Rush hour. Carpool lanes. A blood test two cities away. Sure, glad to.

He needed me to drive this time. Oh okay.

That was quickly dealt with; next was Costco. Ours? Or the one a few blocks from here? Does it have an Optical Center?

Dunno, never looked for one.

Me neither.

But we needed one. My Sibley’s Guide to the Birds is heavy enough that last night when it landed on my falling glasses, not only did the frames twist but a lens popped halfway out. I was making do with an old pair because those were pure funhouse mirror views, but at least I had backup.

He didn’t.

Surely they did–and yes, they did, just past the entrance and in the opposite direction from where most people coming in would be heading towards.

It was a quiet afternoon for that particular crew. Richard was over at one end having them fix his glasses–he’d sat on his in solidarity or something like that–and I was at the other with a patient man who sighed in spite of himself as he got out the tiny screwdriver and simply took the whole thing apart and slowly put it back together again, testing the straightness again and again. It was a chore and it took awhile but at least no one else was waiting.

Then a mom and a teenage boy walked towards me. Hispanic. His jeans were stylishly tight–the problem being that they were apparently not comfortable. He tugged at them in a place you don’t tug in public and his eye caught mine right then.

I instantly flashed back to a man about eight years ago who’d nailed my white privilege surprise when he told me he’d grown up in that neighborhood and that if any Hispanic kids like him wandered into the town next door the cops would be all over them. And were.

For just walking around?! Or driving on a public road?!

Oh yes. He was gratified that I was so horrified but he wasn’t surprised that I never would have guessed.

That Costco is in an industrial area surrounded by one of the poorer neighborhoods around, which in turn borders what is often listed as the richest zip code in the country. Tech CEOs live there, well-paid sports figures. The former CEO of Hewlett-Packard. The current CEO of Apple. The kicker is that part of that is because the lots are big, and the lots are big because a hundred years ago they had to be for the leach fields because that town couldn’t afford to create a sewer system. Hah. Look at it now.

So. This kid sees me seeing him at the most embarrassing moment and he instantly puts on his best defiant rough tough swagger face, trying to look nobody-messes-with-me.

He was no match for someone who’d raised four teenagers who’d towered over me.

Deflection. Standard tactic. I gestured towards the huge boxes about the size of a subcompact car stacked in big pallets with the third group all the way up to the rafters and said with a smile, I wouldn’t want to be near those in an earthquake.

Totally threw him. What? He looked where I was pointing. I said it again. His eyes went big. He suddenly went total little kid, you know, that sense of oh wow! discovery when you think of something you’ve never thought of before–he had to tell his mom, and when he did, the warmth in her smile would melt anyone.

I was not what he’d thought I would be. He was not what some would make him out to be.

They walked off just as Richard was done and came over to me. My optician offered me my glasses back. I thanked him and put them on. Richard helpfully grabbed their little stand mirror so I could see how I looked and I mimicked my best supermodel self to it a moment and grinned, Now all I need is a haircut.

The optician, who till then had looked so tired, guffawed and said Well maybe we can find some scissors around here, making as if to search over here and over there. He was smiling as we left.

We are all in this life thing together. Wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s not every day you read a story in the Washington Post about a protest at a town hall meeting and suddenly, while scrolling down, realize the person holding the poster in that picture is your best friend from high school.

Go Karen!!

But then, being a person who was willing to stand up without hesitation for what she knew to be right is why we became close in the first place all those years ago. And still are.

There were five two-hour sessions of the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints this past weekend, all of them watched from home.

Which means I could knit.

And boy did I have something I wanted to knit. I’d spent all week sure I had a particular yarn but completely unable to find it, not in the place it was supposed to be and not in the places it wasn’t supposed to be and I just couldn’t knit anything else till I’d gotten it out of my head and made real on my needles. Which wasn’t happening.

Till Friday night. At which point the little hide-and-seeker jumped out yelling PEEKABOO! It had fallen behind. I cast on and did the first row to get the chore part of it done so that in the morning it would just be the good part.

Because.

Sunday a week ago, they’d decided at church that with new people moving in, people needed to get to know each other. So they’d set up chairs in circles of about a dozen and handed everybody a sheet of paper with a list of questions to ask each other. There were two sets.

I groaned to myself because this is the kind of thing where it’s all white noise to me. Lots of people in the room talking at once means that the weak-to-me higher pitches of the consonants are obliterated by the decibel level of the rest.

Hmm. How’s that battery…not too bad… I pulled up the app on my phone and asked Haylee next to me if she’d be willing and explained how to use it: for it to pick up what you say, it can do it in this noisy environment but you have to put it right to your face and you have to keep this button pressed while you talk.

I didn’t say, and if you let go of the button and then push it again it erases everything.

I had become a tad reluctant to ask people to use it. They don’t get it. They let go of the button. They hold the phone at the distance they want to. It stares back at them with its initial little prompt unchanged and then they think it doesn’t work.

Haylee, whom I barely know, immediately grokked the whole thing–and not only how to use the app but how the situation was for me. She not only used it to help me hear her, she used it to tell me what everybody else in the group was saying, repeating softly rightupclosetoit.

I took careful note of the colors in the pattern on her skirt. I knew I had that in Rios. I had just finished the afghan and I couldn’t wait to do this next.

Five days. But finally I found it.

So: Conference. (Which had given me a week’s grace period on this.) GO!

I cast off during the last session.

Even the ends are run in now.

Note to myself, and anyone else potentially following this later should know that I am an exceedingly loose knitter: 90 st, US 6, two half-repeats of 10-stitch fern lace, then an M1 in the single stitch dividing them, two more half-repeats, another M1 and then continue from there. Probably should have done it again and taken it from 1 to 4, but it was all a doodle anyway. Maybe next time. I just didn’t want to make it floppy-wide at the bottom, but I don’t think I needed to worry.

It sits in ever-larger folds down the front, not too tight at the bottom nor too loose at the top and I really really like how it came out. I cannot wait to surprise her with it.

She laughed and laughed when I told her I’d set a timer for heading out and the gadget had heard wrong and apparently thought I was going to a farmer’s market: it displayed a tall basket of vegetables with the kale on top in the place of honor. Go see kale! Huzzah! Music and tossing veggies at the bell!

Because Gail is moving away and found herself with a party thrown in her honor. Several men lifted her wheelchair up the two steps to the door. She doesn’t weigh much anymore.

I finally got to meet her daughter who’d knitted her that gorgeous top-down sweater with the lace-leaf yoke–and Gail was wearing it tonight. Ruth’s sweater was gorgeous, too, and when she found out I was a knitter too we were instant friends.

The resident dog, a spaniel, walked through the crowd with a gentle wag of its tail but not eager to pick out one stranger from many for it to pay attention to.

Richard brought her a plate of strawberries per her request.

Gail lost her husband decades ago (to a terrible medical mistake that should never have happened) and I found myself saying to Ruth, I remember your dad.

That’s all I needed to say. She was so grateful.

Her mom, about the age of my own, will now be in walking distance so she can keep a good eye on her care rather than from a two hour flight away.

It was so good to see them and to get a chance to say goodbye. I snapped a picture.

And looked at it. And showed it to Gail. And then offered a do-over and she laughed and laughed again because that’s Gail and said thank you and meant it and yes please let’s and leaned back towards Aly and we got her a better send-off that time.

My phone number’s going to be the same, she made sure I knew.

My email’s on the card I wrote, I told her.

A hug and then another for safekeeping and Richard and I stepped away into the night, knowing just how badly we were going to miss her.

I asked him what he thought was the most memorable moment from the church conference talks today.

“President Neilsen begging everybody to be more charitable.”

So since I couldn’t join the Hands Off! protest for the sun exposure, I watched the Saturday sessions of the LDS Church’s semi-annual conference in real time rather than later. (Link is to Sunday’s.)

I was struck by how again and again the talks were pleas for compassion and humility, reminding us at this Easter season how the enormity of the Atonement was in Jesus’s compassion for every single one of us, more than we can ever know. “Love one another as I have loved you.” One speaker even said to ‘never let your party or’ (as he quickly added I forget what else, I was too busy being surprised) ‘be greater than your love of God’–given that they never, ever talk politics from the pulpit. I’m quite sorry it needed to be said and very glad he said it.

Afterward, I checked the reports: well done, everybody! Look at all those crowds–yay!!! Look at DC. Wow. Of course WaPo reported it: they had to. Wow. You did it. You spoke up for the least of these and for all of us–and for me, on a personal scale in my disability. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

They say the last person who was qualified for the position Trump hired them for was Stormy Daniels. (Credit to an anonymous Washington Post commenter, a little long for a placard.) How about, Overthrow the money changers in the temple of our government! (Still long. Taking suggestions.)

Saturday is the day: April 5 and the Hands Off! protests across the country. Or as I think of it, the Restore Hope Again declaration of We the People to demand a reinstatement of that which functions well in our government, to reclaim our democracy, to reclaim the Rule of Law as the ideal our country has been striving towards since its founding, to reclaim all that is good about democracy, which our fathers put their lives on the line to fight for. We refuse to be ruled by fascists. We refuse to allow our government to kidnap people off the streets by people who offer no names nor warrants, and any law enforcement officer of any kind who has participated in that should be held accountable before a court himself. All those who have been so disappeared must be allowed to appear before an American court and the innocent set free. And yes foreign grad students are allowed to write op-eds in their school paper that some might disagree with. But Americans are not afraid of free speech.

We can do all these things if we speak up.

The Post just lost Eugene Robinson to Bezos’ clampdown on any editorial writing that he and his Rupert Murdoch henchman don’t like. The Post claims that news reporters are not interfered with.

Well, then show it. Let’s see if the protests are covered at WaPo. But Politico, the Contrarian, BBC news, the Guardian, and I know our scrappy little small town paper here will all be snapping pictures and interviewing and hoping people know how important supporting reporters is because they’re the ones holding government figures accountable to us and their work is not easy right now.

Re Trump throwing tariffs at a penguin-only island: bullies hate being made fun of. How about a placard of an indignant penguin holding a placard.

Go team go!

Our house guests last fall (hi, Amy!) left behind a jar of Skippy peanut butter that wouldn’t go in their carry-ons. Actually, it was labeled peanut spread: roasted peanuts, palm oil, and salt.

It had never been opened. There was a layer of oil at the top, just like the natural peanut butter it almost attained the definition of. It was time to figure out what to do with it. (And an excuse–I’d been craving a good cookie.)

I found this recipe, although it’s only partly what I did. I figured if the Washington Post was linking to it that’s a decent recommendation.

I used the peanut butter without stirring the oils in; some flowed to the bottom as I scooped, but I figured a cookie recipe with no other fat in it has to have what it can from what was there.

I started to type out all the other changes I made and thought, nah, just type the thing out.

So.

One cup old-fashioned rolled oats. In retrospect, quick-cooking would have done just fine.

1 tsp baking powder, not the specified baking soda which I really don’t care for at all

a pinch of salt that may have been as much as 1/2 tsp but probably not but definitely more than the 1/8th they said

2 large eggs, not quite straight out of the fridge but almost (such a rebel)

1 c natural peanut butter (well, it tried to be)

1 tsp vanilla. Given that the president just slapped his big tariffs even on an island inhabited only by penguins, can you imagine what replacing that bottle of the second most expensive spice in the world is going to cost? Two teaspoons for that much batter? Nah, one’s fine. It was.

Whisk eggs, add 2/3 c packed dark brown sugar from Trader Joe’s that may have been turbinado type, add peanut butter and vanilla and then the oats+baking powder.

I had a small handful of salted caramel chips and one of chocolate chips ready on a small plate and worked several of each into each cookie. Nowhere near the amount they called for, we’re old farts, we don’t need that much extra sugar.

They say refrigerate the dough so they won’t spread. Yeah, you do for normal chocolate chip cookies with flour and butter but I didn’t see the point with these, I just put them straight in at 350F for 14-15 minutes. They barely spread.

They were great. Seriously good. I have found my new go-to cookies.

I told Richard as we munched, Y’know, these are your daily oatmeal but with peanut butter and eggs and chips added. Extra protein.

So I guess the question in the morning is going to be, Crunch? Or slime?

—

(Ed. to add: they were very crunchy last night coming out of the oven. After a night of San Francisco fog and being left on the counter, they were not, they were a soft cookie. Use an airtight container if you want yours to stay crisp.)

I was standing just past the top of the stairs at the entrance to the museum, chatting with the security guard. I was waiting for my friend Jean: the last time I’d seen her, we were in high school.

He told me about meeting up with old friends from high school; some you do, some, it just never seems to happen, but the friends you made are friends forever.

I very much agreed  with that last part.

Then he said he’d graduated five years ago. I smiled and told him, I’m 66.

And wondered out loud if I would recognize her. I’d given her a description of what I was wearing just in case, but that was all silliness because of course the moment we saw each other I exclaimed to the guard, There she is!

The smile on his face for us was as big as our own.

Her brother was with her and he toured the museum while we found a cozy spot and caught up on things. There was nobody else in that room but the echoes of our words and our memories.

Favorite teachers. Classmates gone now, ones still here, who had I seen, whom had she seen. Katherine: yes! Both of us got to see Katherine, one of the most fearless people I know, a USAID worker willing to go into any country any time.

Who thankfully was stateside visiting her mom when that entity got broadsided by a proverbial Cybertruck with no brakes, but anyway.

Such a good time. We took pictures. We stood in front of a sculpture in bright yellow of two letters: depending on which side you stood, they cheerfully called out, YO! Or… oy.

Needs a J, I said, as her brother raised his camera.

My grandmother was a very proper woman whom I never heard speak ill of anyone.

Except once.

Her husband was a Republican Senator who kept for posterity his thank you letter from Martin Luther King Jr. for voting for the Civil Rights Act.

Strom Thurmond, on the other hand… One of my older cousins asked her how he’d done his historic 24 hour filibuster and Gram did a sharp sniff, took a deep breath, and told us kids, “Well! He had a catheter installed under his pants.” The disdain in her voice was something so unexpected coming from her that I’ve never forgotten it.

(I debated saying contempt, but Merriam-Webster says disdain means considering someone as being beneath one’s notice or dignity and that captures it perfectly. Like I say, she was a proper woman.)

Today I watched now and then and then all of the last 45 minutes of Cory Booker’s speech before Congress. Senator Booker, with enough African heritage to know what it is to be a Black man in America today, was determined  to best the record of a man who had agitated for segregation and the snatching away of rights of people who looked like him. Booker was speaking up for the rule of law, the sanctity of the courts, and the rights of all of us. For us to reclaim all that is good in us as Americans and in our government.

And he did it. He did it. And he kept going, just for good measure, long enough to get past that 24 hour 18 mark to a solid 25-plus so that his number and Thurmond’s would never be the same. Beat the old bastard once and for all. It was a declaration that the old racist fascist in the White House is going to lose out to the judgments of history, too.

Gram’s reaction was never about the catheter. It was just the closest she could come to saying how p***-poor  Thurmond’s ideas had been and what kind of a person would go to so much effort towards damaging the lives of so many others.

Cory Booker stood there, for 25 hours on his feet straight he stood up for every single one of us and I am so proud and so grateful.

And thank you, Wisconsin! 

Someone had a lot of fun putting a dragon eye in that tree. The fact that the iris looks like a black beetle is the perfect extra Halloweeny touch to it.

Wrote to my city council members today. Wrote my congressman. Weighed the morality of being part of the April 5 peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations vs doing right by my family and not risking a flare by being out in the sun to hold up one of those placards. The physical reality of lupus always wins and I always stay inside and it’s so deeply frustrating–but it’s also how I made it to thirty-five years since diagnosis.

But by golly I can drive past slowly honking my horn and waving and cheering in solidarity.

Dunno if you saw the guy who tried pulling a stun gun on an older woman at a demonstration in front of the Berkeley Tesla dealership last week. It is fair to say that that UC Berkeley medical school professor was not having it. Peaceful, peaceful, guys! but yeah, she was not going to let him do that to anybody else.

Deep breath. And a thank you to the cops who came to serve and protect peacefully and they did.

I woke up this morning with the thought, Maybe I can get a row in before church.

Oh wait.

(Still needs a natural-light photo to do the colors justice. Might need to tighten up that cast-off line. Photo will embiggen if clicked.)

Casting off in purl stitch from a wrong-side row to end a seed stitch border gives it such a polished finish. Love it.

Meantime.

A fun bit of amateur theater at church this evening. For me, a four year old stole the show: all dressed up as a mouse, she had a tail. A long tail. A tail she could twirl. A tail she could wrap around her waist in a hug. And again. A tail she could flip up and down, lasso or yo-yo, all the things, but she did, she had a magical tail and it would soon be all over and she was not going to miss one moment of it.

She was adorable.

We needed a grocery stop on the way home. Richard said he’d sit in the car and read his book while I ran into Trader Joe’s; I invited him to join me, but something felt cheerfully like he had the right idea.

When I came back to the car, the first words out of his mouth were, Well that was weird.

What was weird.

A guy knocked on the window. He had a little kid, and said the younger one had fallen asleep in the car and he didn’t want to wake him up and if he gave Richard his phone number so he could call immediately if there was any problem whatsoever, could he leave Richard keeping an eye on his little one while he ran in real quick?

And you let him?! (I said as my brain jerked back decades before to a local baby who had been snatched when a parent ran in a store ‘for just a moment.’)

He, on the other hand, had had the immediate reaction that I had to think my way past my knee-jerkiness to: he remembered what it was like and how hard it was at that stage of parenthood. He had a clear line of sight to the kiddo. It was a compliment to be taken for the kind grandpa that he is and that the guy had instinctively trusted him to be. He lived up to that trust by not taking his eyes off the kid till the dad got back. Three, four minutes at most, he told me, he was fast.

I said, That WAS fast–they’re in the middle of rearranging the store right now like they occasionally do and everything’s moved out of place. It took me forever to find anything that wasn’t in the dairy case. But I bet his wife wouldn’t be thrilled if she knew, though.

Maybe.

Did he thank you when he came back out? (He was already gone by the time I did.)

Oh yes. Richard added that he’d seen it as a chance to make the world a little better place for one overwhelmed dad in this one place at this one time, to be a neighbor. And who wouldn’t want that?

Twenty rows on the bottom edging, not 13, 13 was the number of edge stitches. Darn. Of course. Fourteen done now, six to go.

Those long rows are giving me a little more time to plan the next one in my head as well as on paper.

I had had a particular yarn all set to go for the next project, but…

I finally messaged my little sister. I told her I had asked Mom her take on it and that she’d thought the same way I had, that Anne has all the pictures she could ever want in her house and with my turn to give to her next Christmas, I should knit her a monochrome afghan to play as quiet backdrop to all her gorgeous watercolors.

And I sent her a picture of the yarn that it was purportedly going to be made from, making clear that that was an offer, not a requirement.

By this time my siblings are on to me: Carolyn got her picture of her house right down to the tire swing with the scuffed grass below it, the one that started all this, Morgan got the moose and the river and forest and strawberry farm from our childhood memories.

I want one with a story! she texted back.

She wanted me to give it my all like I had with them. She was really hoping for a picture, too.

Part of me felt a near-giddy sense of having been set free. Intarsia is where my knitting soul is right now. But also–a story? Which story, out of a lifetime? How on earth do you choose?

And so my brain has been (mostly) glad to have all those long tedious seed stitch rows in order to leave it rummaging through its drawers these past two days. I poked around on Ravelry this afternoon to see if there were any already-invented wheels on some ideas.

Ooh, look at… And… I could tweak… Yeah….!

Now to make them all come out to scale to each other and to the afghan’s overall size. And how much of that green did I use up last time. Okay then. Let me just finish this last little tiny bit….

(I’ll put the P.S. up here: In falcon news, the female was sound asleep brooding their four eggs when her mate decided he wanted some nighttime duty too and woke her up to kick her off. This video is for every one of us who is not naturally cheerful at being unexpectedly woken up in the middle of the night. She was mad!)

—

Weird chunks of raised itchy scalp. Memories of a hairdresser from when I was pregnant with my second and long before I’d ever heard of lupus feeling those dried lumps in her hands and asking me gingerly, Did you know you have bald spots?

I had the baby, the hair grew back in, and it was all a weird one-time thing.

Till this year. I knew this time not to scratch at it because it would just pull any hair out with it and after the basal cell surgery took a round inch-plus off the top there awhile ago, let’s hang onto what we’ve got. Gradually it settled down. Last week there was the last of one lump, today I didn’t really feel anything up there. But it was my six-month dermatology check anyway, so I mentioned it.

When did it start?

Around the time of Trump’s inauguration.

She guffawed.

But it was true, and at some point I’d wondered if my angst over the destruction of the rule of law was manifesting itself on top of my head after it spread from one spot to three when the political news was particularly grievous.

Naming a reason for it–or just random chance, or maybe doing better at staying out of the sun–something made it calm down and go away, which is wonderful. May it stay away another 40 years.

Best way to cure something is to make an appointment to get it seen.