An old Chrysler minivan pulled up at the service bay today after the driver looked around for a regular parking spot that didn’t involve a lot of extra steps in the sun.

Parking error 404: Not Found. Go to Service.

So I stopped in front of George’s door, y’know, over where you’re supposed to wait for someone to come ask what you need done with your Toyota. Um. Make it quick, I figured.

The warmth radiating from his face when he saw me coming into his little office again, before he had any idea why I was there (getting out of–you know–a…Chrysler…!) The surprise when I handed him a printout from my blog post about him and told him I hoped his boss would see it. The oh my! extra delight when I said, “It’s not as good as the old country’s, but,” and pulled out the baklava and a stack of paper napkins in case he wanted to share.

I don’t think I was in there more than 30 seconds before I dashed back to my car and out of their way and away.

Some half minutes can make up for a whole awful lot in life.  I have to say, I was given a lot more in those moments than I at all gave; thank you, George!

Note to San Francisco Airport: having cellphone signals work in your cellphone lot is a good idea. Thanks.

I got his “Landed” message while in that lot but he didn’t get my response in time to tell me he and his co-worker had checked their bags after all and that I should stay there.

Three times round the airport, cut off once and forced to go through the paid parking–the sympathetic attendant let me off–it is intense night driving, and with the construction they’ve had, it’s never entirely familiar.

But my Richard is home from his trip. I’d sprout wings and fly to the moon for that.

Parker would love to see that. If he could just stay awake long enough…

I called first; George, the woman said, will be back in on Friday.

Ah, okay, then, thanks, I wanted to come back in and tell him thank you for how nice he was to me yesterday.

The receptionist’s surprise and delight sounded like a kid who wanted to know what was in that Christmas box: what was that all about? But she didn’t ask and I didn’t say.  And now at least one person who works there knows there’s a customer who was happy enough to be making the effort to say so. Always a good thing.

Come Saturday, meantime, I think we’re due to work on a little habitat destruction together: that morning scene of water intermittently spraying vigorously from the same spot on the roof has happened again two more days, and the rain is days gone. Fallen leaves or something must be providing grubs for something up there, or maybe they’re finding a birdbath effect; clearly there must be standing water. Not a good idea. It’s a mostly-flat roof, a  California fad of the 1950’s.

The first time, there was a towhee perched on the edge of the shed just below there, getting sprayed; it looked back over its shoulder, got doused again, and flew away from it.

Today it was a black squirrel, probably watching to see if there was anything worth raiding. Hey! It snorted and jerked away as it got it full in the face. HEY! And it took a big leap up onto that roof to show just who was boss here.  Cut that out!

End of waterfall.

I’d have loved to have seen the end of that. Although, don’t tell the squirrels that from the occasional audible mad dashes that have ended suddenly midpoint, it seems the hawks have learned that white roofs are great for picking off black squirrels. We have a lot fewer of the big oldtimers than we used to.

And for the first time, a few days ago I saw a hawk disappear into the upper branches of the big redwood whose limbs reach over our house. Right above that spot.

Went to a meet-and-greet for the author Douglas Thayer today.  Found I’d somehow missed out on a really great professor back when I was studying in the English department at BYU years ago.

Meantime, the idiot light on the Prius had come on, and since I had time to deal with it, hey. So I was the one who drove over close to their quitting time, expecting to drop the car off and walk home with as little sun time as I could manage.

The assistant manager, George, said no, no, we can check that out and get you on your way I’m sure, no problem.

Great! Except there were benches to sit on–outside. Only. Um. I did a tour of the showroom and met a salesman who separated himself from the pack and would be very happy to help me ditch my old minivan (later, later, still got a kid in college after these eleven years). Actually, he seemed nice enough: I was glad to see that the obnoxious one that had made me walk right out of his sales pitch when we were buying the Prius didn’t seem to be there anymore.

I escaped: I went back to George and explained about not being able to be out in the sun.

I didn’t even have to tell him about not really wanting to fend off salesmen nor offending them by sitting on the floor watching them talk; without a word, he totally got it. He went looking, found me a barstool-type chair, and gladly brought it back to his tiny cubbyhole of an office. It had a door to outside, access to a narrow hallway behind him, and room for basically him and a customer or two standing. Tiny.

I sat.  We were close to eye level (hey, I’m used to being short). It was a quiet time of day. We chatted a bit; and then, more and more, we really talked.

He told me about his daughter in college. His youngest son’s chronic condition. I was sympathetic, and he decided I was someone he could open up to.

I explained, when he asked, what lupus was–and then I got to watch in his face exactly what had been in my own 21 years ago when I was told what I had and could never in my life from that point on ever get away from.

He was crushed; but then he picked himself up and said, “So you adjust. You find new patterns.”

Yes! And I told him, “I’m a nature lover. And so I bring nature to me.” I told him about the birdfeeders. About the California Thrasher the other day, the vanishingly-rare-here Zone-tailed hawk, things I would never have seen nor known.

I told him about how I felt my children had grown up to be people who see when someone is in need and they step forward to help, that they are kinder and more compassionate for what they too have had to go through with all this.

My car was done.

That’s it?

Yes, and no charge.

?!

He was very pleased.

Trying to pull out of the dealership, there was simply no turning left against the lanes of rush-hour traffic; I gave up, pulled right, went into a neighborhood, came back around and back to a long light.

Where, looking up, I saw a large bird and a small bird. Waiiit… That soaring wing pattern, that’s a raptor… As they flew gradually closer, the small bird was no small bird, it was a crow, and the one leisurely coming up behind that it was getting away from–

–I’ll be darned. It was. It was the juvenile Zone-tailed hawk. IT’S STILL AROUND HERE!!! I got to SEE it again!!! I got home, flipped through my Sibley, but no–there was nothing else that matched it. That was it. Wow. WOW.

George had mentioned at one point his mother back home in Greece.

I needed a quick grocery run this evening, and I decided to go to Trader Joe’s.

Where they had A, B, C on my list… And what I had really come for: a package of baklava for a certain automotive assistant manager to offer a piece of to his customers tomorrow for as long as the sweets last. They may not in any way equal the Old Country’s, but he clearly loves his new one, not for its perfections but, like all of life spread before him, simply as it comes.

Winding a racetrack-shaped hank by hand is its own pastime: you create a perfectly lovely round ball, all curves and come-to-me’s, rather than the matter-of-fact flat cake from a mechanical ballwinder setup.

And it gives the mind the freedom to meander the possibilities as you wrap the tethered strand steadily around and around itself; there’s something about working with a good yarn while not being held to anything yet.  Two ounces of cashmere, 400 yards, and ideas on what on earth to do with it went from totally zero to the proverbial sixty, centered by a desire to honor the recipient as well as knitterly possible.

But there is no more where that came from. I’m debating going with something else with more yardage, much though I want this to be in cashmere, just because I so do not like having to worry about whether I can finish what I started the way I want it to come out from my hands.

Let me do some swatching and measuring and checking–but in the meantime, (assessing the inner image I have now of what this project will be, something that had eluded me all day till I finally sat down and got all wound up about it),  it’s done me a great deal of good already.

To be continued.

It started with a blood draw.

My daughter Sam has ITP, idiopathic thrombocytopenia purpura: the autoimmune version of hemophilia. Catch a cold or even athlete’s foot, crash the platelets as the immune system fires up in scattershot mode. (If you follow that link, she was at 10; normal is 150-400.)

And so when she arrived at the university to begin her PhD program five years ago, she needed a doctor and she needed a blood test, fast.

She got sent to the lab. The phlebotomist chatted as she set her up, and on hearing why she was there, immediately told her exactly which doctor at that clinic she should see and why, in very specific terms that had to do with how his personality would react to her history as well as his particular medical skills. He would take good care of her in a way the others would not.

And so he has. That was the doctor who, when her chart came in, I believe before he’d even met her, declared she was to be his patient, period.

That was the doctor who, this past summer, ignored her protests of that spot on her arm having been biopsied five years earlier and having come up benign; he just didn’t like the looks of it. Her ITP had gotten her sent to him just two weeks previously as well as this time, and though they hadn’t even discussed the spot nor had she thought of it, he had, and he thought it looked different this time; he was going to biopsy it again.

She saw no reason to.

No, it just felt… Now. And so he did.

A particularly aggressive melanoma but caught at the very earliest stage. Early enough that she didn’t even have to go through radiation or chemo–though they did have to take four inches out of her arm and she will have to be screened every three months for recurrences from here on out.

Hey. Beats the alternative.

We were on the phone tonight, the three of us, and Sam rather apologized to me for something she’d done.

Then she gave me the context. She told us about that phlebotomist. She told us she’s been going to that specific one ever since that first time they met, that they’ve become almost like family to each other.

I had made Sam an ethereally fine wedding-ring shawl in the softest merino, and she confessed she’d tested it once just to be sure: yup, it really did go through her ring! It was wide and beautiful and lovely and she got many compliments on every one of the rare occasions when she dared take the fragile-looking cloud of lace out to wear.

The phlebotomist had mentioned to her recently that she was to attend a wedding in the family, and that she was to wear a bright orange dress that was just too much for her; she had been wondering how on earth to tone it down, but had no ideas and no time to shop.

Sam asked: would a wide, slightly offwhite lace shawl help? A rectangle. It was certainly formal enough for a wedding. (She did not remember till I said it on the phone that I had knitted it while we drove 13 hours and back to take her to her freshman year at BYU, finishing it after the trip. Stealth knitting, right in front of her–I’d made it to tuck away for her for someday.)

As she was admitting to me she’d offered up the loan of that shawl, hoping I wouldn’t mind, to whom and why, I exclaimed, “She saved your life!”

Steps into a future that neither knew then, but still.

Sam considered the thought and, a sense of awe in her voice, answered, Yes–yes, she did.

I mentioned someone who had wanted to clean white wool with bleach; Sam shuddered, No, no, you don’t do that!

Right. They hadn’t yet and it was okay, and I taught them in time about how bleach dissolves wool and what to use safely.

Sam: I don’t think this lady would…

Me, affirming: Probably not. But if she does, I will knit you a new one.

And she knew I was saying what she’d felt too, that this woman had earned everything we could give her without reservation and together, then, we freely offered her friend all of the love that is in that shawl.

I went on to offer to knit the woman her own, for that matter.

I could hear Sam’s grateful smile across the thousands of miles.

I was off at a luncheon with some friends (thank you Mary Ellen!) and he was waiting for me to get home.

Okay. Let’s see, the parts are about this much, Costco’s having a sale to just replace the thing altogether for close enough to the same, the work involved is about the same…

And so we played plumber today. A do-it-yourself video was conferred with just to be sure. Richard, on his back under the kitchen sink, glad for that gel mat under him, trying to unscrew going one way while I tried to hold on from the top to keep the faucet parts from moving: his grip vs mine, on and on and endlessly on. It’s a good thing I knit a lot, although more regular piano practice on my part of late would have helped there, too. We tried to trade places at one point, but I simply couldn’t reach high enough. He managed not to break into a chorus of “Short People.”

“Get me an (XYZ) wrench!”

“Which one is an (XYZ) wrench? Where would I find it?” (Digging through his tool stashes. The occasional stifled heavy sigh from the man under there who wouldn’t know a merino yarn from a mink–we do understand each other. )

The assembly was rusted in, but between us we finally got it out of there. It took us all afternoon.

After much resting, pumpkin pie for dinner just because we’d earned it and our mommies weren’t watching, some knitting time for me with some sweet baby alpaca telling my hands, There there, I went over to him on impulse and said, “So between us we’re stronger than steel?”

Took him by surprise. His whole face turned into a not-quite-out-loud laugh, and he shook his head with puckered lips, “No.”

“But it made you laugh!”

We ARE stronger than steel.

Thank goodness Purlescence on Tuesday still had a few skeins left of the very lovely but discontinued Epiphany (royal baby alpaca/cashmere/silk) when I needed one in a particular color–from an early mill run, too, before production issues got it shut down. (Look for the 60/20/20.)

Speaking of which… It suddenly hit me as I pulled out of the post office: darn, I was going to snap pictures of that, I was going to count rows and make sure I had what I’d done written down right. I’ve made various iterations of that particular pattern, enjoying them all, trying to improve on it before I put it out for publication, but I’ve never made one quite exactly like that one and I liked it the best of all: the elusive perfection, or about as close as yarn and needles can come, and now it’s on its way to where it needs to be and the recipients will simply forever have a one of a kind.

I like that.

Bought some very good yarn Tuesday at Purlescence, finished an Ipod hat out of it today. Minimalist. Perfect. And then someone announced a dress-like-Steve-Jobs day in his memory for tomorrow, and St Croix, the Washington Post said, had sold out of his trademark mock turtle in black. Me, though, I’m Thinking Different.

And on the wildlife front.

Towhees jump forward, jump back, scratching back the leaves to look for grubs underneath: they look like they’re skipping an invisible jumprope. It charms me.

After the rain was gone and the sun was shining again a day or two ago, I glanced outside to see a cascade of water spraying sideways off the roof. Just in one spot. Wait–is someone sweeping up there? No, I knew Richard had already left for work, and besides, he would never go up there without a spotter watching the ladder.

It stopped.

There it was again.

It stopped.

There it was again.

I thought, if that’s a towhee scratching that’s one heck of a towhee! That’s a lot of water it’s moving!

I walked outside, seeing a shadow of wings through the translucent awning, and then there was no such cascade to be seen again. Huh.

Today maybe the responsible party showed itself? It came to the porch only for a moment, a California Thrasher.  Sibley: “They are difficult to find except when singing.” Oh well… But I got to see it!

Reading another site, it says they no longer breed on the Monterey Peninsula because of habitat fragmentation. Wow. The whole peninsula? And I got to see one here on our more heavily populated one?

Now I know why I threw some suet cake farther out than I usually do. It stabbed that long curved beak at it as fast as it could, looked at me with a stern that-will-not-do because I’d moved, raised its tail and fled. Had I blinked I’d have missed the whole thing.

I am definitely going to throw some peanut suet out in that spot again.

No. Four-hundred-forty-three-tiny-stitch rows would not do: I cast on for a hat, added a second circular needle, joined the ends, knitted halfway across from there: Venn diagram established. Okay, *now* I was ready to go to my lupus group meeting. Mindless ribbing at the brim, bigger stitches I don’t have to look at. Go.

Five middle-aged women–three old-timers, a first-timer needing to find someone else who knew about this disease, and me–and… He tends to go on at great length but he’s totally cool with the knit thing, so hey, speak your piece!

I’ve seen him one other time. He was a strong proponent of medical marijuana, and so he was today, though he says he’s off it now–with a faraway look of a tale he didn’t want to go on about at any length whatsoever. Okay, then.

But when he found out I had GI involvement! It is SO made for that, it’s helped him SO much for that! And he pushed me to try it. And pushed. And pushed.

I tried deflecting him, first with the thought that there’s no way to monitor the dosage. Then I tried the smoke vs protecting the lungs tactic. (The new person was totally with me on that one.) Then I tried, “I’m not going to take up smoking at this point in my life.” One woman who knew me was biting her lip, trying not to crack up…

…I beat her to it when he just had to try one more time. I lost it, laughing: “Not sure what a good little Mormon girl would do with that stuff!”

He still just didn’t get it. Bless his heart. He really did want to help.

A quick late run to the store, we’re out of milk.

Got my cart, got the milk, that was it, but then I thought, you know, we *are* low on veggies…

Turned thataway. There–I hadn’t thought of that, but you know, an acorn squash seemed just the thing to celebrate a fine October dinner with and they’re small enough for two. (Even if the outside color still doesn’t make it a green veggie.) Eh, I’m done.

I got in the shortest line, wondering what all these people were doing shopping after 9 pm too.

And of course found out in slow motion why it had been the shortest line. I was standing there five, then ten minutes with the same small group being waited on, the manager coming and going, all of them increasingly trying not to be flustered.

The clerk was. I’d never seen her before and she certainly seemed new. She flicked her long hair out of her way in annoyance. Finally one of the people grabbed an item and walked back into the aisles with a huff to put it back away.

More waiting for him to come back. Maybe he was searching for the right aisle.

Meantime, a woman had come up from behind. I tried to figure out how to rescue her from being stuck there too without making the clerk’s evening any worse. We smiled at each other; as the minutes ticked on, we shrugged our shoulders ever so slightly and chuckled together. She chose not to look for another line, although others were opening up. Not to be in a hurry.  She came across as someone you’d want to get to know the moment you met her.

And then to my surprise she finally said something–but not at all about the line but rather, “What is that?”

That was so unexpected that it took me a second as I followed her glance. Oh wait–the acorn squash?

“Yes, what is that? What do you do with that?” And then, “Is it bitter?”

No, it’s not bitter, and I explained cutting it in half, scooping out the little bit of string and seeds and microwaving or baking it; that we liked ours with a little maple syrup on it.

She made an appreciative “Ooh” at the mention of maple syrup.

By her accent and features I would guess she was from India. The items she’d placed on the conveyor belt so far were foods of Mexican origin. I was charmed: here was someone with the courage to move to a very different new place and the curiosity to try, clearly, everything. And with the patience of Job.

Finally my milk and squash were being scanned, and in my delight at my fellow shopper I somehow relayed it in my face to the flustered clerk–who was startled to see herself being smiled at, that was the last thing she expected just then! She rang me up quickly and I thanked her.

And then the person coming up behind was more gracious still. I can only imagine what a relief it was to that person trying to get the hang of her new job.

It is amazing to me how the sudden impulse to go down the produce aisle, and then to pick something other than, say, carrots, made such a difference–and the change in tone in that line all came because the woman behind me assessed the situation and felt that she had all the time and the heart to give in this new world of hers. However long she’d been here.

I have been watching with great interest the Occupy Wall Street protests and their growing offshoots and wishing dearly I could ditch my sun sensitivity and get out there.  I have no doubt that if there isn’t a protest over at Stanford yet, there will be. There should be.

The reactions of Wall Street, the New York police, several DC politicians in particular…

Some here may remember what I said (though I gave few details at the time as to why) after a guy in Stanford Hospital’s billing department stole my name and number and tried to make me give him my credit card information over the phone for a supposed bill collection agency for an amount that, actually, I had overpaid my account by because they were slow to update their system and had re-billed it. So clearly he thought I was an easy target. The man was sufficiently vicious in tone that I considered calling the police.

What I wrote was: “The angrier someone gets over something that is unreasonable, the more you know they know they’re in the wrong.”

The protesters have my admiration for their efforts not to show anger, not to give any justification for the crackdowns that have happened, but simply to demand that the laws favoring the 1% change in order for us to have a more just society that creates hope for our future. My favorites so far:

1. A sign held up saying, “Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who believes in free health care for all. You’re thinking of Jesus.”

2. Here is the long version by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, professor at Columbia University, writing for Vanity Fair; below is what he said to the protestors in person. He noted that he and they were not allowed to use a bullhorn to address the crowd, not allowed to make themselves heard by any means other than the crowd repeating his phrases loudly to try to pass them towards the back. He wondered to them why this should be so.

But there are video cameras in smartphones and there is YouTube. (Blessings on those at that link who offer a transcription for those of us who need it.)

“Our financial markets have an important role to play. They’re supposed to allocate capital and manage risk, but they’ve misallocated capital and created risk. We are bearing the cost of their misdeeds. There’s a system where we’ve socialized losses and privatized gains. That’s not capitalism! That’s not a market economy. That’s a distorted economy, and if we continue with that, we won’t succeed in growing, and we won’t succeed in creating a just society.”

Amen.

Yesterday’s yarn felt like work. I’ll get to it: but today is our Sabbath and it just didn’t feel right for the day. It needed to rest.

I went looking for whatever in the stash might strike me to make something to make someone happy–the people and the possibilities were endless, I dithered longer than I wanted to and finally decided that the only way to narrow it down was to start with my eyes. Go.

I had no idea what I was looking for, just a familiar sense that when I found it, I would know.

There–beneath several other ziplocs. A long-ignored goodly start to a shawl in some laceweight purple silk on 3.5mm needles (ouch). It wasn’t begun the way I would start it now; still, I’ve never frogged it, not after all the work that’s gone into it. There was a snag that needed to be fixed and there were circular needles that had totally kinked up in that small bag.

It just needed a little love.  I tugged around the snag a moment but shrugged, eh, later, it’ll be fine. I had no idea why, but this was it, this needed to be done, the sooner the better. I knitted a row, transferring it to new needles as I went down the  long row and weighing whether I still felt that way about it.

I did.

After a year in time-out? Why now?

I don’t know. But as I picked up that ziploc this afternoon and opened it to get a good look, all I can tell you is it felt wonderful that I had it in my hands again at last despite any arguments I could make against it. It was entirely a surprise–I have no idea what there is about it. Yet.

I’ve learned to take that feeling when it’s strong like that and just run with it as fast as I humanly can.  It’s humming along nicely.

Our ladder walked off on its own at some point in the past we know not of. I put out a plea and I do mean plea to our ward chat list; Glenn responded near-instantly. We ran very gratefully off with his ladder and Richard climbed up on our roof, relieved to finally be able to get at that furnace.

It’s working now.

My knitting, not so much. The poor guy spent several hours this evening (and that was only half of it) listening to me muttering under my breath from across the room, “But this makes no *sense*!” I counted, I recounted, I “dear could you SIXTY EIGHT SIXTY NINE SEVENTY oh sorry, dear” knitted, I frogged, I wondered who on earth ever thought I knew how to do this. A designer? Are you kidding me?

I could have fudged that one stitch there. I refuse to fudge. Ripped! I can now tell you that the new Findley yarn from Juniper Moon Farm is not only super soft and deliciously shiny, but it holds up to being frogged and reknitted five times–and it will be again if I have to to get this to come out as perfect as it deserves. I know exactly how I want this pattern to look. A bunch of silly string is not going to defeat me!

I guess we got our heat back…

(Hastening back to the computer to add, he was a total sweetheart about it and I was trying to be. All it needed was for me to stop fussing over it and go do my treadmill time to clear my head. That seems to have done it. Tomorrow I should be able to just sit down, relax totally, and knit.)

I finished this hat.

I thought of about a hundred more people who would be thrilled to be given a handknit hat. I aim to please.

When there are too many possibilities and too many ideas and my brain can’t settle down and pick one, I start winding balls: something to keep my hands busy and getting something actually done while my mind meanders in the context of handling soft yarn and colors. That usually settles it.

That or dyeing hanks to something new, but it was too chilly to change out of my layers of wool that might get splashed on. Even if stacking balls of yarn like this is as close as we get to building snowmen around here, it was 49F last night and at that rate even my husband might start wearing a hat to bed.

Hopefully when he gets some daylight time and climbs up on that roof tomorrow he’ll be able to figure out why the furnace up there isn’t working. The thing melted its, and I quote, silicon control rectifier (not to mention part of our outside circuit breaker) a few years ago. Crossing our fingers and keeping the darn thing turned off for the moment, glad it’s supposed to warm up for the next few days.