Knitting 101

Getting through this fall has been a challenge.  I’m not sure why, but I’ve been busy and beleaguered and burdened with bureaucratic blather at every turn.  I made it 1/10^th of the way through my NaNoWriMo goal and decided to take a break.  This is of course justified by my saying that writing my mother’s memoir/biography was not my only goal this fall; I also wanted desperately to learn to knit, something I’ve been yearning to do for many years.  I envy those women in airports and doctors’ waiting rooms who seem perfectly content to click their needles whiling away the hours, and I watch intently to try to figure out what they’re making.  Is it a scarf?  A cap?  A baby blanket?  A tea cozy?  Are they ambitious enough to make a sweater? Why did they choose that yarn?  What will it look like when it’s finished?  But all of these knitters seem less concerned with the final product than with the knitting itself.  They all look like they’re enjoying themselves immensely; I want to know why.  I want to be in the secret brother-/sisterhood of knitters.

So I turned to my friend Sarah.  She of anyone would know the best place in town to get knitting lessons.  I consider her a “professional” knitter, occasionally showing off some clothes she has made for herself; less so now that she has a toddler, of course.  When I sent her a message asking for advice, she volunteered to teach me herself!  For free!  We settled on a Friday evening in a new coffee shop/pizza place to meet.  I ordered a glass of Chianti and she ordered a hazelnut steamer, and we settled ourselves side by side in the window looking out onto the dark street.

Sarah patiently explained how the lesson(s) would progress, how she would start my first project so I didn’t need to worry yet about that part, how to hold the needles and create tension on the yarn with my left hand.  She told me how we would start with a small square, which could be expanded if I wanted to make a scarf, or left as a coaster or a doily.  She showed me how to count the loops; there should always be 30.  We talked about where to get the best yarn, the different methods of knitting, and exercises for stretching after knitting.  Soon it was my turn to actually try to knit, and I slowly pushed through from the left side of the loop, under the left needle, wrapped around the yarn, pulled the loop I’d made back through, then cast the original loop off to the right needle.  Over and over.  My hands started to ache.  I couldn’t figure out the best way to hold tension in the yarn.  My back ached.  I realized I couldn’t see the yarn or needles very well, so I gingerly put down the needles and dug in my purse for my reading glasses.  I tried to carry on a conversation, but couldn’t completely concentrate; I’ve never been one of those people who could simultaneously walk and chew gum, or rub my belly while patting my head.  I kept forgetting to move the loops on the left needle closer to the end, the top inch and a half of each needle where Sarah told me “all of the work is done.”  At one point, I even thought of laughingly giving it up and saying how enjoyable it was to just sit back and have a drink together.  The next minute I felt myself actually almost close to tears with frustration.  Left side of the loop, not right.  Hold the tension on the yarn.  Make sure your left pinkie anchors the yarn.  Wrap the yarn clockwise, not counterclockwise.  Move the stitches up the needle.  Soft words of encouragement from Sarah; I kept going.

I can’t remember the last time I learned a new motor activity.  Maybe they’re all, after all, just like learning to ride a bike.  Hours and days and weeks and months of training wheels and wobbly parent-assisted jaunts down the driveway resulting in skinned knees and bruises and tears.  And then, one day, for some unknown reason, it works.  The wobblies cease, the momentum pulls you along faster than Mom or Dad or Grandpa can push you, the front tire straightens out, and you are light.  You are made of air.  You are moving forward effortlessly, perfectly attuned to the rhythm of your turning pedals.  And then….you realize you’re going fast, faster than you’ve ever gone.  And you panic, and start feeling the component parts of the bicycle:  the seat, the pedals, your feet, your legs, the handlebars; your logical brain cannot accept how they would work together in such perfect synchronicity.  So you stop, or maybe the ground stops you.  And maybe you’re afraid to start again.  But once you’ve tasted a drop of that essence of perfect balance of pedaling and breathing and holding the handlebars, you have mastered the thing.  You may stumble or wobble, but it will be short-lived and just enough to keep you wary and humble.

I have noticed that my son goes through a period of being extremely moody and difficult right before a cognitive growth spurt. So it was with knitting.  After my overblown frustration, I took a deep breath, and tried again.  And suddenly I was on that bike, zooming down the block, putting my needle through loops and winding yarn around and pulling it back through and casting it off to the other needle in one fluid movement.  Of course, I got going too fast, and became overconfident; that’s probably why I ended up with 31 loops instead of 30.  That’s probably why when I got home and tried to show my husband what I had learned, the thing suddenly looked all wonky and foreign.  But I had a small taste of mastery.  And I’ll stumble and wobble and drop stitches, but just enough to keep me wary and humble.

I have a few rows done now.  I can’t stop, of course, unless I only want a wristband or a scarf for a mouse.

The Journey of Writing

Writing has been on my mind a lot lately.  I’ve been thinking about writing more than actually writing, so my blog sites are pitifully and woefully ignored as of late.  But sometimes you have to reflect on stories, events, daydreams and night dreams to get the well primed, so to speak.  I also have spent a lot of time reading what others have written in my Prose Workshop and in my personal reading time, and sometimes trying on a new style to see how it fits.  The Cinderella slipper is out there for each new piece of work I produce.  And while I’m not traveling literally, I’ve been traveling in two important ways recently: 

1) Thinking about moving gracefully through mid-life.  Dear God, if you exist, and whoever or wherever you may be, don’t let me become a cliché.  Don’t let me get too comfortable.  Don’t let me get bored.  Don’t let me get lazy; rest is OK, lazy is not.  Don’t let me stop learning.  Don’t let me stop trying.  Don’t let me get too far off-track--I have a few goals this fall, such as learning to knit and finishing a rough draft of my mother’s biography.  Don’t let my health fail, my eyesight fade, my sanity depart.  Don’t let my family get away with not appreciating what I do for them.  Don’t let me complain too much without taking action.  Don’t let me forget who I once was, who I am, and who I want to be.  Don’t let me wallow for grey days on end without making that light appear at the end of the tunnel.

2) Traveling with my mother through the past to try to recreate her life on the page.  She went to a lot of places, that woman.  And lived some pretty exciting stuff.  Actually, what’s most exciting is not the stuff, but the enthusiasm she showed for the things she experienced, some of which many think are mundane.  I’m hoping she’ll be alive for the readers.  Through her photographs, her letters (written and received), interviews with my aunt, and my memories of lectures she gave when I was in grade school, I’ve been jumping from southern Illinois to Japan, to Panama, to Europe, to Egypt, and back again.  I’m exhausted.  My mental passport is in tatters.

My next stop is NaNoWriMo, a website set up for writers to network and enter raw word counts during November, National Novel Writing Month.  The idea is that if you can average 1667 words per day for 3o days, you’ll have 50,000 words—the average length of a full-length novel—by the end of November.  In theory, December is for revision, and in January of the new year you can start looking for a way to publish.  I tried halfheartedly to do this last year, but only got a few days in.  The election happened, and 4^th grade homework, Christmas shopping, Thanksgiving meal planning, and situations at work conspired to shut my efforts down after only 10 days.  Oh, and I wasn’t getting much sleep either.  Sleep is vastly underrated.  Sleep is necessary to fuel imagination.  So this year, I’m shelving last year’s unfinished project, and bravely starting the new project I’ve been talking about for years.  It’s time.  Even if I have to ditch it after a couple of weeks, that’s OK.  I will have tried.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being in my Prose Writing Workshop, it’s that the writer’s archenemy is a blank page; so my first goal is to fill it up.  How can you do 1667 words a day, you ask?  Well, right now this blog entry has 612 words.  That’s over a third of the way.  And I’m a chatty person most of the time, so if I write as much as I would chat, the other 1000 words will come spilling out in no time.  It doesn’t have to be beautiful, poetic, descriptive, unified, or witty.  That will come out later, hopefully.  It just has to be volume.  Then the magic happens; once you have lots of volume, you realize that you’ve been sort of…well….beautiful, poetic, descriptive, unified, witty.  In a few places, at least.  And the rest is just work.

The computer version of a blank page

So…off I go.  Into uncharted territory, murky waters, snowy peaks and rocky valleys…use whichever metaphor you like.  Wish me luck.  I’ll try to send you a postcard once I arrive.