Making progress… Sorry about the fuzzies; I knit better than I photograph, this was my fourth try.

Did anybody else see this? We were watching the debate last night via MSNBC, and McCain and Obama were shaking hands with the crowd afterwards, the thing still being aired.  Just before the cameras cut out–and I’m guessing McCain must have thought they already had–the two men happened to find themselves next to each other again, and Obama reached out with a warm smile to shake McCain’s hand again, not as part of the debate performance but as two colleagues.

And McCain stood there stone-faced, absolutely refusing to.  Cindy McCain finally shook Obama’s to cover for her husband’s gaffe.

(Edited to add: with the help of Momo Fali, this is the scene from a completely different camera and angle to what MSNBC showed.  In this one, you can see McCain patting Obama on the back, but when Obama turns in response and reaches his hand out, McCain steps back away from him and waves him towards Cindy McCain.  I would say that that was still rude, but it definitely is far better than standing there arms stock still like it had seemed. Thank you for the link and the clarification!)

I am knitting again: one row across, rest.  The hand’s doing reasonably well.  What is coming off my needles as I go is so compelling to me that it’s hard to make myself take those breaks.

One of the things I did in Wrapped in Comfort was to give the stitch count for each lace pattern within each shawl, so you could swap out other ones if you want to just use the pattern as a template, or so you could do so many repeats across and make a scarf for a faster project to test-drive that lace pattern.  What I’m doing right now, just because I was curious how it would play out, is, I did the Kathy’s Clover shawl through the yoke. That’s a 10+1.  Did the increase row.  Then I flipped the page to Nina’s Ann Arbor; that’s a 20+1, and 381 for the Kathy divides into 20+1 with no group of ten left dragging.  It worked.  This also gets me a slightly smaller-around finished product than if I’d just done the Nina’s, 381 stitches vs 421.

My record is two of these shawls in a week.  One is a more leisurely pace. We’ll see how well I keep it up, but fingering weight yarn and size 9s, it really won’t take long.

(Edited to add: Knitpicks has books on sale, and you can get it there for cheaper than the used copies on Amazon.  Just sayin’.)

After a conversation with a friend last week, I wanted to put this out there.

I was born with a gift for music.  One day, several hours after we’d returned from a jazz concert, I asked my son Richard, who takes after me that way and who was then in middle school, to sing the start of a song we’d heard there that was totally new to him, “Bedtime for Bigfoot.”  He nailed it.  He not only remembered it, he had the exact right pitch from the first note.  That’s my boy.

When I was a teenager, I was told I had a progressive hearing loss that had taken the uppermost frequencies and now was impeding my hearing speech. They had me take sign language and lipreading lessons.  Finding out that it was all an allergic reaction to aspirin was way in the future.  (Here.)

And I bottomed out.  It’s hard enough being a teenager, much less an aspiring musician going deaf.  I gradually pulled myself out of it, with much prayer and a lot of daily exercise to clear the brain, but it was a long, hard, slogging, two year process.  My first college roommate, upon meeting me, lasted two hours before she ditched me.  (The one I ended up with became a lifelong friend.)

I’m actually glad now that I went through all that: it taught me compassion. It taught me to keep my eyes open for people in pain.  I can’t fix everything for everybody or even everything for anybody, and in some cases, anything at all, but I have to be my best self and try. It is important to me never to inflict any pain on any soul for any reason if I can in any way know, and to help if I can.

So I was quite interested when I read Dr. Rachel Remen recounting having counseled a fellow doctor, who was terribly depressed, to write down five things every day that surprised him.

Me, where I am now, all that part of my life being long in the past, I would say that the thing to do is to look for things to be grateful for.  But I have come to realize that Remen was right; her patient had gone into an emotional lockdown where he was just trying to defend himself from being hurt any more.  He wasn’t ready to fathom gratitude; he was a cancer surgeon, and he just couldn’t handle the unending sense of loss.  He didn’t see that that loss was because he so deeply cared about his patients, whether he knew them well or not, that it represented the good side of him.

She writes of his begrudging reaction to her challenge.  And yet, slowly, trying to dutifully fulfill her assignment, he starts to notice things. At first, it was a tumor that shrank rather than grew.  Then came the day he had a lovely young mom in his office, where he knew how ill she was, with her small children  cuddling up shyly with her as they spoke.  Despite the intensity of the fatigue he knew she must be going through, their hair was washed and their clothes were clean, and being with her in a strange place, they felt secure.  And it hit him.  He told her that clearly, her children were well loved: he saw a great strength in her.  He told her he felt that that love would sustain her and pull her through this illness.  She was surprised, and thanked him then, deeply moved.  As was he.

And it had surprised him that he could see that and be that kind of a doctor to her.  He was surprised at how much it meant to his patient.  He was surprised that he had somehow become a doctor now whom a patient would think well of.  He was surprised to see: he’d had it in him all along.  It was just waiting for him to see it.

And he was grateful.

Our losses become our strengths by which we can bless others, especially with the gift of time added to them.  They are still losses.  Sometimes it takes a great deal of time.  Sometimes hearing aids, in whatever form they may come, be they electronic, be they friends, be they circumstances, be they God, are necessary.

I promise you this: it is worth going through what we have to go through to get there.

Thank you so much to everybody for all your support and kind words.  They will be monitoring Michelle’s counts carefully; she’s doing fine.  And Richard feels good about how he did on that test.

We went!  Gigi and Jasmin aka The Knitmore Girls and No-Blog-Rachel and I carpooled up to Santa Rosa to see Stephanie. We left early and came home late and had a blast.

Stephanie gave her talk; the bookstore sat me where I could lipread, which was wonderful, but I’m afraid I still missed far too much.  But what I did hear was thoughtful, inspiring, insightful, and very, very funny.  I love that one of our own got Barack Obama to hold her sock on her needles.

Stephanie announced it was time now to sign books–and then instead, came around the table and first threw her arms around me.  Then she turned back around the table again to her seat and started, pre-boarders first.  We hung back and visited.  When it was my turn, she asked me to grab my book for her picture to be taken with, and I went for hers while my friends went, No, she means yours, silly!  I’m not convinced, but either way, look what picture I got!  I had to crop it way down to get WordPress to take it.  Hmm.  Given a choice between slicing her off at the forehead or slicing my book, um, yeah, I don’t think that would be the help with her hair she was talking about.

Laura came!  She told me she always keeps spare needles and yarn at the hospital where she works, just because, well, you never know, right?  (I see every knitter reading this nodding yes.)  She’d recently had a patient who’d been brought in under emergency circumstances, no chance to pack, whom she was talking to–and…

…Hang on a second.  Stephanie, in her talk, mentioned the satisfaction of knitting a particularly nice pair of socks while at the same time knowing that most of it was going to spend its life unseen inside some shoes.  I’ve got an answer to that: Laura’s patient saw a flash of color as Laura was leaving the room, and called out after her, hoping Laura would hear. She did.

Only another knitter would have instantly realized that those were handknit socks.  Only another knitter would have realized that that means either Laura was a knitter, or Laura was dear enough to a knitter for that level of effort and that if so, that knitter also knew Laura would appreciate them.  (Laura had made them.)  Only another knitter, or perhaps someone deemed worthy to be knitted for, would get how dire the patient’s need was.  Yarn!  Oh, please, anything, do you have any?  Laura ran down the hall and got her size 7s and some Encore and gave her patient a promise of more in that dyelot as needed.

Now that’s my kind of medical insurance.

(Hey, Jasmin–I wasn’t really kinnearing you. I was just being a klutz as I turned off the camera, and guffawed when I saw the result.)

Santa Rosa tomorrow, Stephanie, Stitches East; my life suddenly played Fifty-Two Pickup on me in the late afternoon today, everything thrown in the air.  I have never been so glad to hear that child of mine on the line.  She sounded like I felt: a small voice, hesitating, “Mom??…!!”

And then we threw our arms around each other across the phone lines.

I wrote a blog draft during the two+ hours I waited to hear, two. long. hours. that were longer than being in labor, needing desperately to do something and dealing with it by addressing it sideways, talking about how, when a kid turns 18, they’re not covered under the family health insurance anymore unless they’re a full-time student, and if they get sick enough to be forced to drop out, then what the heck do you do?  They can’t get employer-funded coverage themselves if they’re too sick to work, and even then, as grad students, once they hit 23 they are dropped from the family coverage by the insurers: yours, mine, anyone’s.  I wrote that that’s part of why I’m voting for the man who wants to offer to all Americans the same health insurance plan that members of Congress get. Go Obama.

All that doesn’t really matter so much to me right now, and I’m debating deleting that part entirely from this post.  No arguments, please, not today.  All that matters to me is that my daughter was able to pick up that phone herself and call home and talk to me.  After a few minutes, relaxing, she put on her best Monty Python imitation and joked, “I’m not dead yet!”  And she told me how grateful she was to her brother and sister-in-law for taking care of her. I am so glad they’re at the same university.

The on-campus student health center had sent her to the hospital, fast, thinking she had a blood clot in her lungs.  What Ruth Schooley died of.  We have known for the past year that there was a risk of that.  Turns out it wasn’t that; the CT scan indicated a virus inflaming her lungs.  But there were those hours this evening where I’d gotten the simple message from my son of, I’m taking my sister to the hospital for a pulmonary embolism, more later.   And all I could do was wait and pray hard.

She’s okay.

And he had dropped everything on the spot to help her be okay, despite the fact that he’s taking the LSAT tomorrow.

I will be at Copperfield Books in Santa Rosa tomorrow to see Stephanie, and this time we’re not getting caught in traffic on the way.

I will be signing books, hanging out, and generally making a cheerful nuisance of myself at Kaleidoscope Yarns in Essex Junction, Vermont, on Friday, Nov. 14th, starting at 1:00 pm, and signing any copies on order as well as for those there in person.

Twenty-one years ago, after our moving van got done unloading our belongings, billing for 3333 miles for the trip from New Hampshire (a memorable number, that), the elderly retiree across the street sauntered over to introduce himself by way of saying, “I saw them taking a snow shovel off that truck.  Whaddya think you’re gonna need THAT here for?”

He was right. It made a lousy spade for our new Californian garden, and I know because I did try it once because that’s all I had. I figured, well, if it ever does snow, I’ll rent the thing out for a hundred bucks an hour.  Not a snowplow in hundreds of miles, I’ll make a killing.

My husband’s offer letter on the job here promised, in writing, “No home delivery of snow.”

I could get all wistful and say I miss real weather and that I’d be hoping to make snow angels for nostalgia’s sake while we’re back in New England, but you know?  The last time I said any such thing about visiting the East Coast, my flight was the last one allowed down at Dulles airport–five minutes ahead of the tornado that likewise touched down at Dulles airport, and we skidded sideways for a moment there on the runway.

Boring weather isn’t so bad after all.

Besides.  I wear Birkis now.  Snow angels in Birkenstocks is just too Calif—well, now, wait a minute, this IS Vermont we’re talking about…

I’ve done a number of booksignings around here where people knew me well already and it mostly seemed an excuse for friends to come see each other, where I didn’t do the typical author read-from-the-book thing; it would have meant interrupting lots of conversations to get started and people were clearly having a fine time already, which to me is the point of any get-together.  So we kept it informal.

Last night at Green Planet (where I utterly forgot to pull out my camera, this is an older photo), Beth introduced me and it was a more formal set-up this time. I both keenly enjoyed it and felt I rather flubbed it; I tripped over myself, forgot names, was a bit of a ditz…but I have to say that it was definitely great fun.  With my deafness, I kind of wanted to ask Beth afterwards whether the questions asked and my answers had had connections to each other often enough.  Heh.

Beth had draped a shawl across the back of each chair and encouraged people to try them on.  One woman asked, when I said I’d knitted one shawl for a friend and then a duplicate for the publisher, over and over, “How do I get to be your friend?”  I was totally charmed, and thought, well, hon, that was a real good start.  And what was your name again?…

Except, today, don’t expect anything any too soon.  I hit my left hand on the edge of the metal towel rack on the shower door this morning, hard.  I’m usually pretty impervious to pain, but wow.  The doctor told me to gently exercise my hand, demonstrating hand-moving motions, and I immediately chirped hopefully, “Knitting?” She laughed; she got it.  She has knitters in her family.  She allowed as how it would set back my recovery if I did too much of it, and she will call me with the x-ray results when we find out if I broke it or not.

During part of my growing up just outside Washington, DC, we had a family next door where the father (later Ambassador Cleveland) had worked in Indonesia for the State Department; their youngest child, at three, didn’t even speak English when they transferred to DC because his parents figured he’d pick it up fast enough once they moved back to the States.  He did.

One of the children was a girl slightly older than me, and she told me a few stories on what it was like to live in a place that seemed perfectly normal to her, quite enjoying the fact that in her telling it, it was anything but, to me–having to wait for a hot bath till the elephants delivered the logs for the fire to go under the tub was just not quite in my daily experience.  Not to mention that the tub was on the outside of their house, I guess because, well, you don’t let the elephants tromp around inside, right?  But hey!  She could top that!  And she told me of the soldiers coming up the hill toward their home with their guns and how scary it was.  She reiterated the point: there was the government. And there were people fighting the government, and they all had guns and sometimes there was actually shooting going on.

I had a very hard time wrapping my mind around all that at seven or eight years old.

Now, one of the sayings around DC is that the definition of a diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you look forward to the trip.  And what I saw of the mom next door, looking back now as a mother myself, I imagine she could probably have dealt with those soldiers just fine by herself, though I don’t know if she ever had to or not.  She was a strong woman.  But I imagine that strength had to have been blended with a whole lot of that kind of diplomacy, on both her part and her husband’s, given where they’d been living; and so, her children turned out to be safe.

We bought a new washer/dryer set 13 years ago.  Kitchenaid.  The washer went through every kind of problem from year one and finally kicked the bucket last month.  No-Blog-Rachel to the rescue!  How many friends have a spare three-year-old washer to sell you?

So I have a question to put out there.  Is my dryer mourning its mate and refusing to play nice with that hussy Whirlpool?  Do I need to replace the thing?  My dryer has never been a really hot one, and it has a brand new hose, so that’s not it.  This blouse was not caught in the door, and it’s definitely not the first one, just the most agonizing to me.  It’s just the no-iron cotton shirts that do this: they come out of the dryer with little burn spots. This was very dark, and the picture here is after much scrubbing of the scorched collar.  Is it the coating they put on those shirts? Would another dryer just do the same thing?  Has anybody else had this?

Some of the no-iron cotton shirts are terrible–they cling like clumped-up plastic wrap.  This one had it exactly right: it was a cotton shirt, by golly, the fabric relaxed and smooth as if it had been pre-ironed for me, but first and foremost for this natural-fibers fanatic, it was emphatically cotton.

So I showed that dryer who’s boss.  I spent yesterday afternoon working out a new lace pattern, grabbed my Potomac colorway Geisha that Tina dyed for me, and cast on to knit the C&O Canal and the towpath alongside it in the fall back home where she and I grew up.  Dancing in the leaves and seeing them flurry up from our feet.  Storebought can be replaced.  Our time and our knitting can never be.  Onward.

(Note: I will be at Green Planet Yarn in Campbell tomorrow night at 6:30 for a booksigning. Not sure what I’ll wear, but we’ll have fun. See you there!)

I finished it!  Maybe.

Sometimes you just go back to old favorites: this is the Michelle shawl from “Wrapped in Comfort.” Curious–I did one fewer half-repeat in the main body than in the one in the book, and the effect with the edging came out completely different.  In the book, the edging and the triangles above it form a perfect diamond and the lines are flowing in a connected continuation.  Here, the edging is set apart, more distinct from the body.  Such a small change, and yet it’s so different, and it totally fascinates me.

Here’s what the shawl looked like last night and this morning. I’m debating re-blocking it with my wires to sharpen the points or to rinse it down again and round it out instead.  Haven’t decided.  Baby alpaca is drapy by nature, silk tends to sag…but I do like points.

We were at the Mormon Temple in Oakland this morning, and as we stepped out the door, there was a wedding party gathering in the garden with parents shepherding their little ones forward for the family photos.  We passed a young dad with an adorable toddler, I’d say two years old if that, in a stroller.  She was perfectly well-behaved, but such events have a tendency to require little ones to be perfectly well-behaved for a bit longer than the child is made for; I reached into my purse and gave the dad a smile and a back-up plan.  He was blown away and then delighted.

You all have heard of the handknitted finger puppets from Peru before.

The grounds are built into the Oakland hillside, and there were steps going up from one section of flowers to the next; it’s perfectly designed for people to line up in rows and be seen by the camera, surrounded by gorgeousness, which is what those two families were doing.

And oh did it bring back memories.

Four years ago, when our oldest got married there and we took family photos in the same spot, our new son-in-law had a toddler niece with Down’s syndrome.  And clearly and cheerfully, strong ideas of her own.  Her mother tried really hard to hold her still for the pictures.  The photographer got our two families scrunched in together, okay you, step forward a bit, you, you, go here, you, lean a bit to the right, right there, okay, got it, SMILE!

At that the niece, who was a good size for her age, broke clean away from her mommy and ran straight to the photographer, arms outstretched, and launched into him with a bowl-him-over bear hug.  He had smiled at her! He loved her!  YAY!!!

He thought it was great, and hugged her back with a chuckle and scooted her back towards her mom.

Her mother was flustered that her daughter had ruined the picture, but no, no, not at all: she had perfected it. She had captured exactly what the whole day had been about to the two families coming together:  I do not know you well yet. But you are part of my family and therefore part of me as of this day, and we are going to celebrate!  That little girl had it exactly right.  She knew joy when she saw it.

And I thought of her as the happy groom and his beautiful bride in her long white dress swished past us on their way.  Whoever they were.  I reached blindly into the bottom of my purse, my fingers closing on what turned out to be one of the most colorful, bright fingerpuppet birds you could ask for, and I gave it to that young dad today.

I wanted that couple’s day to be a celebration of joy like that, too.

As we got in our car, I saw a very small arm waving her hummingbird hi, high in the air, at the happy couple her daddy was taking her towards.

Barbara-Kay’s comment sparked this one.  Growing up, I took piano lessons from Louise Kupelian, who required I come in twice a week, once with a piano partner and once to meet with a group, teaching under the Robert Pace method. (That last little bit in case any old students of hers come googling so I can wave hi to old friends.)  My mom used to do some grocery shopping at the nearby Safeway in Chevy Chase while she waited, or she would sit there and knit till I got out.  (Usually, anyway–one year, it was a needlepoint bench cover for my grandmother’s Steinway Grand.)  The lessons were far enough away that for her to go home in between meant she’d have to turn around the second she got there.  No point.  So.

Her father was a US Senator.  She wanted to knit him a sweater.  My grandfather did not dress casually, and his reaction was that a bit of warmth would be nice, but it couldn’t be anything outdoorsy; it needed to be very formal-looking, something he could wear in the hallways of Congress and that he could throw his suitcoat over as needed.

A few years ago, I was mentioning that project to her: with her busy household and six children, it had taken her a year to finish.  I remember those size 2 needles and the needlepoint yarn she’d had to buy 30+ skeins’ worth to get a fine enough yarn to work with.

What surprised me was Mom exclaiming, all those years later, with me remembering and her not, “Size two needles?! I must have been out of my mind!”  And maybe that’s why I remember the details; she wasn’t so sure she wasn’t out of her mind back then, either, and carefully explained to me at the time why she was using the needles and yarn she was and why it would mean so much to her dad.  And it did.

She knitted Grampa an all-over single-stitch-wide Aran diamond pattern, a monochrome argyle effect in a subdued sage green.

And all that time and all those piano lessons and all those evenings I saw her working on that gorgeous pattern, allowing love to become visible and tangible, I very much wanted a sweater like that too.  The great act of maternal love beyond my understanding at the time was that, with a heavy sigh, she actually did.  She knitted me one too when she got done with his. After having plugged steadily away at that same pattern for a YEAR.  She let me pick out the color and then made it in worsted-weight acrylic so it would go much faster and, I was in heaven, she put a zipper in the front so I could be in style just to top it all off.  With a big brassy triangle zipper pull, not just some plain old thing. I loved it.

Grampa took care of and wore his wool diamond sweater for the rest of his life.  He retired from his seat in his 70’s and died at 95. And that’s one of the reasons I love working with animal fibers: no cotton sweater is going to look great 30 years out, but wool can.

Mine, I wore until the sleeves barely covered my elbows and Mom was embarrassed to let me be seen in public with it.  That was MINE.  *I’d* picked out the pattern, *I’d* picked the color, my MOM made it just for ME, that was MINE.

She finally hid it, to my distress.   So.  We were doing this reminiscing a few years ago, and I asked her whatever had happened to it; it would have been nice to somehow be able to show it to my own kids.  She didn’t remember.  She assured me, “I would only have given it to someone who appreciated what went into it.”  True, but… I don’t think anyone could quite love it as dearly as I did back in the day.  My mom made me that and nobody else had one but me.  And Grampa.

Of my parents’ six children and their four daughters, I’m the only one who knits.  I wonder now if how thrilled I was at Mom’s unselfishness, eagerly watching Grampa’s sweater and then mine coming slowly to be, helped nudge me in that direction.  I quite think so.

Stray thought: I never thought I’d see the day when I would totally agree with–Newt Gingrich. Wow. Thank you, Suburbancorrespondent, for the link re the $700 billion bailout idea: I do like my radio in closed captions.

The silk that Claudia dyed that Sandi gave is turning into a Michelle shawl; the second strand is Misti Alpaca laceweight from my stash and my dyepot.  The knitting started off a bit slowly, till my husband told me I was going to have to get me a ghostknitter.  I don’t *think* so!  Back to work!

I’m suddenly picturing Wall Street multimillionaire welfare kings being handed some needles and some Red Heart (got to be frugal, you know, yes, it has its uses, and no, guys, you don’t get qiviut this time) and told to chill awhile till something intelligent gets worked out.

I will be signing books at Green Planet Yarn in Campbell, CA on Wednesday, Oct. 1, from 6:30-8 pm.

As always, you can order a copy from Purlescence in Sunnyvale, CA (not the yarn store by that name in England) and I will gladly come in and inscribe it during Thursday Knit Night.

I will be signing books at Stitches East at 2:00 at Lisa Souza’s booth on Saturday, Nov 8, in Baltimore, MD, and plan to be there at Stitches pretty much all day Friday and Saturday.

I will be in Burlington, VT the following week…and we shall see.

If anybody wants to come early, I’ll be at Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s booksigning next week in Santa Rosa, CA on Saturday, Oct 4th. That’s Stephanie’s show, not mine, but hey, I’ll be there; I’m afraid I can’t promise how long my carpool will stick around afterwards.

And oh my goodness–looking at my picture files, I find that the shawl that I was working on while waiting for Stephanie to speak last year was the one I surprised Tina at Blue Moon Fibers with. I had totally forgotten it was that one!

I’ve been trying for days, and this is as close as I’ve gotten so far.  This jay was particularly bright and blue in the morning sun, and it let me open the sliding glass door, slowly, slowly.  One unsteady click of the camera, though, and it was ducking into the shelter of the larger trees and away.

It’s beautiful out there.

(Edited to add: Knitpicks just put “Wrapped in Comfort” at 40% off! Just in case, you know, anybody besides me might be jumping up and down over that.)