Now, I knew she was related somewhere, but…

When my “Wrapped in Comfort” book did so very well right out of the gate–Amazon, Knitpicks, and all the bookstore chains all sold out for awhile the first week, Walmart two days later, and someone was scalping it for $67 Canadian, how cool is that?–my dad used it as an excuse to go call his cousin and chat.

Whom sci-fi readers may have heard of: Janet, aka J O Jeppson, aka Isaac Asimov’s widow.

So I recently ordered her autobiography, it came Saturday while I was off at Jasmin’s, and yesterday afternoon I sat down with it and didn’t put it down till I was done; Harry Potter could wait, this was family.

And when she wrote of her Aunt Hazel, I started to think, “My dad has a relative named Ha–” Oh, wait… And there was a picture near the back of Janet from the 80’s with Asimov, with her hair long, bangs, and big clunky glasses on her face. Now, at my in-laws’ 50th anniversary celebration a few years ago, the grandkids all guffawed during the slide show at the photos of their parents young and in love and wearing 70’s and 80’s clothes and hair, and glasses, those big clunky glasses. And me with my bangs, always.

So here I am, book in hand, staring at what looks like essentially a picture of ME way back when, standing next to Isaac Asimov. Wow.

One of the things I loved was reading about the compulsion to write: her husband’s, which was intense, but her own as well. Goodness: 17 years ago, I had a brain MRI and EEG done, and at the end, one doctor said to me, “Mrs. Hyde: do you like to write?”

I was stunned–who had told him? How did he know? I stammered out something to the effect that, yes, thank you, yes, I did. Why?

He then told me I had a hyperactive (okay, I think I remember the part of the brain he said, but if I get it wrong, there are readers who know who will just guffaw, so let’s skip that particular) and he’d seen that in patients who were writers. Matter of fact, mine was so hyperactive that he was considering putting me on anti-seizure meds.

While I sat there and thought, don’t you dare touch that. Sir.

In the end, he did not.

Janet Jeppson Asimov is a psychiatrist. I wonder if she’s had a brain MRI. I wonder if she, too, has a hyperactive (okay, she could fill in the blank there.) I’ll bet it runs in the family. The best things do.

Thursday at the booksigning at Purlescence, my friend Jasmin mentioned that Constance was making the drive down for the weekend.

Turns out, Jasmin had just bought a new house, and it needed a lot of work; the place had been left in terrible shape when the previous owner had passed away. Lots of her friends were coming to pitch in, scrubbing floors and walls, playing barnraising, and one of them was Constance, the same Constance I mentioned in my book; she had a three-hour drive down from the Gold Country. Any excuse to get together anyway, and this was a great one.

Saturday morning, my phone rang; did I want to be kidnapped? Heck yeah! Much though I would dearly love to, I’m not up to much when it comes to being useful, but I was greeted with huge hugs and Constance told me I was to be the decoration to the festivities, and that was that. So here, in a moment of total karma, is Constance reaching to rearrange knitting books just so while adding more on Jasmin’s bookshelf. Note the four Barbara Walker stitch treasuries to the left of her hand: the important stuff first.

But what I didn’t expect was that when I exclaimed over Jasmin’s pair of handspun socks she had sitting on a shelf in a basket, from Lisa Souza’s Jellybeanz roving, Jasmin said they were too small for her. My feet were 6.5? Here, try them on!

Thus giving new meaning for my feet to the term housewarming present, when the air conditioning kicked on briskly. Oh. My. These are wonderful. Wow.  Thank you!

Getting just the right color is a whole lot easier than it used to be. Fire up the dyepot, sprinkle a little dye, simmer briefly, and you’re done. Doing this in green brings back memories…

We were doing the VIP tour of the White House with our children, pre-911; my aunt, the wife of a Senator and daughter-in-law, years earlier, of another, brought us in. I don’t know if the regular tours had this, but for the VIP tours, a formally-dressed guide gave a well-rehearsed history speech in each room. We walked through George Washington’s dream, taking it all in in awe.

There was a bit of lag time before moving to the next room each time; we had to wait for the group ahead of us to clear out. As we stood in one, I was admiring a very old rug with an Eagle motif (believe me, that E was capitalized. Definitely!) that was set aside from where our feet might touch it. I mentioned to my aunt that the green color in it had most likely come from boiling moss to extract the dye. She thought that was very cool.

Stepping outside a moment in the Rose Garden, I looked out at the lawn and, when the guide was done talking about Jack Kennedy and the like, mentioned to him that President Johnson had thrown a party for the children and grandchildren of Senators on the White House lawn: there was a small ferris wheel brought in, pony rides, and an official-looking white pen with red and blue ink printed with the words “The White House” given to each child. I had been eight years old at the time. (There was no way I was going near that ferris wheel, but I could have stayed on the ponies forever.)

I remember coming home and telling my mom that President Johnson was a really nice man, and I hoped he ran for re-election. (I wanted to ride the ponies again.) She about died.

Meantime, the guide, thrown off his routine, stopped, looked at me, and demanded in all seriousness, “Which President Johnson?”

I came to look at my shawl patterns, because of that day of testing at UCSF, in a way I hadn’t before.

When they sent me to the room for the full-body scan, the technician was six months pregnant. We got to talking, and I found myself telling her I had had four kids–and then adding, “And a miscarriage.”

Now, that’s not something I usually talk about, much less mention to a woman who’s expecting. But somehow it felt like the right thing to say.

Was it my first? Yes. She told me she’d miscarried her first at five months. “Five months!” I exclaimed. Yes. This, then, would be their first child.

Mine had been at about four months. She knew then that she could tell me about it, and I would know, and I did: the sense of holding back just a bit, the slight wariness at the possibility of great loss repeated, the need to hold one’s child, arrived safe and sound and healthy. She was relieved to hear from an older mom that I’d gone through that and gone on to have four healthy kids just fine. And this from someone later diagnosed with lupus and Crohn’s!

The next morning I woke up to the mental image of a nursing mother with one of my circular shawls wrapped around her and over the baby for those moments in public. The green hand-painted merino one that I’d knitted to convey my impressions of the kelp forest at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Another image came, of the baby wrapped up in that shawl in the chilly San Francisco fog. For a mom who had suffered such a great loss, but who had so much joy ahead of her–pain and joy intensify each other, but it does go both ways–yes. I love how happy the colors are in this, and how good they would look on her. I had felt for quite some time that this shawl was waiting for me to meet its recipient. It would be someone petite. She is. I hadn’t considered that it would be someone expecting, and so deserving of, great joy. Now I have met her. It’s perfect.

I had to call the researcher first to ask the woman’s name again, I didn’t quite remember, and I couldn’t just mail it off to “that nice person.” But I will always remember how she made me feel: she’s such a beautiful soul. And now it’s ready to go.

And I wish I could come hold the baby too when it comes, truth be told. I remember.

As a longterm guinea pig for UCSF, today I went in for nearly five hours of all kinds of testing as a lupus patient for my part for the good of humanity. (Ed. to add: I’ve always been able to do it long distance before, but this time they needed me there in person.) My daughter (bless her) gave up her day and drove me.

Coming through Golden Gate Park, I could see tall buildings on the top of a tall hill, and said, “I bet it’s that one.” It was.

Now imagine being on the 12th floor of the hospital, looking out the window, and looking UP at the trees. Yes we were way up above the top of a hillside–but there was a taller hillside right beyond it, densely green with tall eucalyptuses. Cool.

Four years ago today I was wheeled into Stanford Hospital after an intense turn for the worse with nobody expecting me ever to come out again. Refractory Crohn’s. Today I walked into Merritt Hospital, enjoyed the view, knit a little between phases, gave the blood, got through their muscle, cognitive, etc tests and body scan and enjoyed the company of some really fine people on this planet that I wouldn’t have gotten a chance to meet any other way. And walked out with my dark glasses into the foggy late afternoon–

–and to my surprise didn’t have to close my eyes for pain nor sudden intense whiteout effects. They felt fine.

Recently, the hard disk on my six-month-old computer crashed and told us all to go to Dell. Today it’s the new flat-screen monitor. I am writing from one that I cannot post pictures from, but hopefully that will (again) get fixed quickly.

I was not happy. Oh well, there was housekeeping to do anyway. Fi fie fo fun.

I’ve mentioned before that I like to have little handknit fingerpuppets, made in Peru by a women’s cooperative to put food on their tables, to give to unhappy little kids to make life easier on their moms as well as them–grocery store lines, waiting rooms, church, you name it. They’re adorable, they’re quite inexpensive, and it’s so easy to turn the day around and make people smile with them.

My daughter said she was going to make a run to the drycleaners, did I have anything to send? Sure, and I picked up my husband’s suit and started checking the pockets.

And found a little wool llama with a cheerful multicolor dash of yarn decorating the back of its head and a matching saddlebag-type decoration, just ready to slip on one’s finger to wave hello cheerfully. I did not expect that. He’d wanted to have one ready, too. It completely made my day. Wow, I love that man!

Boy, that got your attention, didn’t it? The San Jose Mercury News just validated the cost of the year’s subscription to me. I happened to thumb through their gardening section–like that’s going to do me any good, right? A lupus patient with a flare at the moment so that my eyes are currently going into whiteout conditions, unable to see well enough to read for the rest of the day if I go out in direct sunlight even for a moment. (I’ve been going to the passenger side of the car lately in dark glasses with my eyes shut tight and someone guiding me.) I’m not going out in the sunlight. I’m not growing tomatoes this year. I don’t want to go blind–I was for a few weeks on the left two years ago, and I refuse to go back if I can help it.

But there was a mention of www.bugband.net in an article describing how the reporter had tested it out. A bracelet with geranium vapors to keep mosquitos away. It was cheap, and it had worked.

I not long ago opened my front door to watch a beautiful little goldfinch die right there in front of me on the edge of my welcome mat. The county refused to test it: there was no point. They had thousands of dead birds reported and West Nile was already known to be here in greater force than I believe any other county in California.

I have almost no immune system. I’ve been on chemo for four years. I have been unable to take walks in the evenings, the simplest escape from cabin fever, for fear of a simple mosquito bite and all the potential risk in it with all that I have going on.

A simple bracelet. Totally non toxic. Designed so you can string them into a collar on your dog if you want. Or an anklet to go with your bracelet if you’re really paranoid. Designed to snap open rather than cause damage to the wearer if snagged.

I can’t tell you how much of a hurry I am in for that package of bracelets to arrive. Let freedom ring me!

My sister-in-law is running in a marathon to raise money for breast cancer, and so is for a brief time on my side of the country; yesterday she drove from Sacramento down here for a visit–not a trivial amount of driving time, and much appreciated. I had two shawls I’d been wanting for quite some time to have her pick one from in person. Actually, no, more than those, but those were the two I was sure she would like the best.

I hauled out a whole bunch of ziploc bags, started opening them, and she immediately loved the two I’d most anticipated she would. She picked the one made from this baby alpaca yarn, and I was pleased that she was getting one that was in a yarn that I’d dyed. She asked about the pattern, and I told her the story of the Water Turtles and gave her a copy of Wrapped in Comfort. Oh! She told me about her friend who had so much loved turtles. They had recently scattered his ashes…. There was a moment of pain and love in her face. And delight that she had somehow picked the turtle-related shawl, a way to hold him close to her thoughts and not have him be gone.

I was so focused on spending every last moment with her that I could that I utterly forgot the camera. Which is as it should be.

(Ed. to add: the photo is a bit hazy close up, and clearer to the view as you get farther away from it. As so much of life is, especially the parts involving loss. I rather like the photo. It fits.)

A detail edited out of Wrapped in Comfort for the sake of space: Dave’s astonishment at being offered a full berry box’s worth of strawberries at dessert. I had bought a case at a farmstand, my rebellion against New Hampshire’s refusal to give up the cold weather at Easter. He had never before considered a pint of strawberries and a person to be a one-on-one possibility.

I thought of that just now as I offered my son a large bowl, like this one, but full of sliced strawberries ready to eat, and his eyes got big as he asked, “All for me?” You betcha. Happy Fourth.

It’s got a few gray hairs too, now, doesn’t it? We don’t even use it anymore for barbecuing: the blacksmithing kid in the family (we accept luddites of every persuasion amongst us, declared the handspinner) has turned it into his personal forge–but *not* under the flammable olive tree when in use, thank you very much.

When we bought our first house, in New Hampshire, we were pretty excited (um, yeah in the way you are when you know what the alternative could be like) that we’d landed a mortgage with the lowest interest rate that had been available in several years–12.5%. That left our budget with not a whole lot of room for extras. Hence the untuned piano in the book, but I digress.

*But the hubby wanted to buy a barbecue grill. I said no way. He wanted a grill. I said no way. (Repeat pattern from asterisk till length desired or till you can’t stand it anymore.)

Which means we eventually got a grill.

Now, if I’d had any idea how much fun he was going to have with that thing, if I’d had any idea how much of the dinnertime work he was going to be taking over when he used it, I would never have argued a word. I would have shoved him firmly out the door towards the store, saying, g’buy now!

But then one day he decided that I needed to use the thing, too. How could I not love his favorite toy? C’mon, just come try it!

Yeah, right, like I couldn’t see right through that one? I had my hands full of babies, I had enough to keep me busy. This is your thing, dude, I want no part.

Come on!

Yeah, so, in the end, I did. He got me to come poke around with it, following his instructions. See? he said. You do this, then this.

I did exactly what he’d told me. Nada.

He’d forgotten one step in the process–he was used to just doing, not verbalizing it–and as I stood there looking at the thing sitting there thumbing its nose at me, he asked me, Did you push the start button?

What, this one? And I pushed it.

Now, I am 15″ closer to the ground than he is in the first place. My head was still reeking a bit when I showed up at my wide-eyed hairdresser’s, asking her if she could make this look, you know, on purpose? Please? I well remember her running her fingers through my hair and having some of it just kind of shred into little dark stinky pieces in my lap as she did. Not a whole lot of it–it could have been far, far worse. It was just enough that I am glad my children were too young to remember or be traumatized at seeing their mom’s face engulfed in a fireball, a view I never want to see from the inside again. Somehow my glasses saved my eyes, and no skin burned. Just a bit of hair.

I never touched that grill again. The hubby tried half-heartedly, and I totally refused.

Yeah, I guess I know how to play fire with fire. I’m actually kind of fond of the old clunker now, from a nice distance. And I’m told it makes a really good forge.

Richard was asking me, “Where would you like to go out to dinner?”

Like there was any question? Where do we always go to celebrate our anniversary (not to mention, this time, the book’s being launched at last–what else would do)? The Peninsula’s answer to Alice Water’s famous Chez Panisse in Berkeley, the place where you go if you want to really, really enjoy your meal.

“The one where they shear the sheep.” I grinned. “Of course!”

That utterly threw him. There was this head-tilted-sideways pause, and then, “Huh?”

“You know! Fleece Treat Cafe!”

“Congratulations–you picked the hottest day on record in Washington, DC!”

“You’re marrying that Hyde boy?” (This from a sweet, elderly woman about 4’10.” The groom was 6’8″.) “I’ve looked up to him for a long time!”

(Spoken in a grinning aside to the groom by a friend of his grandparents:) “I unlocked the back door on the north stairs. Got it? The North. Stairs. You can bolt.”

My father-in-law and my husband each have one crummy tooth that has cycled through numerous crowns. Dad Hyde is the practical sort, and hey, he’d paid for that gold, so he collected the ones that came out and always wanted to go create something out of them. Richard and I were students when we got married, with absolutely no money, so here was his dad’s chance. He melted them down and recast them and voila–our 20k wedding bands, done, at the time gold was hitting an all-time high of $360/ounce. (Our bands are silver now and so is our hair. Wait–I can just hear Richard reading this and guffawing, “Speak for yourself!” Can you hear me going, “You do too, look back here, if I stand on my tippy tippy toes I can see plenty of gray, trust me…”)

Today is June 27th, our 27th anniversary being in ’07, we created a family of six, and when I checked Amazon Saturday, I must have looked at just the right moment; their numbers tend to dance around a fair bit, but my “Wrapped in Comfort” book was listed as #2007 in their sales rankings. Somehow that coming together of numbers just pleases me, like a well-balanced lace pattern.

So my Richard gifted me with some superb hot cocoa mix today that a cafe in our downtown area sells, by a couple who owns the cafe and the plantation their cacao beans come from. Superb chocolate–with a connectedness.

Simple celebrations .

Remember that game of telephone we all played as kids?

We drove down to Saratoga today for the blessing of a cousin’s baby at church. The hubby’s aunt has a dear friend, Louise, who has been at all the big family parties: the weddings, the baby showers, you name it, always helping out with an impish smile and energy and a way to make you laugh, and I just love her.

Yeah well. Richard talked to his aunt on the phone one time recently, and then told me, She says her friend Louise got diagnosed with scleroderma–and poof, died, just like that.

Now, autoimmune stuff would hit close to home already, but Louise?!? But she was perfectly fine last time I saw her!

People sometimes go fast with the autoimmune stuff, he reminded me.

I quite grieved over that one. I only saw her maybe once a year at most, but that makes absolutely no difference in how you feel about a person.

Okay, so, here we are arriving at the chapel down there, I’m just getting out of the car, opening my door and beginning to stand up. When, just then, I look up to see someone coming dashing over to greet an old buddy-in-law–me. LOUISE???!!!!????

Yeah, it turns out it was Lois who died; one of the cousins straightened out the details for me later. I have no clue who Lois is, and I’m quite sorry she’s gone, but but absolutely thrilled for Louise and thrilled for me. Louise, of course, had no idea why I was so speechlessly happy to see her, and I wasn’t about to say. All she knew, was, I was just really really really happy to see her, too.

Ya think?!!!!!!!

I always thought that was an odd phrase. I have asked my folks about it from time to time, they being gifted wordsmiths: does anybody have cold heart cockles? What’s a cockle, and does it truly have heart? Where on earth did that phrase come from? They didn’t know, and neither did our dictionary.

Shelle just came home from a college internship in marine biology–a few hours after her Sea Silk shawl arrived home via UPS. Cool. She spent several hours showing us pictures of things she’d studied, some weird, some wonderful. One of those crabs looked exactly, in the photo she took, like the tick I removed from her back after she came home from a week at camp one summer, with a bulls-eye of red rings around that bug. (They tested the bug and her both, no Lyme. Phew.)

Anyway. She brought me a few shells, and I had to show this: these are Heart Cockles. So named because when you see the intact shell from the side, it looks heart-shaped. But what I now love best about them, something I had thought to be just an ordinary white shell you see on probably every beach–kind of like sea gulls, something you take for granted, right?–was this: they are a favorite food of giant sea stars, which can move amazingly fast towards them. The heart cockles have one foot, which they stick out so they can run away from the sea star. How does such a thing run? It flips itself, over and over, a seashell version of a living Slinky, running away at a good clip. Does Pixar know about this?

I mentioned in my book that I’d made my first Monterey shawl for my friend Michelle, who is a dedicated marine biology enthusiast. I had no idea, when I wrote that, that my daughter Michelle was likewise going to become one. But I sure can see now why she is.

So good to have you home, sweetie.

I signed a book for my friend Mary in Iowa at Purlescence last night, went out to dinner with friends and hubby, just normal busy life stuff, came home, and read Mary’s blog entry about her elderly father being interviewed and talking about how important it is to get our stories recorded. Yes. It’s not just a busy life–it’s how we spend our time becoming who we are.

My grandmother’s mother died of colon cancer when Gram was eight. When Gram was 60, knowing well what it was like to grow up wondering who her mother had really been as a person, she got talked into writing down some of her own life stories. Thank you very much, that’s me, the three year old in the family photo in there with the curls who, on being told to sit up at the table, declared emphatically, “I won’t sit up! I’ll sit down.”

This business of needing to get the words just right. It goes way back.

I got given a copy, with her inscription, “To Alison, who is old enough to read and enjoy this book.” I was by then nine. I hated it. It was boring. It had a vivid sunflower-orange cover, a color that was very much in vogue and that I very much hated.

Yeah, well. You know what comes next. Or some of it, anyway–the rest, I did not quite believe till I’d called my mother, who knew the people involved, remembered it, and confirmed it was so. So: I picked up the book a few years ago and read it, wondering why on earth I hadn’t earlier. Maybe I’d been afraid I would be critical of the writing, or that I might find it to have any vapid Washington DC politics, or–I dunno, but I didn’t want to be critical of my grandmother.

I liked it. Hey Mikey. The Supreme Court Justice who came to his office every day in a horse-drawn carriage? The senators’ wives being expected to wear hats and white gloves and to leave their calling cards at each others’ residences, timed and ranked by Senate seniority, her surprise at how southern and how Victorian-style Washington was in the early 50’s? It was fascinating.

But what I hadn’t expected to find was one story of what had happened after they made a slew of new friends when they moved there part-time after that first election.

My uncle, his father’s namesake, was serving in the Army in Korea, and an officer came up to him whom he’d never laid eyes on before, and barked at him: “I don’t know what your name is, soldier, but it ought to be–” And then he named my grandfather’s and his name.

To which my uncle, stunned, stammered, “Uh, yes, sir. That’s exactly what it is, sir.”

She named that officer. She published this when I was nine and my husband was ten.

It was my husband’s great uncle.