair, we go up the ramp and the guy parks me and runs back down to help someone else.

There was not a second pusher available just then. The fastest thing was to just push the both of us so the other guy, who was about 80, wouldn’t have to wait.

He did not look particularly happy.

I turned to him as we started out and joked, I’ll race you!

I had said that to the woman in the chair just before the pink whale saga and she’d gone from stressed out to uproarious laughter, with the pushers guffawing, too. From this guy, though, nothing–and I thought, eh, I know what it’s like to be deaf and people expecting you to respond to what they said when you have no idea, and I left him alone after that.

I interrupted apologetically and they had to wait for my restroom break. Sorry–but it had been hours.

When the immigrant who clearly had been working hard on learning English finally got our chairs to the security zone barrier, on the other side waiting were the parents and the two boys whom Richard had thought too old for our little toys, and I got to see their happy faces at seeing their grandparents. Jumping up and down and waving hi excitedly as kids do.

As if they hadn’t just been on the same flight. As if, rather than their having gone ahead from the gate, they’d long been separated. They loved their grandparents and they were happy and all was right in their world.

All this time, the grandpa had never once looked my way nor at the attendant. Not even at baggage claim when helped with their bags. Stern as stone. While throughout all this his wife’s face looked at me from time to time with an expression I couldn’t figure out. I would have said stricken? Maybe? Did I do something wrong? What was all that about?

Well, we had left them out, though I have no idea if they knew that. I wasn’t going to leave them on that note if I could do something about it and I found I still had three last puppets. We were at that point just arrived at the Uber pick-up. The attendant left.

I went to the grandma. I said, We were giving out finger puppets on the plane to the kids–but (quizzically) did your grandkids get one?

No, they didn’t.

Would they like some?

The older kid was edging closer at this point.

Yes!

I gave her two (an elephant two days before an election felt a little weird but what would a knitter in Peru know about that?) and she just melted on the spot. Like she’d been rescued. The kids said thank you, and meant it, the older one twice. They were wonderful.

It wasn’t till we got home that I said to Richard that I didn’t know if she’d seen other kids playing with them and had been wondering why her grands had been left out, and was that what the look on her face had been about.

Oh no, he said. She was embarrassed. Her husband from the get-go had been complaining that this was not the level of service he expected and he shouldn’t have to share a wheelchair attendant. And that was before I’d asked for the rest stop. He was so rude to the guy that Richard had almost spoken up to give him a reality dose that they could simply have left him there for half an hour waiting for the next pusher but didn’t even though he was being such a jerk. The parents with the kids had gone on ahead.

Those finger puppets changed the narrative of the night by giving them all something else to focus on, at least in that moment, and I can only hope for all the ride home.

And now I know why the attendant was so focusing on my smiling face the times I looked back trying to hear him, and he was totally okay with those times I couldn’t quite: he mattered to me and he knew it. The other guy mattered to him, too, which is why he’d gone to all that extra effort for him. Pushing two wheelchairs evenly through a large oblivious crowd dragging rollaboards just ahead, making you have to occasionally brake with all that weight to re-accelerate afterwards, is no small thing.

If only the old guy had been able to see it. Instead, he built his inner wall up high to keep the immigrant out, and not just he but his family, at least for that little while, were made to pay for it.

There was a short cloudburst that began as we were walking from my mom’s to the car and in seconds it went from rain to snow bouncing off the rental as we were getting in it to return it at the airport.

Snow! Not enough to worry about, just enough to enjoy.

We are home. Changing time zones and daylight savings is a strange combination and throw in the effects of high altitudes there and we are about to fall into bed. More tomorrow. But it was a great trip.

The scary hand lost its Halloweenish fabric glove years ago.

But with a new battery installed by my holiday helper this afternoon, it still comes down on whoever reaches into the bowl, and growls or ho-ho-hos or shouts hi. Loudly. Yup, the motion sensor still works after ~twenty-five years.

Our usual number of trick or treaters: apparently zero. Although, I did put the bowl on a folding chair just outside the door at one point when neither of us was going to be able to hear/move fast enough across the house to get to the doorbell for just a few minutes.

Either someone grabbed a couple–

–or a raccoon did.