This is Karen. She owns the Rug and Yarn Hut.

This is the friend who taught me how to spin and not to be afraid of dyeing my own yarns. It’s just playing with watercolors, have a good time!

This is the friend whom I called after my car accident in ’00, and told her my sister wanted a navy afghan for Christmas, I needed yarn, but the world was spinning around and I couldn’t drive.

This is the LYSO (local yarn store owner) whose response was to pack up her minivan, drive the 25 minutes each way to my house, present me with all the navy yarns she had for me to choose from, and who then GAVE ME A DISCOUNT at her great insistence, along with a hug, and told me to get better.

I’d tell you about her white and gray cat climbing into her dyepot and snuggling down into that nice warm wool and dyeing itself green semi-permanently, totally freaking out the neighbors, except that I’m saving that for the next book.

If you’ve got a good LYSO, give them your best. Because there just aren’t enough Karens in the world.

Around Christmastime, I ordered a few copies of this book to give away; Chris Baldwin at littledee.net writes the best comic strip since Calvin and Hobbes. After I got done with all the wrapping and shipping to far-flung family, come to find out I’d miscounted and my own prized copy was winging its way across the country to make someone else have some good laughs.

Which Margo Lynn knew nothing whatsoever about. She just knew there was this really cool comic strip, and now there was a book, and she wanted to make me happy… So she ordered me a copy.

Meantime, I had taken the nonsense knitting pattern that Vachel the Vulture knits in one scene, had knitted it up out of a bamboo/wool mix, made a vulture wing with it, photo’d it for this blog, and eventually mailed it off to Chris Baldwin; I figured he’d get a kick out of seeing what that pattern turned into. He did.

So when Margo Lynn ordered me that copy, this is what he did before shipping it off…

Chris, you’re the best. You, too, Margo Lynn.

Last week, I was waiting for an elevator up to my doctor’s appointment, and an elderly man in a motorized wheelchair and his bored-looking attendant came around the corner to wait for the doors to open with me. He looked just like an age-progressioned version of the dad in the neighborhood, growing up, whose storm door I had careened through as a little kid (see Kathleen’s afghan story on my main website), and I instantly liked the guy for that. So. His chair looked a lot like the one I use occasionally, and I told him that as I unzipped my purse and pulled out whichever random fingerpuppet came to hand. I explained that I keep one over the joystick on my scooter and find that it makes me instantly friends with all the little kids around me (very true), especially bored ones in waiting rooms. He needed one for his joystick, too!

The attendant still looked bored. The man was absolutely delighted, so she put it over his joystick. He asked if I’d made it, and I admitted that no, I do knit, but these I buy by the dozens from Peru–but they are handknit. He declared, Well, then, I have to pay you! I laughed, as we were boarding the elevator together, telling him, Hey: it cost me eighty cents. Enjoy!

I’d had a twinge while unzipping that purse, not knowing what kind of condition the old man’s mind might be in, given that his body had clearly seen better days. But his mind, heart, and sense of humor were utterly delightful; I’m so glad I didn’t hesitate.

(My Rabbit Tracks pattern with the recommended extra edging at the sides. Yarn: Lisa Souza’s Seafoam colorway; sorry I don’t have any more of the requisite cashmere knitted up on hand for the illustration.)

I am so stealing this line from Carol H., a commenter over at Yarnharlot’s blog. Stephanie aka Yarnharlot wrote a superb post Friday that every knitter who has ever been condescended to, but who wants to handle it well, can relate to. For me, the biggest such moment was when a medical resident last October, seeing me knitting as I sat in my hospital bed, having just met me and knowing nothing whatsoever about me except the fact that I knit, when I mentioned something about my blog and website, gasped loudly, “YOU!!! have a WEBSITE?!!?”

Like wielding two sticks and some wool means you’re not capable of using a computer? Sir?

Stephanie is a woman who, single-handedly, raised $320,000 for Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres from her fellow knitters simply by asking for people to open their hearts. This is a woman with great power to do good, by how she writes and who she is. Her picture is on the very first day that this blog was launched, if I may so brag, from when she was in Los Altos, CA for a booksigning–one that involved a city permit to take over a large parking lot to accommodate the over 300 knitters who showed up for it.

And yet at another venue, she had someone hesitate to set up that tenth chair in their hands, no matter her protests, sure there couldn’t possibly be ten knitters in the area to want to come to a signing for a knitting book. Knitting?

Thus Carol H.’s line: we hold “weapons of mass construction” in our hands. We use them to show people we love them. And there are a lot of us. Ann Rubin’s Afghans for Afghans project, putting warm clothes and blankets made by hand–not just physical warmth from things bought, but a real and human warmth, stranger reaching out to stranger–I think goes a huge but quiet way to launch peace between the peoples of our countries. Our hours spent doing so cannot be bought: they can only be given. And when they are given, when we measure our lives in a manifestation of real caring, we have great power to do good.

Weapons of mass construction. Let’s knit!

Oh, and, that resident? The last day I was there, he looked at the lace scarf I was working on, in cashmere that I had dyed in shades of a royal blue, (absolutely gorgeous if I do say so, and I do say so), and said, wistfully, “I have a wife…”

I thought long and hard about it after I finished it, and finally went back to Stanford and left it with my favorite nurse, whom I’d already gifted with baby alpaca/silk lace, to give that man for his wife, the resident being unavailable just then (she paged him; he was there somewhere; we tried.) A physical reminder, soft, lovely, and skilled in the craftsmanship, that he needs to truly see his patients, not write them instantly off on the basis of his prejudices. It gently holds fast to the truth that I did not write HIM off despite that and other mistakes I believe he won’t repeat. I figure, if I’m to be part of his medical education, then it’s essential I play the part well.

We can construct a massive amount of good by holding fast to our good will. When we express it in stitches, all the better.

Drive-by knitting.

They had no idea. None. The timing! That the last few nights I’d considered packing a hospital bag, didn’t pack one, but I did go hunting through my stash till I found the second ball of that yarn I needed to finish the project on my needles–knowing that Richard wouldn’t have a chance of finding it. (Yeah, like if he were to tell me to go grab the particular ham radio that… Not a chance.) Just in case. My Crohn’s and my dysautonomia both had started to flare recently, and I can manage as long as I don’t start barfing, which my low blood pressure can’t handle, and I don’t know what meds are left to try now if my permanent chemo stops holding off the Crohn’s, and I’m trying not to get overly worried about it, yeah, I’ll be fine, and and and…

And feeling not as fine as I’d like.

So. Last night I went to my monthly knitting group, which had been moved forward a week because of Stitches being next week. My friend Nancy had called to make sure I’d be going, and had picked me up so that a ride wouldn’t be an issue; Los Gatos is a bit of a hike, and last month my husband was answering a Red Cross call and I had had to miss half of it.

We did the usual go-around-the-room and show off, and when it got to Nancy’s turn, she stood up and said, ‘Scuse me a minute.

She disappeared into the back room. She reappeared with a box, gorgeously wrapped.

I have been a party to some of Nancy’s shenanigans in the past, but I never ever thought I’d… My stars!!

Finally someone said, Well, OPEN it! I looked up at last at that, my jaw still on the ground, and said plaintively, My hands forgot how!

Open it. I opened it. And out came this: a congratulations from my local knitting friends on the June 11 publication of my book. Nancy had put all the squares together and had attached a tag naming the creator to each block. Nancy’s is wool she’d handspun–she’s the one who’d dragged me kicking and screaming to Karen’s shop to learn how to spin, back when my kids were in elementary school. Pam’s is handdyed cashmere/silk–Pam was one of the test knitters for my book, giving me feedback on how I’d written the patterns out and reassuring me I’d done okay with them. Llama, wool, mohair, smooth, boucle, chenille, sock handpaint: every square is done in a yarn and pattern that reflects the knitter. And every one is a huge burst of love. I was. Stunned. Speechless.

How could I not be well, with all that love and goodwill buoying me up? I went home, showed off to my husband and my youngest, and then fell into bed and slept for ten solid hours.

And woke up much better.

I wrote another note re roses last night, while giving my hands a rest from knitting and being too wired from all the Scharffenberger chocolate to sleep:

When I was in college, I was dating an older fellow with whom I was supremely incompatible but whom I was, for awhile, in love with, and who very much wanted to settle down and marry me. Meantime, my old friend Richard, whom I’d known since I was a week old, was off to France on a mission for the Mormon Church.

Come summertime, his two years being up, Richard came home. There was a large party held for the twenty-something young adults in the area, and we all came. So it was that I ran into my old high-school buddy–we’d never dated, we’d been good friends, more akin to siblings than anything else–and I took one look at the guy I’d been dating right there, and I simply knew that that was that. He just didn’t measure up. It was over. It didn’t occur to me that I’d someday get to marry Richard, just, I knew I had to marry someone as good as him.

It wasn’t too long after that that Richard asked me out on our first actual date. It felt so much better being with him than George: with Richard, I wasn’t careening from wild highs to low lows, I was simply home. Eventually, he proposed; it felt so wonderful to say yes.

Word got out–I don’t know how, ’twasn’t me–to the first guy that I was engaged. He showed up at my doorstep. With (oh goodness) a dozen red roses, supposedly as a congratulations on my happiness. Can you say awkward!? Mercifully, he simply left quickly after thrusting them into my stunned hands at my door.

Richard showed up less than an hour later. I was living in an apartment with three other single women; he looked from the doorway to the kitchen table, and asked, curious, whose roses those were?

“Mine…” I was beyond chagrinned.

“Who gave them to you?” It certainly made no sense to him. It made no sense to me either!

(Oh man what do I do with this!?) “George…”

“‘Scuse me a moment.” And with that, he spun on his heels and disappeared. I had no idea what he was going to do nor what to say. He reappeared not too long after, with One. Single. Rose. The very longest long-stemmed red rose I had ever laid eyes on in my life. It was big, and it was in direct contrast to the bunch that had so many littler ones crammed together into that vase, a crowd noisily vying for attention all at once. Richard’s single rose had presence, it had self-confidence, and it was from the man who knew he had my full heart.

So I occasionally razz him gently about the big bunches of red roses at Valentine’s; one will always do it, for me.

But I’ve also learned, however he wants to celebrate it, let him do it his way. He knows what he’s doing. He always has.

We had a Maytag dishwasher. Out of five dishwashers in 26 years of marriage, it was by far the best one we’d ever had–till we had a houseful of people (of course) keeping it going constantly in December. We replaced the hose; then it started smoking of burning rubber. Come to find out (thank you MSNBC!) that it was under recall, that Maytag would give you $75 toward a new one, and finding the motor fried at this point, we gave up and ordered one a month ago.

And waited. And waited. It seems there were a lot of people who suddenly wanted to replace their nine-year-old dishwashers too (ya think? After the part under recall set off housefires? And being offered that much to replace something that’s both that old and has worked so well in the past?)

Yesterday, oh, goodness, at last Home Despot finally delivered. Last night my husband and son worked till all odd hours getting that thing in, and then today my sweetie brought me locally-grown, bug-free, organic roses to top it off. No high-dose pesticides poisoning workers in Columbia. We’re lucky; there’s a small grower’s co-op just a few miles from here.

They say the way not to be romantic is to buy your wife an appliance. They also say no man was ever shot doing the dishes. Me, I’d say that the effort my sweetie put in to make my life far easier (grumbling for hours over the hieroglyphic-only instructions geared at the non-English-speaking) is just incredibly lovely, and he could have skipped the flowers altogether. He tells me that whether I like roses or prefer amaryllises is irrelevant, he has to teach his sons how to treat their future wives. Roses it is. And yes, he’d checked the undersides of the leaves to make sure no little oval carpet beetle eggs or bugs lurked there to come infest my stash. This man of mine: he’s a keeper.

Ditch the dishtowel and raise the flowers high: Happy Valentine’s, everyone!

You’ll meet my friends Nina and Rod when my book comes out, but in the meantime, a week ago Sunday, their college-age daughter ended up in the ER with her appendix gone bad. Laparoscopic surgery, and they sent her home the same day (wow).

Towards the end of the week, her parents were heading off for somewhere about 40 minutes away, and G. didn’t feel up to the excursion yet. No big deal. Their house had been having a power failure, so they hadn’t been able to recharge their cell phones. Again, not a big deal.

But that is why G. could not reach them. So she called her sister, who’s a veterinarian in another state. Who told her, Go! G. had the sense to know she was in too much pain by that point and had better not try to drive herself, and called a friend from church who just happened to have flown home from college for a couple of days. (“You could have called me!” Oh. Didn’t think of that.)

Which is why, after Nina and Rod returned home, they got a knock on their door, and the friend saying, um, G. isn’t home because I took her to the ER at Stanford and they’ve admitted her. Thought you might like to know. Sorry I couldn’t stay, I’ve got to run to catch my flight, ‘bye!

My hubby and I went over to visit G. yesterday, and we were thrilled to see how well she was recovering from her abscess. Meantime, her room was in the same ward, same floor as where I’d been in October, and I saw one of my old nurses. Two rooms over from G. was her high school teacher’s mom and the teacher was there visiting, and G. somehow made the whole thing feel like a party: if you’re going to be sick, you might as well celebrate the flowers.

She and her friend just got added to my to-knit-for list. I’d better get to work. Meantime, just to show off, here’s my newly finished teal Sea Silk shawl.

Seven years ago, I bought these daffodil bulbs, and then was head-injured when a speeder totalled my car and his before I could plant them. I wanted my flowers! I dug along the front walkway with one hand, holding onto the spinning ground with the other. Every year since then, they have reminded me why I did that. Life goes forward. The daffodils celebrate every year–after the rains come.

Typed the woman whose Crohn’s went nuts at 4 am today. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll be fine. We just get these occasional blips to remind us how good we have it. And to make us go notice the flowers. I think I’ll go snip the rain-bent ones and bring them inside where they can perfume-ify the kitchen.)

Edited to add: between when I started writing that and when it actually got posted, most of the daffodils doing faceplants in those pictures taken this afternoon brushed the rain off themselves and got halfway back up. The two that did not are now in a vase.

Yesterday evening, we shared a potluck dinner with old friends (I brought the chocolate torte, and I had a picture of its remains up, but then decided it wasn’t doing the torte justice and ditched it for this wallflower instead.) We laughed till our sides were sore. Some of them hadn’t heard the story about the skunk’s tail caressing my husband’s arm that I wrote about on my Profile page on this blog. It reached right over that campfire… Good times.

While my parents were here visiting over Christmas, my dad actually ate a tiny piece of good European chocolate we had lying around, just to taste. My father never eats chocolate! Mom generally could take it or leave it, so we simply never had it around when I was growing up. Me? Pfft. I buy cocoa by the 25 lb bags, when I can find them at baking supply stores. Now, if I could only get Valrhona cocoa at wholesale, my life would be perfect.

A story on my folks from their visit at Christmas: it was time for saying the prayer before the dinner one evening. My husband, as head of the household, deferred to my father with the word, “Boss?”

And with perfect comedic timing, my father hesitated the slightest second, then turned to his left, and asked, with the most perfect upward lilt to the voice and gentle twinkle in his eye towards his wife: “Frances?” We laughed ourselves absolutely breathless. It took a moment before the prayer got offered and dinner got started, but, hey, God was definitely there already.

Blogger has finally fixed whatever bug they had and I can come show you what I’ve been talking about. It was rainy and dark yesterday, and I was thinking I wouldn’t be able to get a good shot of the colors of my cashmere I’d plied and dyed, as I spread Robert’s medicine blanket out under a skylight and snapped this picture. Uh, didn’t do too bad, I’d say. But the funny thing is, the second I looked through my viewfinder, I knew. Those oranges–out. Definitely. Out. (And I think I’m going to dye those background skeins after all.)

I once snagged quite a few pounds of an undyed light brown cashmere at $15/lb from a wholesaler I knew. The catch was that it was extremely thin and single-ply and too fragile to knit up even as lace; it had to be plied on a spinning wheel. Well, guess what I have. Hey. Ply, dye, felt the hanks with some merino, perhaps, for a little extra strength–I can manage all that.

I have made three afghans with it so far. My mother knitted some into an exceedingly elegant aran sweater. And I have five pounds, half of it dyed into all these colors (we are still working on the camera thing), all waiting to be made up into the next afghan; I’m picturing a windowpane quilting pattern or some such, the undyed skeins framing the blocks of color.

But it’s been sitting in the closet, ready to go, for several years. I’ve been thinking lately that I’m going to Stitches in a couple of weeks, that the new stuff tends to push the old stash further back in the lineup, and I’d really like to see this yarn finally grow up. So. I pulled it out and looked it over.

It stopped me, just like it has every time since I dyed it. Some of the colors came out brighter than the others. Swatch swatch swatch, and yet, I don’t believe I can really know how they’ll all play together as a whole until I’ve gotten a piece done that’s way bigger than a swatch. If it were an even balance of bright and subdued, but it’s not. It’s odd; I mean, they’re all overdyed on top of this same light brown, you’d think…

So the past few days, I’ve been thinking: my hearing loss makes it so I don’t hear some things, but, I notice things that other people sometimes miss, because they’re too busy hearing the whole words while I’m focusing on the nonverbal aspects of the conversation. So. I wonder… I have a friend a few blocks away whose husband is colorblind. The walls in her family room are yellow. I wonder, if I took that stack of balls over to them, if he could tell me better than I can see how the color tones/values mesh? Since he’s missing the distraction of the reds and greens, akin to the consonants I tend to miss. I wonder if it would be clearer to me myself, if I put them in the context of the yellow walls? Or if I put it on top of her white grand piano with the white living room walls as a backdrop and looked across at them rather than down. Curious.

My camera and my computer are not currently on speaking terms, so I’m afraid knitting pictures are temporarily on hold.

I got an email yesterday, one of those things that gets forwarded around the Internet, a poem from a “Crabby Old Man” that had been found in the man’s pocket after he’d died in a hospital in Florida, rebuking the nurses for only seeing an uncooperative patient who didn’t want to eat that food–because he still wanted to be able to make choices. Who didn’t comply over various other things, either, wanting to be seen as a human being, and warning them that they, too, would be old someday. I read it, understood why the nurses were touched and passed it around, but thought, oh, but he could have had such a different experience!

One more story about that trip to Urgent Care last summer: the IV that a young nurse put in was done painfully (okay, so they never exactly feel wonderful.) I had two IVs running at a time for eight days, with many a blown vein, before I got a central line installed while I was at Stanford in ’03, and feel I know a bit on the subject now. But hey; this nurse had tried her best. I wanted to introduce her to Rachel Remen, because Dr. Remen writes of the time she, while in training, was basically handed needles and told to go draw blood out of a hospital ward full of patients. She had no idea what she was doing, and she knew she had no idea what she was doing. Finally, a large gruff patient on the ward who totally intimidated her exclaimed, “Don’t they teach these kids anything!?” And he took her around, patient to patient, showing her how to draw blood out of any kind of vein, easy or hard, with such finesse that she says that she as a professor has now taught thousands what he taught her that day–and that there have been times where that skill has saved a life.

Her story has a powerful surprise ending that I won’t spoil; go read her “My Grandfather’s Blessings” and “Kitchen Table Wisdom” books, they’re powerful reading.

So. There I was, with that IV in Urgent Care, and a couple of hours later another nurse goes to check it. He’s big, he’s gruff, and he shoots a glance towards the other medical personnel across the ward, grumbling, “Don’t they teach these kids anything? Look at that IV!” Grr… and he goes to fix it as best he can, annoyed at it, annoyed at himself for grumbling out loud, annoyed at everything, it seemed to me.

And I looked up at him, and thought, You have never seen me before in your life. You are unhappy because you don’t want me to be suffering any more than I have to. You are acting gruff because I, a stranger, matter to you, and you don’t want me to be in any pain I don’t have to be in.

I managed to voice a quiet “Thank you” that surprised him, and he looked at me, then. And saw me looking into his eyes hoping that he would see how much I meant that thank you. How much I hoped that he, too, would be in less pain.

He saw. A look of wonder passed his face. He instantly softened, and he let the gruffness go. He saw. I wonder now how he is, and I hope he sees all the time now.

I started to answer Anonymous’s question in the comments, and it got so long I think I’ll just move it here. I do not remember who made my first pair of hearing aids: I got them just before my third child was born. I’d had two such soft-spoken little babies before, and then, my stars, that third one was LOUD! They do take awhile to get used to. Um, the aids, I mean.

My second pair was the latest and greatest at the time, 19 years ago, with adaptive compression to try to squeeze things down into my hearing range. Which meant that the higher the notes went in the music, the flatter they went, and everything was offkey, my brain fighting with the aids. I absolutely hated it. And there was nothing better out there to be had. I have perfect pitch, and was trained as a musician before my deafness advanced. You can imagine… I simply quit listening to music for years. Years. For such a wasted long time, till one day something simply snapped: I remember the moment vividly. I was playing Taxi Mom, sitting at the red light at Charleston and Alma with a carful of kids, and suddenly punched the radio on, to whatever station it might be set to, I had no idea, I’d never listened to it, I didn’t care. I needed music! Off key, on key, who cares, just deal with it, I’m a musician and I can’t live without music!

I think that happened because a dear friend had recently surprised me with the gift of some tapes of his compositions. How could I not put them in and enjoy them. I didn’t have them in the car, but I was in the car, and suddenly it all just came together–it was quite a dramatic moment for me. Rock on!!!

Later, Sonic Innovations, a new company, was developing their first hearing aids, and, having a friend on their Board of Directors (this being Silicon Valley), and knowing through him what they were working on, I kept bugging him to bug them to get them out on the market. I wanted some! They sampled from I think thirteen bands of sound whereas my old ones did from three. Rather against my audiologist’s advice, I had him order me a pair immediately after they became available, even though they were only making moderate-loss ones at the time. The sound was so crystal clear, so perfectly pitched, that they actually sounded louder than my old ones, even though they were actually 13 dB less.

But I really did need more oomph, even so, and when, after another four or five years, they came out with a severe-loss version, I got a pair. At 8000 Hz, my hearing loss is 110 and 120 dB. And they, for the first time, gave me hearing at that 8000 Hz. It was absolutely mindblowing. I could walk outside and hear all these birds I couldn’t see–where on earth were they? Man, you guys live in a noisy world! …I remember being woken up by the birds in the woods immediately behind the house, growing up… I was totally in love.

But that first miserable pair of in-the-ears aids from 22 years ago fed back all the time, and when we moved to California I asked my new audiologist, John Miles, (who was quoted in Newsweek recently, go, John!) if that could damage my hearing. He kind of went, huh, nobody’s ever asked me that before. He dropped everything and took my audiograms, new and old, over to Stanford University and asked around. They said, yes, there hasn’t been a lot of research in the past, but we’re doing some now, and yes, hearing aid feedback can cause further loss, and yes, your patient is a classic case. Fifteen more dB gone from that at this and this frequency.

Great.

So. I got the adaptive compression ones I used for so long. Fast forward to my new louder Sonic Innovations aids, which did not have the feedback suppression they should have; I’m assuming that was due to patent/licensing issues with older companies. I finally had to, with great regret, hand them back to my audiologist, because they were feeding back, they weren’t worth the risk, and my husband was beginning to tell me I was getting deafer again. I replaced them with a pair from Oticon. The Oticons are safer for me. They have lots of bells and whistles. I can actually, for the first time in my hearing-aided life, use things with earphones; they can plug into them. (Wow, movies on airplanes are suddenly an option!) They’re very nice. But they are not quite entirely musically perfect, and oh, do I miss my Sonic Innovations: and if they ever do come out with much better feedback suppression, the very first thing I would do with my very first royalty check from Martingale would be to blow the bucks on a new pair.

John Miles once mentioned to me that severe-loss hearing aids are only a very tiny, tiny part of the market. My pair of Oticons cost $5400. On the other hand, that price tag is what it costs to feel like a participating member of the human race when I’m around other people, and to say they were worth every penny doesn’t begin to describe it. I’m grateful to have them.

Now, when you all see me at Stitches, it’s really really noisy there; make sure I can see your face when you talk to me…

This just in (announcer slightly breathless.) Houston, we have a dial tone, repeat, we have a dial tone. Richard the wonder man.