I have an AT&T Princess phone, nearly as old as my marriage–1980–that has served me well for a long time. We gave it a handset that Ma Bell sold for the hearing impaired at the time. It wasn’t perfect–it amplified all the frequencies, when I just wanted the high ones, which is where my hearing loss is and where the consonants of speech predominate, but that’s the way it is. Amplify the vowels too, oh well, beats deafness. (And if you know anybody who complains that people mumble these days, people don’t, it’s that they’re missing the higher-pitched consonants while hearing the rest of the words as loud as ever. Take that sentence, strike out all the consonants, and see how intelligible it looks. Mumble.)

Later, we found that phone didn’t buzz if the computer was on the way the newer cordless ones do. Point for it. It drew enough amps from the phone system that several friends mentioned to me, when I left messages on their answering machines, that they couldn’t make out what I’d been saying. Apparently too much of the juice went to amping up their machine to me, at the expense of my voice to them: making them the ones being, for that moment, the hearing-impaired one. I thought it was rather funny, actually, but used the other phones to leave messages after that.

It tried to die once before, and Richard spent $20 on electronic parts to revive it again. I’m not sure that’ll work this time. It’s the phone I keep–or kept, anyway–just above my head in the headboard at night, so that if the phone rings when my hearing aids are out I have some chance of responding. Richard once slept through dynamite going off outside his dorm room. I wake up for anything, if I hear it.

As a matter of fact. I inadvertently became part of the local Red Cross’s training manual for Disaster Services operators. He’s on their DS team, and they called in the very dead of the night one night: some house fire, or some such thing. People in need. He’s the modern-day equivalent of the Boston Minute Man.

At the time, we had been getting a slew of New York City brokers making cold calls and not having a clue where we were or what time zone we were in, and often calling right when they got to work at 8 or 9 am. We are in California. This did not prove to be a fabulous selling point on their part. So when the phone rang at dark o’clock this one time, I picked up that Princess handset and simply dropped it back down on the phone. Somewhat gently. I was so proud of myself. I hadn’t slammed it down after giving them a piece of my very opinionated mind on what they had just done to my good night’s sleep, and no, I did not want to invest in Kansas oilwells!

I stewed for about 20 seconds before it hit me that, um, wait, that could have been the Red Cross instead. Oh. My. I hoped they would call back, but the dispatcher at the other end was sitting there holding out the phone staring at it going, Great. NOW what do I do?

So now the training manual says, if you call in the middle of the night to one of the volunteers and get hung up on, count to ten, then dial again. Let the person wake up enough to answer. They don’t name me by name. But everybody knows. I will never totally live it down, but that’s fine, everybody needs a conversation piece for the annual Christmas party, right?

Too funny.

Dropping a cordless phone back down just doesn’t have the same effect. Where on earth am I going to replace this old thing? I’ve never yet found another phone I could hear as well on.

A stray follow-up thought on Friday’s post: if I hadn’t dropped that chair earlier, that technician wouldn’t have been able to make quite so much of a difference later when I so much needed him to, when I had pneumonia. And Sam wouldn’t have had me thanking him and calling him my hero–which he very much was–and don’t we all need to be needed. I still promise not to drop it again, though, promise.

Someone who knows me wasn’t quite sure my blog was mine when she found it, because I had never set up my profile. Now I’ve got one. Go enjoy a marshmallow, but watch out for helpers… (My husband’s face pleaded silently, Please don’t laugh. PLEASE don’t laugh!!! I managed not to. But it was very, very hard.)

My mail just came. There was a package. The return address was from a city my sister lived in–oh, nearly twenty years or so ago. I looked at the name, and thought, both, Hi, Niki! and, huh?

And inside was this gorgeous pair of Koigu handpainted-yarn socks. Made as if she’d measured them to my feet as she’d knitted along. Wow. If I could make everybody’s feet feel like mine feel like right now with these on, nobody would ever again ask why anybody would bother to handknit socks. Wow.

Thank you, Niki!!!

Joan Schrouder is often referred to on the Knitlist, I think rather to her embarrassment, as Saint Joan, because of how she answers technical knitting questions and calls for help with a great willingness to puzzle out problems for other people. Joan also happens to be a nurse. She gave me permission to post this email exchange we had this week:

Joan! Joan! I just found my book on Amazon.ca! Not on plain old Amazon, but .ca. No picture, and they hyphenated my name, but hey, they had to do SOMEthing to keep me from hyperventilating!

To which she answered:

Quick! Print this out. Take paper, fold into a tube, pinch one end shut and *breathe slowly and evenly into open end. Repeat from * until circumoral buzzing ceases and vision clears.

Seriously, congratulations! So how soon until it’s actually out on the stands?

Joan

Too funny. The answer I told her was July. Today I heard from my editor, working from home so she didn’t have my contract in hand, saying that sometimes the timing changes; she wanted to make sure I knew the release date was now set for June 11.

ALRIGHT!!!!

p.s. I just checked, and they’ve got “Wrapped in Comfort” on Amazon.com now, no hyphen, although they’ve still got it as Alison Jeppson-Hyde on Amazon.ca. Either way, it’s me. Wouldn’t want anybody to get confused, you know, looking at that hyphen, and think oh, then, well, that must be someone else…

Stitches West, the Disneyland of knitters, is coming up in a few weeks. This morning I was remembering the Stitches of two years ago, when I arrived at the Santa Clara Convention Center and was unloading my motorized wheelchair from my minivan. I don’t use it often, but for long days out and about, it’s essential. Unfortunately, the sticker on my ramp had been placed on the wrong side, and I set it up according to that rather than by simply seeing how the ramp was supposed to be, the way my hubby always did. So the hinge was upside down.

Which means I had 250 lbs collapse on my foot.

I had waited a year for Stitches and I was going to Stitches!!!

And then the supposedly newly-charged-up battery was about gone. Great. Now that I REALLY needed that chair. I had just enough juice to get it back up into my car with the help of a random passerby to whom I will always be grateful.

The end result is that the teenage son of a friend pushed me around for several hours in a manual belonging to the center–one very decent kid there, go, Sam–and then I drove home carefully with my left foot, got met at the door by my husband, and got hauled off to the Urgent Care Clinic for X-rays.

It was a fairly quiet day at the UCC, or else maybe the technician just made it seem so for me; he took all the time in the world to get that foot just so as comfortably as possible. He asked how I had done this, and was intrigued at the knitting I had with me and the idea of Stitches: all that creativity gathering together! He told me a little about his wife and four stepchildren, and his face just glowed as he described them. He was as gentle a soul as you could ask for at a time like that. It helped.

My sweet husband, as soon as we were done there, hauled off to the store where that chair could be repaired before their closing time so that I could go back to Stitches the next day and go see my friends.

Last summer, at the time the first round of my manuscript and my projects were due into the publishers, I caught pneumonia. I collapsed on the floor at the FedEx place with a raging fever, (my son drove, not me) but by golly, I got that thing off. I had misplaced a ball band or two on a project, but oh well. I did it. I did it!

A few days later, my hubby hauled me off to Urgent Care again. My fever was 103.2, and I couldn’t keep fluids down. They stuck an IV in me, sure that a little hydration would bring that fever right around. It shot upwards instead. I was sick enough to be feeling, please, someone, remind me why I wanted to live? Please? And I meant it.

It was a long wait lying in the clinic’s bed for the doctor on a very busy day; someone in the waiting room with a broken bone suddenly dropped with a heart attack, and–yeah. (He turned out okay, apparently. Right place to be.) Finally, they ordered me over to X-ray.

Imagine gray hair skewed all over the place as if I’d stuck it in the blender, a dishevelled hospital gown, a mask covering a lot of my face, and a very different appearance from that day with the foot. I was groaning, They want me to walk!?

But then I saw my old technician in the hallway. I exclaimed, “You’re the one that X-rayed my foot when I dropped my wheelchair on it!”

He smiled back, “Did you have a face then?”

Oh. Oops. I whipped the mask down to my neck a moment, and we both laughed a bit in recognition.

The power of laughter is intense. The power of a good person placed at just the right place at the right time is immeasurable. I do not remember that man’s name; I remember that he loved his family.

Enough to include me in his warmth. And that made all the difference. Again.

I promise to put the ramp right-side up this time.

Making a multi-berry crisp, hey, where’s the cinnamon.

Oh, that’s right…

And as I walked towards the bedroom closet, I suddenly remembered the question I got lobbed at me yesterday that I’d forgotten to answer: surely I’d never had to deal with moths? I never seem to mention them?

One of my children for Valentine’s one year gave me a heart-shaped ornament made from a baked paste of cinnamon and water; I wonder how many Costco bottles it took for the six middle-schoolers (they’re in their third year of college now) to make those for their moms (I wasn’t in on it, the gift was a nifty surprise.) Something to make their kitchens smell nice. And maybe to induce them to make multi-berry crisps by sheer Pavlovianism.

I eventually tucked mine away in a drawer, along with a neglected angora sweater.

No bug has ever touched anything in that drawer, even though angora is moths’ very, very favorite food. Oh! Come to find out cinnamon is one of those things, like lavendar and cedar oil, that repels buggies; one of these days I’ll have to figure out just how to make more of those ornaments. Meantime, I’m taking the lazy way out and leaving a Costco jar of cinnamon with the half-lid left open in the back of my closet. Carefully. Right there next to the cedar chest, with everything woolen in heavy-duty ziploc bags, sometimes bags within bags, cedar, cinnamon, and lavendar notwithstanding. To back that up, I’ve got the tennis-racket mothzappers pictured way back in the beginning days of this blog–$2 at the hardware store, snap’em up if you find one.

My vacuum broke once and I borrowed one for a day from a friend who had wool-to-wool carpeting. Where I parked it, out came… So now my friend knows, after exclaiming to me, THAT’S what carpet beetles look like?

Like innocent little lady bugs that forgot to put on their red dresses for the party?

Yup.

Nope! Oh no, I’ve never had a problem with moths… (Listen, y’all, I had one get in through the screen in the bathroom, that couldn’t find its way around the plasticized curtain, so it chewed a perfect round hole through it. Round=carpet beetles, random chomps=moths.)

Are you sure? I asked Nancy. They’re so different.

Yes they go together! she answered. She pointed out that I was the one who had picked up the two balls and put them side-by-side in the first place, and told me I’d been right.

One ball Colinette handpainted kid mohair, oh I forget the name of the yarn. But that’s what it is. With one strand of Jaggerspun Zephyr silk/wool of semi-endless yardage in I believe the Emerald shade. Lost the ball band a project ago.

I started this a week ago, when I needed a brainless project; somehow those two balls just grabbed me. I got it halfway done, and then after all that initial enthusiasm it just sat there for three days, defying me. I didn’t know who it was for, so it got stuck. Till I offered to knit a scarf for someone, asked her what her favorite colors were, and she reeled off a list straight off that UFO on my needles, along with a mention that she loved handpaint yarns. Huh. Whodathunkit. You never saw a project finish up so fast, after that…

Now off to try to catch the mailman with it before he’s gone by for the day.

I was asked the other day about ways to pin a triangle shawl together in front. I haven’t knit one that shape in ages; I personally much prefer the front-and-back arc of my top-down circular ones, and how well they stay on the shoulders on their own, enough to write the book on the subject. But. Back in the Dark Ages, before I sat down with my copies of the newly-republished Barbara Walker books and struggled to teach myself how to knit lace (thank you, Barbara!), I used to knit the very simplest triangle shawls: fine yarn with large needles to make it look open and meshy. Cast on 3, knit into the front and back of the last stitch in each row, stockinette stitch, keep on doing that till you have the size you want and you’re done. Voila. Let the yarn itself be the showpiece.

I made dozens of those. And a dozen or two more. If you use a soft, natural fiber (my biases are showing), and beautiful yarn, what’s not to like. Except for me, as a knitter, after whipping those out one after another for eighteen months. I got screamingly bored, but I’m glad I got so bored: it propelled me to go sweat it through those Stitch Treasury instructions the second I got the chance, and lacework for me took off from there.

Meantime, though. What I gave people with those triangles was a way to hold them together in front so they wouldn’t fall off. I took small, cheap hair elastics–you know, the kind that rip your hair to shreds if you use them very much–and crocheted around them with the leftover yarn until you could no longer see the elastic beneath. At the beginning, I made them very fancy/artsy; since the triangle pattern was so plain, I had to have some fun somewhere, at least! But they got plainer and simpler till all that was left was something like this one here.

Which is an idea that’s useful enough that it occurred to me I ought to share it.

(For me, personally, though, these days I have my treble clef shawl pin, custom-designed by designsbyromi.com to connect my music with my knitting.)

My older brother is going to go “Wha.a..a…t?!” when he reads this. But I have a confession to make: there is a beautiful piece of music that is sometimes sung as a solo at church, I believe by Schubert, called “Oh Divine Redeemer.” And I do not overly love it.

Oh, the music is gorgeous. But I’ve heard it sung in a style of chest-beating, loud, wailing, “I’m so humble, LOOK AT ME being HUMBLE!! Man, I’m so much better than anyone else because I know I’m so baaaaadddd so I’m humble (lookitmelookitme).”

Can you tell that style kind of rubs me the wrong way? I know it’s absolutely silly, and usually after the first note or two I can settle myself in, thinking, just enjoy the singing, you know not everybody can pull off that tune, c’mon, grow up, kid.

The first time I ever posted to the knitlist about a project I’d made to surprise someone with, I wondered and held my fingers off for awhile before typing about it. I did not want to be beating my chest about how wonderful I was for making this. I dearly wanted, however, to share how good it feels to reach out to others like that, to tell them they are worth that effort of our time and our talents, to write a post that would encourage other people to go do likewise for the people around them.

I still struggle with that, still keep an eagle eye on the sources of my motivation. But, if I say that out loud, am I wailing on about how humble I am?

Okay, I’ll shut up now. You guys just go make someone else feel important today, that’s all I’m asking.

(Edited to add: One guess as to what I just caught myself singing as I walked away from the computer.)

(Edited: Snapped a picture Saturday morning before I ran the ends in, after it was dry.)
I finished it! I can stop knitting. I finished the project I had to have done tomorrow, and it is lying blocking; I can’t get a good photo at dark o’clock of something that hasn’t dried yet, so imagine electric blue and purple with a touch of turquoisey teal thrown in, Cazadero Mist yarn from Royale Hare in Santa Rosa, CA. Gorgeous.

So now I can finally sit down and write about what happened yesterday. I haven’t driven for six months, but by now I’d been doing well enough long enough that it just felt like the right day to give it a cautious start. The Target store is maybe a mile and a half from home. Solo flight.

I can’t tell you how good it felt to be able to GO somewhere and still be alone, minding my own business. Much though I love my family, I was absolutely revelling in the freedom. You never thought buying a huge pack of bathroom tissue could be so much fun.

Going out to my car, I passed a young woman, maybe 18, sitting on the curb smoking, with a very sour look on her face. As I was reaching my car, a mom with two young girls looked at that pack of TP, me with my cane, and asked if she could help? I smiled, “Thank you; I think I can handle it,” feeling quite grateful that she’d been kind and had offered. A good example to her girls. Good for her!

I pulled out of that spot, thinking… Maybe… Pulled the car around so that I was coming back so as to be on the opposite side of the curb from the girl with the cigarette. No traffic to block; oh why not. I rolled the window down, and said to the girl, with an apology and a smile, that I had once been put on oxygen, when I was 27 (trying to make it sound like something she could relate to better than a gray-haired 48-year-old), and had been tethered to the hospital wall. Every time I see a kid smoking, I explained, it reminds me of that–I hope she didn’t mind my butting in…

Somehow in that instant she saw that I was saying this because how she did and how she felt were important to me. Her face became warm and kind, she thanked me for caring, and she put the cigarette down. I waved, and we parted friends.

What I never, ever, ever would have expected as a reaction!

The power of speaking to the truth of our experiences while feeling great love. At a time I was loving all the world because I was so thrilled with my freedom. And great credit to her for being not only receptive to that, but able to offer it back as well; she’s a good one.

I wonder now if she will think of that exchange every time the temptation to light up hits her, and if it will help. I very much think so. I very much think that’s why I felt I had to go drive somewhere yesterday. By myself.

And I never could have known, 21 years ago, that being hospitalized for carbon monoxide poisoning along with my family from a faulty stove, when I was four and a half months pregnant with my daughter who’s now in college, despite how traumatic it all was at the time, could, all these years later, turn around and help someone else’s daughter.

My father is a modern art dealer. Nat Leeb was one of the artists he represented for many years. I remember Monsieur Leeb, when I was 16, trying to give me an impromptu drawing lesson: you observe for ten minutes, he said, then draw for one.

This was always my favorite Leeb painting, all my growing up. My father told me that Leeb had been one of the last proteges of Claude Monet, when Monet was an old man and Leeb a young one. Leeb became, not an Impressionist, but a Colorist: see, Dad said, in this painting, there is a house at the top of the cliff, with the ocean below, see how the light interacts with them.

Echoes from what Leeb had said to me: observe for ten minutes. Then draw conclusions as to what you’re seeing for one.

I have not succeeded yet in getting a good picture of my necklace, with its leaves and fine curls of silver across the top of the leaves. It wasn’t till after I’d finished that shawl, which stretches easily to 20″ wide and went down to my knees, that I saw: it looks like two women, each dressed with a shawl wrapped around them, reaching across the expanse of earth, the distance of the turquoise stone, to embrace each other above it.

The silversmiths make a cast and then create a number of pieces from that cast. I am quite pleased that a twin to my necklace is now up for sale on dineh’s ebay site–and that the starting price is higher than mine was two weeks ago. Very good.

There have been a few times, writing this blog, where I feel like, there. I’ve said it. There is no more I could add that might not somehow detract by distracting from that, I should just flip off the light and hang the “Closed” sign on the door: I’m done. That last post was one of those for me. As were the posts in mid-October about Robert’s medicine blanket (which is another emotional link to Native Americans for me) and about seeing Noel at Stanford Hospital again.

But life has a habit of simply continuing, and of being perfectly ordinary most of the time. Thank goodness for that, too.

That tall skinny kid of mine whose picture I posted recently? I just booked his plane ticket home from the university for his pre-op. They think the tumor is benign, but the sooner it’s out of there and biopsied, the happier we’ll all be.

Robert, when you read this, please know that I am wrapping your blanket around that boy of mine the second he walks in the door Saturday.

And he’ll be fine.

Most of the story this shawl is about hasn’t happened yet, and most of it I likely never will know. And that’s fine.

Elsie. That’s my Grandmother Jeppson’s name. The grandmother whose husband was Agriculture Commissioner for the state of Nevada and a horticulture professor at the University there, the man who once drove into the southern part of the state onto a reservation, picked out a stone for his dear wife, picked a setting style he liked, and watched the ring coming to be for her. My father cannot remember when his mother didn’t have rheumatoid arthritis, which quickly deforms the joints of the fingers–so that a big ring like that would have been painfully heavy, not to mention she would have found it very difficult simply to get it on over her swollen joints. So I’m guessing my grandparents were a rather young couple at the time the ring came to be, and they were born in the late 1890’s. My inherited ring is an old ring–and it connects me to a time and place far from where and how I grew up.

Last week, I had a pendant that had long since lost its sterling chain–I probably gave it to one of my daughters, I have no idea–and I looked at it and thought, you know, I’d like to wear that again. I really ought to replace that chain. So I went looking for one, and found a competitive price. No big deal.

But before I ordered it, as long as I was clicking around, I thought, hmm, and looked around some more. I stumbled across a beautiful handmade turquoise pendant, complete with sterling chain, offered by a cooperative of the Navajo Nation representing the particular craftswoman who had created it, on Ebay. She was proud enough of the piece that she had signed her name on the back. There was a Buy It Now price, or a much lower one where one could start the bidding at. On impulse, I bid rather than bought.

And instantly regretted it. The price was far too unfair. I hoped someone would bid it up, but by the next day I admitted to myself the feeling I was having that nobody would. The picture had not shown the piece as well as it could have, and it was a bit of a guess what the top of it would look like. Even my bid-up-to-here price wouldn’t come to be. It was just me and that opening price.

I thought of my grandfather, face to face with the craftsman, admiring his skill in person, and wished for that chance to have seen this necklace coming to be, too. I wondered if this woman’s older family members might possibly ever have met Grandfather in his travels around the area. And I wondered how I could face paying in a few days for a beautiful rendition of this Navajo woman’s talent for which, after the markup up to Target or Walmart’s price on that sterling silver chain, what would be left to cover the cost of the stone, the silver, the skills and the years of expertise, the time, and the artistic vision that went into creating that piece, something she was proud enough of to have signed her name to it, all of the percentage of that bid price to cover her work and her materials, was…

Fifty. Cents. Fifty. Stinking. Cents. That’s it.

I could not bear it. I absolutely could not bear it. I don’t think I could have faced my grandfather nor Elsie in the hereafter had I left it at that. It was just so wrong.

You know my reaction to just about all human problems is to go knit something for someone; it’s what I know how to do. And so I found myself thinking, people like handmade things because they like the personal touch, and yet, it’s not quite truly that personal touch unless the experience is somehow shared both ways, a connection made between maker and receiver. Whether that means admiring the work in person, or through a letter of appreciation afterwards–but for me, I felt her necklace was simply an outright gift to me, when you come down to it, and I wanted to give back.

But how do you pick out what to make for a complete stranger? It stopped me a moment. I did a mental inventory of my stash, and when I thought of the green I had, something in me cried out, That’s IT!

I had ordered some green baby alpaca yarn. When it had come, it had arrived the color of new plants just coming up out of the soil, bright and vigorous and beginning, but without the time and experience in the sun that gives them their color depth. It didn’t quite please me. I let it sit for some months, and finally one day wound it up into a one-pound hank, scoured it in preparation, added just a bit of blue to my dyepot–the color of the sky to go with the grass–and let the yarn simmer away there.

I have this pattern that didn’t make the final cut in my book. I’m glad; it had not felt quite finished. I had been wanting lately to redo the edges, and now the old rendition of it wouldn’t be set in stone with my name attached to it. I could still go tweak it.

And that is the pattern I knitted up, with those changes, for this woman in this green plants-and-sky-colored yarn. I live near the redwoods, with one bordering my property; I knitted a tall redwood growing to either side of the shawl. I knitted the wind blowing the water of the San Francisco Bay in the center, and at times having it remind me instead of the leaves of the trees hanging over Cabin John Creek in Maryland, deep in the woods, where I grew up. This shawl showed me what this pattern had been meant to be all along. And I accidentally twisted a stitch in the wrong direction, and then left it that way, a tiny flaw nobody will ever see, but one that, in the Navajo tradition, at least as I understand it, should be there to offer reverence to God by acknowledging the humbleness of our being imperfect and human.

Monday it goes in the mail. I do not expect to hear anything back, nor do I ask to. I did this for the woman who creates with silver and stone like I create with yarn, but also, I did it for me. I could not rest until I had done a good enough job of expressing my thanks.

This is the single skein of Seashore Sea Silk, knitted up now, that I got for my birthday. Like the amaryllis bulb, it arrived full of expectations and promise on Dec. 13th, and had to wait to see what it would gradually grow to be: a dolphin-safe fisherman’s net. Diamond Mesh lace on size 7 (4.5mm) needles, with one plain stitch added each side.

Not bad, for only 400 yards’ worth.

We interrupt this frigid January to haul my birthday present, a red amaryllis bulb, outside for a photo session. Add a little water and window time to that dead-looking brown clumpy thing in the dirt and see what you get. It’s that simple.