Okay, today I’m remembering to take my camera, even if I can’t make use of it yet.

I wonder if anyone else noticed–that last post, I finished writing it, got up from the computer, and it hit me almost immediately that that second to last paragraph was a perfect metaphor for the hopes of people around the world for how the United States will do after Tuesday’s results.

Anyway, back to yarn. I got some to play with, oh definitely, but no way to show them that I know how to do on this computer.  I did quite enjoy one woman seeing a copy of “Wrapped in Comfort” on my lap and exclaiming, “Oh, I LOVE that book!” Karen, wearing the large Water Turtles shawl in its pages and standing next to me, answered, “She wrote the book!”

The woman’s delighted exclamations made all three years of effort worth it just in that moment, I tell you.

Taking the cheapest flight meant going to Las Vegas before heading east to Baltimore.  We then flew over the Grand Canyon, the colors so Monet’ed from that height as to mostly blend together. I thought of a few friends who are colorblind and wondered if that’s more like how they would see it up closer; I don’t have the context to know.  I wondered how much of that vast landscape was the actual park: it went on and on, horizon to horizon to horizon, a great collapsed sand castle of sheer cliffs falling straight down, a meandering blue flashing in and out of sight at the bottom.  At the eventual edges, there were some softer-curving areas where the erosion of the water had been more spread out: one mountainside facing me looked like a Georgia O’Keefe ginkco leaf in fading fall colors. Glorious.

My newspaper put the hold on home delivery a day too soon: I wanted that November 5th paper to take on the plane! While we waited for our luggage, Richard bought me a late-printed Washington Post Special Election Edition in the Baltimore airport, which made me quite a few instant friends as I held it in my hands and people commented on the headline.  By this morning, a pristine copy was being sold on Ebay for $400, according to the Post’s amazed online edition; yesterday was a very good day to be a print newspaper.

The air got fairly turbulent as we flew into Baltimore, but that pilot placed that plane down just exquisitely so. Well done.

We’re home.

(The colors are more subdued in real life.)

When my grandfather died in ’94, the coat that I wore the winter day of his funeral up in the Rocky Mountains was my Kaffe Fassett one, knitted in one strand of mohair with one of wool on size 5.5mm needles: in other words, it was dense and surprisingly warm, even with snow on the ground.  My feet, on the other hand, froze memorably.

I felt somehow like it wasn’t quite right, though, to wear that there. I just felt it called too much attention to itself at a solemn moment.   So not longer after, for the first time since I’d gotten married, I splurged on a new, more formal, long wool-and-cashmere charcoal-colored coat.  Gorgeous.  When it came, though, the sizing was generous.  Um, like, real generous in the sleeves–I’m short-armed to begin with.

My children are tall.  Returns are a major hassle.  I kept it.

My oldest went off to college, and at the first snow, she called and told us she had her electric blanket set to “Deep fat fry!”

Two years later, her brother was packing for his first semester at BYU too, and she was having far too much fun telling him just how cold he was going to be out there.  Heh.  I heard her, thought about it, and it was clear to me I should have done this two years sooner:

I had bought that long coat for all the wrong reasons. I had bought it to fit in with my husband’s co-workers at their Christmas parties.  Did I think it would be more impressive than my Kaffe Fassett?  I had bought it so as not to be loud come the day that my grandmother should pass away; I did wear it to her funeral two years after Grampa’s, where we were, again, standing in snow at the gravesite.   But my husband and I had run out of 90-something grandparents to have leave us; we were done with that need.

And what nobody could have foreseen was, the thing now drove me nuts: the bottom of it flapped and wrapped around my cane with each left-foot-forward step, now that I was using a cane post-accident.  When your balance depends on your muscular feedback, this is the equivalent of my coat trying to throw me down on the ground in rhythm with my gait. Tell me, do your clothes do wrestling moves on you?

So my daughter upgraded to a longer, nicer coat. She traded it back and forth later with her little sister’s navy peacoat, each as she saw the other needing whichever.

…And I am hanging onto the memory of being warm at Grampa’s funeral, because my Kaffe Fassett is going to have a large job to do at my older daughter’s house in Vermont.  The sleeves on this thing came out too long, and I’ve never gotten around to going back and fixing that.

My children are tall.

The housesitter’s got the keys, the flight’s leaving soon.  Baltimore first, here we come!

The elderly black man pulled up alongside my car a few minutes ago while I was madly dashing around doing last-minute errands–I’d gone to the polling place first, then the pharmacy, now I was on my way to the post office–and he made a point of catching my eye and giving me a huge grin.  I smiled back at him, wondering for a moment… Oh! Right! Of course. Duh.

I’ve got an Obama sticker on the back of my car. My first-ever bumper sticker in my life:

“Hope.”

I’ve been thinking about Kyle’s story and his mom, and it strikes me that one of the reasons it’s so very compelling, was, yes, what an incredible gift he gave her. It cost him a lot of planning, time, money, and devotion to pull it off, and he pulled it off, and what an incredible and insightful act of love.  And how many people he never knew, at 25, would be affected and touched by what he was doing.  The whole thing just totally wows me.

But there’s also this: there’s this deep, innate human yearning that every person who’s ever lived can relate to of wishing you could go back, just for one day, and have back something that was dear to you. Something that you’ve lost.

How often do we actually get to?

Kyle made that happen for his mother that day.  To life!

Kyle spoke with me at church and gave me permission to share his story:

His mom was a pilot.  Loved to fly, love love loved it.  Planes, helicopters.

Then she got married, decided to start a family, got pregnant with him… And during the pregnancy had seizures that cost her her pilot’s license.  And that was that.

But she still loved planes and she would sometimes take her little boy to the small local airport from time to time to show him around.

When he was 25, he decided he owed his mom and he decided to do something about it.

He called her up one day and invited her to meet him over at the municipal airport.  You know, look around, give her a chance to rag on him about who he was dating or not, quality time with her kid (I think he said it was her birthday).  Sure.

As they walked around the small planes, he asked her about the difference between the controls on, say, this Cessna here vs… and he opened the door.

Kyle! You can’t just…!

He climbed in.

KYLE! You can’t just… Kyle?!

Hop in, Mom, c’mon, show me!

She knew her kid enough to know he certainly wasn’t going to do something wrong, but this was someone else’s plane and this was going too far and what did he THINK he was…

C’mon in, Mom, here, show me!

She climbed in, started to ask what on *earth* is this about, what are you DOING, Kyle.

Then she looked in his eyes.  And suddenly got it.  “Did you…!”

Yup. He’d gotten his license, and he’d rented this plane to take her up. Pilot, co-pilot.  “Go for it, Mom!”

YEEHAW!!!

(Go here to see my best Halloween costume ever.)

It drizzled off and on last night and we only got about ten trick-or-treaters at the door, all of them quite young.  (Oh dear. My husband bought the 4 2/3 pound bag of mini candy bars at Costco in anticipation of there being lots more coming than that.)

Our neighborhood has an annual block party, so that even if I can’t keep everyone’s names straight, we all know each others’ faces, which is a wonderful thing.

The doorbell rang.  A young mom with her little ones whom I didn’t recognize introduced herself as the new neighbor down the street in the “pumpkin colored house.”  Cool.

There was quite a wait, and then the doorbell rang again: four children from two families, the oldest a boy about six, the youngest a girl of maybe three and a half at the most from the nearby cul-de-sac.  The parents stayed back away from immediate sight, letting the children in their costumes have their moment.

“Is there anything else?” The boy whined, picking at the bowl. “I want chocolate.”  The rubber hand came down on his with a gravelly voice, “Trick or Treat!” He grabbed it and waggled it back and forth, trying to make it do that again.  As I showed him that waving your hand in front of it without touching it made it activate, knowing that little boys like to see how things work, it was all I could do not to guffaw out loud at his disappointment, thinking, oh, me, too, hon, me too, but I didn’t pick out the candy this year, and they rarely sell Valrhona or Scharffenberger in bite sizes.  I tried to make it up to him by offering him extras of the dissed candy, and he pocketed it, sure, glad to; the five-year-old boy likewise.  They turned to go.

The two little girls were torn: clearly, their mothers had coached them well. You only take one piece.  That’s it.  Be polite.  I offered them more like the boys had gotten, and how could they disobey their moms?  But how could they leave, given an offer like that?

I rescued them by reaching into the bowl myself and putting extra into their bags, the slightly-older girl holding hers open for me.

Now, I’ve certainly been a young mom myself groaning over all the junk food my kids gleefully counted out of their loot on Halloween night after we walked them around to houses of people we knew.

This one little girl, the littlest, looked up at me with these huge eyes and these long eyelashes, and suddenly I felt I had passed the Grandma test: I was in cahoots with her. I didn’t make her disobey. But I got her what she wanted just the same; clearly my intent was simply for her to be happy, with the candy only a sign of that, and now she was ready to come in in her princess costume for a snuggle in the rocking chair and a good bedtime story.   Grandma.  I was adopted on the spot (and I knew her own Grandmas were half a world away.)  She utterly melted my heart.

Halloween became magical in that moment.

I heard recently from someone who didn’t quite see what my shawls were about; she thought that when I said circular, I was just referring to the needles used to knit them.  I realized I hadn’t really shown much of my work lately.  So I thought I’d show off some old pictures and try to show the v-neck styling a little better.

The red is the Peace shawl for my friend Johnna. The lilac is the Bigfoot shawl, done in Jade Sapphire’s 4-ply Cashmere; this yarn is about double the weight of the original,  Frog Tree laceweight, but it was exactly the color I was looking for at the time, and the right color and a super soft cashmere–it was hard to go wrong. Somehow this photo seems to me like a Niagara Falls of stitches.

Then we’ve got the Constance, the picture cropped to fit into the blog.  Done in two strands of fine laceweight together, one a silk, one Misti baby alpaca.

Next up is the Michelle shawl, with about 2/3 of it showing, done in a handdyed silk.

Next we have the Wanda’s Flowers shawl, which, like the Constance, is one of the narrower shawls in “Wrapped in Comfort,” done here in one skein of Lisa Souza‘s handdyed sportweight baby alpaca and easily adaptable to heavier yarns.

Next up is Kathy’s Clover Chain shawl in baby alpaca I dyed to match the clovers she and I used to string together. Note the shadow of the amaryllis in the background.

And then, since I can’t wait for my favorite flowers to start blooming again, I’m borrowing one of last season’s pictures in anticipation. Note how the leaf is waving hi.

I asked my friend Robin if I could borrow her story here, and she said sure.  She flew early this morning, and there was a young family that was going to be on her flight.  In her words:

“When we were in the waiting area, the little boy was very much his parents child.  His dad held him up to the window, showing him the view through the plate glass.  His mom spelled his first name for the person to whom we were giving our boarding passes.  (I was right behind them but don’t remember the name because it’s not one I’ve ever before heard.)  The family spoke another language to one another.  English they spoke to the agent was clearly accented but was clear.  The father was wearing a tee shirt only one word of which I read:  Dutch.

Then the parents were delayed a bit folding up the two-child stroller. The little boy went ahead a bit to see what was next.  And all of a sudden he was everyone’s child.  The stewardess was ahead of him.  At the spot where the platform we were walking on meets the plane, there is a gap.  He stopped.  He looked.  He held up his hand in a way that let me know he wanted someone to hold his hand.  I did.  The stewardess was encouraging him to take that big step across the small gap.  He did.  I looked back and asked the mom whether her son spoke English.  Just then he said “Whoosh!”  Recognizable in any language. Then he looked up and realized it wasn’t mom’s hand he was holding.  Lucky mom was right behind us.”

And thus one little boy had a morning that showed everybody around him, through his eyes, that the world is a friendly place.

I can’t wait to go “Whoosh!” next week!

As I mentally pack for my trip before starting the actual packing:

I inherited this pin from my grandmother. I was startled to see Gov. Palin wearing a replica of it at one point, but I guess it means she can’t tell me I’m not a real American; I’ve got the jewelry to prove my bona fides.  Heh. (What did they do, hand these out at a Republican convention once? I’d love to know the story behind this. Mom? Uncle Bob?)

My late grandfather, as I’ve mentioned before, was a Republican senator, and he amassed an eclectic collection of elephants over his 24 years in office.  When he passed away at 95, each of his grandchildren was told to pick one out and take it home.  I chose a small mostly-roundish handblown lead crystal one, beautifully crafted; note that the tip of its trunk is 4″ high and the little thing weighs over 10 ounces.

I wrapped it carefully in my knitting that morning to cushion it from harm.  And late in the day, heading for the airport, totally forgot it was in there.

My knitting was of course in my carry-on bag for my flight home; I would never trust my projects to baggage handlers, much less fly without something to occupy me.

This was before 9/11.  The airport screener ran my bag through and freaked, and I thought oh crud: I brought those because they’re not my favorite needles, but I should have remembered they were metal. I tried to reassure her: “It’s just knitting needles.”  She shot me a look of oh you drop dead! that I thought was totally uncalled for, and in her panic, dropped everything and ran for the manager.

Leaving me with free access before me should I happen to care to nonchalantly pick up my bag and stroll away whistling.  Which of course I wasn’t about to do, but…

The manager and the screener came running back.  They started throwing everything out of my bag onto the conveyor helter-skelter.  Given that I was only flying in and back for an overnighter, everything, actually, was in that carry-on, including my underwear, being shaken out and thrown aside during their search.  Thanks, guys.

Then the screener saw the elephant.  She suddenly knew.  It had looked exactly on the screen how she’d been trained to see that a bomb would.  She screeched in relief, grabbing it and holding it high for all the other screeners and the manager to see, starting to sob in relief.

While everybody behind me in line waited for me to repack my delicates.  Joy.

During the flight afterwards, I dropped one of my straights as I was changing rows and it instantly rolled somewhere far behind me in the ascending plane. I never saw it again.

And I never knitted with metal straights again.  Enough was enough.

1. Stitches East, Saturday, Nov 8th, Lisa Souza’s booth, 2:00.  Lisa had 14 copies left, last I heard, and last year, every single vendor at Stitches East that sold my book had sold out by about noon on Saturday.  I have to tell you, as an author, it was very gratifying to see empty space where the copies had been, in between stacks of other books still there, booth after booth, although my regrets very much for the people who couldn’t find a copy and were disappointed.  If you have a copy already, you might want to bring it.  My plan is to be at the market all day (all afternoon, at least; we’ll see how I do with the jetlag) on Friday and Saturday.  Next week!

2. Kaleidoscope Yarns, Essex Junction, Vermont, 1:00 Friday, Nov 14th. Feel free to buy one there or bring your own. Let’s hope for no snow that day. They currently have it on sale at 20% off and will hold your order for me to sign for you if you’d like.

3. Knitpicks.com is selling my book at 40% off, $14.97 a copy and the potential for free shipping, through this Friday, Oct. 31st.  Yesterday they had it on backorder, but today it’s in stock and ready to go.

Thank you!

So.  Finished two projects delayed by my flu.  Got halfway today through another one in the lineup.  I took breaks from the knittingknittingknitting (4620 stitches’ worth today–I think I need to get out more) to go check my email, and…

…Oh, wow, cool, Elann has some nice-sounding new yarns!  I want some of THAT and THAT, and THAT‘s one of my favorites, and it would be fun to try THAT and THAT out in my dyepot…  Okay, c’mon, calm down.  And then, hey, even better, there’s this and this!

Hang on. I already have some kid/silk yarn and some merino/silk and some baby alpaca/silk in my stash. And some Handmaiden.  There’s never enough Lisa yarn, but I’ll see her next week at Stitches East (2:00 Saturday. Signing books.  Come!)

There’s nothing like finishing a big project to make my brain want to run and go play with twenty-leven new yarns and ideas impatiently and all of them at once.  Right NOW!

One extra-large platter of baby alpaca, served extra rare, coming right up.

I showed this awhile ago in its earlier stages.  There was a lull in the knitting with that flu bug.  But now it’s done, blocked, the ends run in, and ready to go.

I wanted a one-off, something unique but familiar.  So I knitted the Kathy shawl through the yoke and from there in the Nina pattern, and I really like how they played together.

I love the arbors in Nina’s done in red: they remind me of the climbing bougainvillea that so surprised me when we arrived in California in March ’87.  We were coming from New Hampshire, where it had been snowing and snowing and SNOWING and snowing, five and a half feet’s worth in 17 days after a whole winter of the stuff.   The kicker was when my little girl wanted to play on the swingset: I looked out the window from the second story and challenged her wryly, “Try to find it first.” You could just make out the top bar.

Then we arrived here where it was in the middle of springtime, with these gorgeous flowers skipping around fences everywhere in cheerful red and bright fuschia, just an explosion of nature singing “I feel pretty!”

Which, you know, is actually how I’m hoping the recipient will feel when she puts this on.

Note the new category.  I wanted to make it easier for people who were curious to find old posts such as about the Pony Express rider‘s daughter–who is still alive–to be able to go look them up.

Reading Sharon Randall‘s Sept 16th column reminded me of this.  A few years ago, one of my sister’s sons had a school assignment: he and his I think fifth-grade classmates each made a book, putting together so many blank pages, and mailed it away, asking that it be forwarded around and then mailed back by a date towards the end of the school year.  Each person it was sent to was asked to write about any particular historical date that they had memories of and might wish to write about and then to pass it on to the next person who would be interested in adding to it.

I quite honestly don’t remember what I wrote.  Having grown up just outside DC, I remember there were a lot of things I debated telling them about:

The announcements crackling badly over the PA system at Seven Locks Elementary School, with Mr Newcomb, the principal, telling us of yet another loss: President Kennedy.  Helen Keller.  Martin Luther King.  Robert Kennedy.

Watching the lunar landing.  Finding out that my little brother‘s new friend at school was Neil Armstrong’s son.  Living where we did, connections such as that were common.

The hitchhikers we passed, as my mom drove me from DC to Peabody Institute in Baltimore for the Maryland State Piano Competition, their thumbs up and signs held high: New Jersey.  Delaware.  Maine.  Asking for a ride for any part of the distance to help them get home after the March on Washington to protest the Vietnam War, hundreds of people along the freeway where it was illegal to hitchhike, but hey, that’s where the cars were, and hitchhiking was the norm in those days.  Not a one was hassled by the cops for it, as far as we could tell.

It’s so different now: when was the last time you saw someone with a thumb up along the side of the road?

The DC mounted police and the protesters at our picnic…

But what I do remember is, my brother and my father got that book before I did, and before I passed it along, I photocopied their pages so I could pocket their memories, too.

I’d never heard the story before of how my dad had found out about Pearl Harbor.  Of his being squished down among 49 Christmas trees bumping along in the back of a pickup truck coming out of the forest, doing his part in a Boy Scout fundraiser. (I always pictured the truck white. I have no idea what color it was. I never realized it till I typed this, but, I always just assumed it was.) I could smell the intensity of the needles and the bite of the cold on my face from here as I read Dad’s words.

They were met and stopped by his father, who had raced to where they were to tell them the news: the US, too, was now at war.

Dad’s brothers served, as did Dad.

Mom sent this to the family two years ago, a story of forgiving and reconciliation.

I think that covers the posts that ought to be in the History category so far.

May we pass on a world with good stories for our children to tell.

One last thought, leading to perhaps the point of all this: when my grandfather turned 90, it was the same weekend that my brother got married to a girl in the same city, so there were a lot of family members gathered together.  A cousin prepared a list of questions to pepper Grampa with, and he and Gram and their five children were seated around a table at my aunt’s house, the rest of us playing audience around them, with a tape recorder going and a video camera running.  The questions got Grampa reminiscing and telling stories and it was wonderful.

Eventually the cousin manning the camera announced with chagrin that he’d run out of videotape.  We of the cousins generation watched from the sides with amazement as our parents all visibly relaxed around that table and started elbowing and teasing each other like the teenagers we’d never before seen them act like and started telling the REAL stories on each other now, and hey, do you remember Fran’s pony?

There is history in our older loved ones.  If you at all can, go grab something to record it with and go ask the questions that will help a part of them last forever.

While the aunts and uncles were laughing and telling on each other, the cousin with the videorecorder turned to my husband and whispered, “The audiotape’s still running.”

(Edited to add, found one more, about Abraham Lincoln and my ancestor.)