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.

So that did it. I figured if my head is daymaring old car accident scenes it’s past time to take on the source of that stress and answer my own admonition. I’d already put in most of the work but there were a few things on that ballot I needed to learn more about first and decide on.

(Really? A guy in LA made tens of millions off a loophole for charities and made himself a slumlord and fought building better and something about a stadium and paid for repeating defeated ballot propositions as a hobby so there’s ‘the revenge proposition’ about his AIDS foundation regarding rent control? We need Tim Walz over here. Say it with me, Tim: Weird!)

Arizona’s ballot made the front page for being two pages long, front and back–it was going to hold up the lines!

Beginners. Ours was three like that. That’s normal. What it does is tell the voters to do their homework ahead of time so as not to waste anyone else’s. (Pretty much a moot point now that our ballots are mailed to everyone.)

It felt contagiously good to go through all that and declare it ready, so Richard sat down with his.

Prop 34 was the weird one. It should have been fixed by the legislature–you know, where different ideas get hashed out, justifications get shot down, motivations get holes poked in them, compromises made, and tax- and ratepayers’ money gets looked after. Supposedly.

We checked fronts and backs multiple times making sure we’d filled out every single thing correctly. The envelope, too. Card A, I went back and looked at one more time.

Kamala Harris. My filled-out oval beside her name. I held that in my hands and eyes and just let it wash over me.

There was a woman my age reading all the print all over the ballot boxes trying to make sure she was doing this right, a little flustered as I approached at being caught in her uncertainty, afraid of potentially doing anything wrong but quickly letting go of that as she saw my face and laughing for joy with me as we saw our ballots, our precious precious at-long-last votes, our declarations of democracy and hopes for all we hold dear to continue as they slowly slid down inside those slots out of sight.

A neighbor. I have no idea who she is, all I know is if we ever see each other again we will most likely throw our arms around each other in recognition of all that that moment had meant.

And then I went home, found this, and watched Kamala Harris’s speech at the Ellipse, starting at one hour twelve.

That. That was a speech of unity for the ages. That is my future President. That is what I did my part to help come to be. I can’t wait.

The joy!

It’s one of my very earliest memories. I was in the far back of the station wagon (there were no seatbelts there in those days) and I was being thrown around the inside of the car–the roof and I were not supposed to come at each other like that–along with the other kids and I didn’t LIKE it and my daddy was in control of the whole world and I didn’t understand why was he doing this and I was mad. Stop it right now!

A brake cable had snapped and wrapped around an axle (did I get that right, Mom?) and suddenly we were doing a 360 at full speed on the freeway and going over an embankment. Mom remembers the gasoline tanker we missed by inches. My oldest sister remembers the petting zoo we fell into at the bottom where we kids were entertained by the animals as we waited for help. The trucker went on to the nearest phone he could find to call the police to tell them a family had just died back there.

But we hadn’t; somehow we went on with our cross-country trip after that. I wonder what the car looked like. I have no idea.

I wondered tonight why those very old images had come to mind and had to stop a moment to puzzle it out.

I had just read Jeff Bezos’ new editorial: the one wherein he claims himself as a fellow journalist to the Post and proceeds to gaslight both his readers and quite possibly himself, but with obvious discrepancies between his story and Lewis’s. Lies from the both of them, but Bezos might even half-believe them. Right after Trump held an actual Nazi-wannabe rally.

It’s like Bezos had just cut that brake cord himself while we the voters and the honorable reporters are trying to control that wheel and guide where our car lands as it careens out of control.

We can still steer this to safety, though. They can’t take that away from us–yet.

Not now, not ever. We can do this. VOTE.

The Washington Post reinstated my paid-for weeks on my subscription, which means I got to read Dana Milbank’s essay today arguing passionately for the paper he loves. He didn’t say out loud, Boycott Amazon instead, but he’s right, I do still want to support the 18 signatories on their protest to their employer. And I will always want to read them.

Meantime, that reaction flattened me for a second day, which has never happened before. Glad I got the shot, glad I don’t have to do it again, and the case of Marie Callender’s chicken pot pie soup I bought for earthquake emergency supplies? (You know, veggies, protein, a bit of liquid, zero prep necessary.) The rest can go right back into that storage closet because it would take a lot more than that for me to say I’m that sick.

An updated pneumonia vaccine and the RSV vaccine yesterday and today lots of sleep happened.

Recovering.

I checked: of the 18 columnists at the Washington Post who have now signed onto the public protest page against Bezos’ and Williams’ decision to kowtow to Trump the day after Trump met with Bezos–

–note that then-President Trump retaliated against the Post’s coverage by yanking a government contract with Amazon, which Biden later restored–

–only two of those writers had columns today.

One was news on the Middle East escalations.

The other, bless her, was satirist Alexandra Petri speaking up. To quote her:

“But if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement. I will spare you the suspense: I am endorsing Kamala Harris for president, because I like elections and want to keep having them.”

What is happening to all the others?

(I went to make sure that link was right and I got told I’ve been unsubscribed. I’ve been charged for two more weeks and was told yesterday specifically what date my subscription ran to. So not cool, WaPo, not cool.)

I picked up my friend Karen and we headed down the freeway towards Andy’s Orchard. As we were talking, I said, well, my potassium’s always low–to the point they actually treated it for awhile, awhile ago–and one of the best sources of potassium in food is dried apricots. By far, compared to, say, bananas. (Side chatter about stocking up for the winter on this trip.) So it’s not just food, it’s medicine, right? Hey, when life gives you an excuse to do what you want to do anyway…

She laughed.

I was hoping for Comice pears, too, but they were out today.

So, she asked me, standing in front of the recently-dried varieties: regular, premium, slab. How do you know what’s what?

The slabs are the ones that were so perfectly ripe they went smush when they cut them open. Those regulars? Nice and round and pretty. The slabs? Sweet and melting in texture with no added sugar but the shape is ‘gone splat.’ They are perfect.

Turns out it was her son Andy’s birthday. I was his Sunday School teacher back when he was ten, and now he’s ‘the answer to life, the universe, and everything‘ (MIT link with happy mathematicians) per Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (It appears the answer really IS 42!)

Got her back home. I opened my car door, went around to the back and of course I pulled out a pound from me. Go celebrate with Andy for me, willya? Tell him I said happy birthday. He was always one of my favorites.

I was musing, as the first skein ended at the second row of trees and I connected the next: this is the color of their car.

I figure when it’s the color they picked to present themselves to the world beyond their windshield, it’s a pretty safe bet they’ll like it.

And then I remember with bemusement the gold minivan of long ago that was the last one on the lot of that model on the last day of the year so the dealer was willing to cut the price to keep from having to pay inventory tax into the next year on it. It was okay enough; we took it. Remember when Chrysler minivans were infamous for bad transmissions? Maybe it wasn’t such a deal.

But a red electric car? That’s not a last-minute Iococaccamobile, that’s a point of pride in taking care of our children’s futures.

Let me speed this thing up a bit, shall I?

A comment at church yesterday by an avid reader that will stay with me, quoting a friend who loved books as much as she did. The friend was, at the time, a young Mormon missionary, and was trying hard to stay close to the Spirit. To go where she could do good. To do what someone out there needed.

The friend’s favorite conversation opener was to ask, What’s your favorite book?

One time, having been taught all her life that G_d knows and cares about us personally, while trying to focus her thoughts in prayer she found herself impulsively asking G_d Himself, What’s Your favorite book?

She felt immediately silly–but also, to her astonishment, an answer.

“Anne of Green Gables.”

Wait. What? Her favorite from her childhood, but. Why would G_d care about that of all things? What? So that was the second question; she really wanted to know.

And the answer and the experience, passed on to her friend Sarah and now to the rest of us, came just as quickly and just as close to her heart:

“Because that is the first book you read that made you want to be a better person.”

I didn’t want my cardiologist to later dismiss it as a two-week buildup of unwashed sweat under the monitor that I was complaining about so I put it in writing the morning after I got it: I was fiercely reacting. There are other adhesives out there, and I said I was mentioning this in case he might put a word out with the manufacturer.

The phone rang this morning.

Why, yes, they had a hypoallergenic one–but it’s fiddly. You have to take it off and recharge it every three days and alternate it between putting it back on vertically vs horizontally and you’ll have to put it back on yourself and change the strips and clean the area off with this but not that but did I want to do that?

Are. You. Kidding. Me.

I went in and the nurse went, Wow. THAT’s red!

Yeah… I told her about the adhesives-allergy test they did at Stanford that flamed on for a month afterwards.

Okay, so: I would also have to recharge the phone every three days.

What phone. Wait–you’re sending me home with a cell phone?!

Preprogrammed, yes, here, let’s walk you through what to do. Power on: a list pops up. Shortness of breath? Fainting? Palpitations? Accidentally pressed button?

Now push ‘Accidentally pressed button,’ she said, since we were just training here.

Richard’s take on it later was that that was a great use for old cells–they don’t have to wonder what phone the patient does or doesn’t have, they don’t have to add an app to yours nor know how to program anything, they just hand you this one ready to go and the company got it cheap.

Which you then mail back to the company along with the monitor when you’re done.

So I have gone from I seriously do not know how I am going to make it through these next two weeks and sleepless nights, to, hey. This is so much better. My skin is still close to raw but the thing it was so angry at is gone.

I cannot begin to tell you what a relief that is.

I’ve been determined to get back to Fillory Yarn to try to run into the woman who helped pick out Rios in a color that seemed moose-y two months ago, especially now that I really had something to show her.

She’d particularly liked the golden brown, and I did, too–and even better after I’d paired it with this darker one. I probably would not have bought the lighter without her definitive opinion that it was The One and my moose would have been much less without it.

So. That group meets on Thursday afternoons and today seemed like a good day to try. (The adhesive in the heart monitor is super itchy. A week from now it is definitely not going to be less itchy and distracting, just go!)

So blame it on the heart monitor, but it got me there.

I saw a long-ago familiar face, exclaimed, Oh, HI! and she welcomed me to sit down next to her.

It wasn’t till she said something about once babysitting my youngest and what was his name? that drew a complete blank from me that I finally asked her to remind me her name again?

LILLY!!! Ohmygosh yes!! She’s one of the people I’ve most missed with the ending of Stitches conferences. It’s been years. And–it’s John.

YES! That was his name! He’d come one year to push me around in a chair.

Then there was the time we were both having our scooters repaired beforehand, at the same place, turns out, going in at different times but with both of us saying what we needed it for and it apparently stuck with the guy: a conference. Of knitters. In the thousands. Who knew.

The thing is that when I came in to pick up mine he was dumbfounded. Was I alright? I had lost so much weight. So quickly. Surely there was something I wasn’t saying, but he wanted to know, and said it again, trying hard to be supportive, was I okay.

(what on earth is he on about)

He said something else and I went, Ohhh. You’re thinking of my friend Lilly not me. Huh. Well she does kind of look like my big sister. (And I am definitely not one to complain about people getting faces mixed up.)

Speaking of which, one woman across the table asked if I could pull the mask down for a moment. I did. She studied my face, and asked, Did you ever go to a little yarn store on such-and-such street in Santa Clara years ago called…

I did!

She’d been sure of it. Yes!

That had to have been a good twenty-five, thirty years earlier. Wow, you’re good. (Somehow I remember that LYSO as being younger… When did we age.)

A great time was had by all, the moose-yarn-finder was thanked, showing off happened all around, a ball of Rios was bought “to pay for my afternoon’s entertainment” and wound up for me, and at last I headed out to try to beat at least some of the rush hour traffic home.

Lilly had reached for her cane first–and spent a quick second staring wondering what on earth–as I laughed that wait, she’d grabbed mine. Our canes even matched. Wood, hand carved.

As she had said several times by then, Great minds!