Writing, Knitting & Opinions

Martha Louise woke up rich. Not rich, really. More, stinking wealthy. She hadn’t gone to bed that way. For years, decades, ever since she could make words, she had said “Rabbit, Rabbit,” on the first day of every month, just as her Nanna had taught her, as a charm to bring in the old buckaroos. A message from her bank told her her statement was ready. She’d checked her balance, as she always did, to see what was available for the month. That’s when she learned that today, at last, “Rabbit, Rabbit” had worked. Nanna would have been so pleased.

Martha Louise, who knew she hadn’t fallen off the turnip truck yesterday, was suspicious. She didn’t run right out and buy a brand new Prius. She didn’t go down to the real estate office and make a cash offer on the turreted, brick, now vacant (except for the books), old library building that she’d had her eye on for a while. Nor did she take a walk through town passing out hundred dollar bills. Instead she kept her trap shut and checked her bank account every couple of hours. The money (filthy lucre she would have said if it were in someone else’s account) was still there when she went to bed.

And it was still there the next morning. And the next. And the next. No one, it seemed, had come to their senses and sucked back the balance to where it belonged. No one, but Martha Louise herself, had discovered the mistake.

Maybe it was some kind of pay off, a ransom maybe, that had been misdirected into her account, the routing information gone astray, and they (whoever they were) couldn’t claw it back.

Maybe it was a money laundering scheme and – well, ditto the above.

Maybe there was a super secret trust fund, or a tontine someone had enrolled her in as a child, and she was the last survivor.

On the fourth day, Martha Louise actually went in to her bank and spoke to her account manager. Here is what she found out: Nothing.

Or rather a lot of other possibilities were eliminated. It was not a mystery inheritance of any kind. No rich aunt, no multi-generational trust now reaching maturity. No class action law suit. No cute little algorithm that had quietly been siphoning off two cents from every payment to a credit card company, and now that the Feds were homing on on the culprit they stuck it in her account rather than go to jail.

On the fifth morning the loot was still there. And there was a message attached to her bank account. Martha Louise read it.

“Quit fooling around, Martha Louise,” it said. “The money is yours. I know you’ll be a better steward than the bozos who used to own it. Get busy and do some good.”

It sounded, she thought, a bit casual for God, but who or what else could it be?

Martha Louise got busy. She called up a paving company and fixed all the potholes in town. She took a leave out of the Disney World maintenance handbook She made some stipulations. The work had to be done entirely at night and it had to be done within the week.

For the people who lived in her town, it was something of a rolling miracle. Street by street they woke up to the bliss of ever smoother roads, uncracked sidewalks, and lawns free of construction rubble. Sure, they’d heard rumbling in the streets at night, but it had been so rhythmic, that they all drifted peacefully back to sleep. It was the “Cobbler and The Elves,” but it happened to them.

Martha Louise did not leave her neighbors to wonder at their good fortune for too long. She bought ad space in the newspaper and sent a press release to the radio and TV stations. She wrote: “Do you like what you see? Then keep it tidy, picked up, and repaired. If it stays that way, you can continue to have nice things.” For a week or so, people trimmed their hedges and flower beds. Some lawns were mowed, other turned into herb gardens. One family put in a tennis court and let anyone who wanted to use it.

But one person let their trash can tip over and didn’t clean it up; they just walked back into the house. Their neighbors held their breath. That night a staccato banging tore up their sleep. In the morning the trash was gone. So was the sidewalk in front of the trash scoffer’s house. So was the mailbox. So was their once trimmed hedge. Martha Louise did not explain. There was no need for a notice. Everyone knew why. The Fixer Fairy (as they called her since they had no clue, at that point, of her identity) was not to be messed around with.

That very day, that very morning, within minutes of waking up and seeing the damage, the neighbors got together, confronted the garbage spiller, and then repaired the damage.

Next Martha Louise renovated all the empty malls and big box stores for miles around, turning them into housing for anyone who had been living on the streets. The parking lots became parks. She fixed the school buildings and hospitals. And as each project was finished she issued the same message: “Do you like what you see? Is it nice to be here? Then keep it tidy, picked up, and repaired. If it stays that way, you can continue to have nice things.”

She didn’t give people a free ride; they had to pay for upkeep, the privilege of renting a nice place. She knew they needed to do that so there would be a sense of ownership. A feeling of pride. But paying with labor was just fine with her. All the money went back into the community anyway.

At first Martha Louise was afraid her money would run out, but somehow it didn’t. In fact, it grew.

Eventually people figured out who was responsible for all the improvements, and they got a little greedy, in Martha Louise’s opinion. They started asking her for handouts. They wanted her to fund their own special projects. They asked her for bigger houses and faster cars and tastier food. She said “No.” She didn’t smile when she said it, but there was no anger or frustration either. Just “No,” even when they pushed or pleaded.

Martha Louise instead pulled out one of her favorite things: Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs. “I’ve taken care of these bottom two layers right here,” she said pointing out the infrastructure and safety bands on the chart. “If you want more than that, you’re on your own.”

Over time Martha Louise reached out farther and farther beyond her home town. It turned out that she wasn’t the only one. There were little epicenters of what came to be called Bottom Layer Boosters, spreading out like lichens on rocks, all over the world, turning the hard places into fertile soil. They ran into each other, one perimeter bumping into another.

New ideas were born, new discoveries made, Was there competition? Of course there was. But not usually the hurtful kind. Mean people were avoided at first, then quarantined until they had a change of heart. It was hard for them to bully people, to lure them away from safety and comfort when they already had everything they needed and maybe a little bit more.

I’ve been thinking about flying a flag, the good old Stars and Stripes, the one I started pledging to as a first grader at the Point School in Westport way back in the fall of 1960. I know my family used to fly one, if not daily, certainly on the high patriotic holidays of The Fourth of July, Armistice Day, and Memorial Day. I remember Dad clipping it to hooks and using a pulley to raise it to the top of the pole. I would hold it carefully, and very respectfully, if somewhat wadded, in my 4, 5, and 6 year old arms to keep it off the ground. (This stopped in 1960 when one of the two hurricanes toppled the pole, breaking it near ground level. It then became part of my tight rope practicing equipment.) When I started school I also joined the Brownies, proudly wore my uniform with the other little girls, and learned, even more respectfully, how to fold and furl the flag. Every event in those days started with The Pledge. 

I don’t recall feeling especially patriotic. It was just of the embedded rituals that were part of being born in that place, in that community where my parents had been born and grown up years before. It was no different than saying prayers before going to bed, putting on school clothes to go grocery shopping even in the summer, eating the pie filling first before savoring the glorious juice soaked crust. It was one of the landmarks of my life. 

I knew that what I and my family did was not what everyone did, but it didn’t much matter to me. On Memorial Day I believed myself to be the envy of every kid we passed as I stood on a float beside my Dad. He played clarinet and wore a white shirt with striped gaiters around his arms. I wore a red, white, and blue dress and flung candy to the crowd. What could be better? At school I was one of the five or six kids that did not get released early from school to take the bus up to Central Village for religious education. I knew the Catholic kids attended catechism because I had a friend who tried to teach it to me. I had no idea what the other kids did, but I was a Quaker, a member of the Society of Friends, and there were a lot of things we didn’t do, although then I wasn’t really clear what those things were.. I’m sure, now, that the teachers wished we would all get on the bus, but then what mattered was that I could have an hour of peaceful reading in one of the books from the book cart the library refreshed each month.

I had a fondness for the cadence of language. One book described different types of houses around the world. There were square ones made of adobe, round huts with thatching, brick, stone, wood, plaster, steel structures in all sorts of landscapes. Each section was closed with words that, in a religious setting, would have been part of a call and response ritual. They became a mantra for me that I applied broadly. “It all depends. It all depends on who you are, and where you live, and what you have to build with.” It suggested that there could be lots of different approaches to the same problem. It seemed to pair nicely with the Golden Rule. It became a keystone.

Time passed. I encountered challenges. I learned lessons. I was shocked. When my family moved to East Africa, it was the first time I was among people who were not like me. Well, duh, you might be thinking. But no, it was not the Tiriki, or Kikuyu, or Marigoli. It was not even the other Americans who were USAID workers or from other church groups, or the British. It was other Quakers who, coming from other Yearly Meetings more conservative than ours, judged us according to their own standards. I started referring to myself as a New England Friend. Although I didn’t think of it in these terms, I was learning to manage expectations.

Back in the States, after three years in Kenya and one in Jordan, I was in Junior High. I started learning about the political fissures that divide people. Vietnam  was prominent. I watched Dad navigate conversations at the Presbyterian Church we attended where people asked outright “Are you a Hawk or a Dove?” I could see the problem. Should he lie and live with that? Should he tell the truth and suffer through an unpleasant lecture? And when it’s the Chief of Police asking, what then? Was it better to be on the asking end of the exchange, or the answering end? There was often no perfect stance. 

In 1967, the West Bank between Israel and Jordan, blew up. Mom, as she often did, came home from school one day and then was miserable, fractious, and either ill or angry for the next week, sniping at us and fighting with Dad. Finally Dad found out what was wrong. She had been looking at a magazine in the library and found an illustrated article describing the Six Day War. One of the pictures showed a group of Palestinians balancing bundles on their heads, hands in the air, being forced across the Jordan River at gunpoint. In the center, leading the way, was my youngest sister’s kindergarten teacher. The war, which she had barely been managing, came suddenly personal. Her agony leaked out and swamped us all. The relief on sharing it was magical, and a lesson she never really learned. Then a new family moved into town. They were the son, daughter-in-law, and three kids of a doctor in town, a German Jew who had survived. They asked Mom to tutor their grandson in English so he could be prepared to start school in the fall. “You know where I’ve lived and my stand on Israel,” Mom told them. “I’d really rather not. I’m not sure I could be fair.” “We know how you stand,” they told her. “We are Jews and so are they. But they are here because they, and we, disagree with the direction General Dayan is taking. We trust you will do your best.” So she tutored the boy and refused payment. Instead, I found myself taking German lessons from the Grandmother, once a week, when the boy was at our house. That summer, for me, and evermore, the world was painted in shades of gray. Dichotomies are for the very young; icosahedrons are for adults.

To fly a flag or not? When presented with an either/or situation, I invariably look for at least a third way. I’ve learned to make decisions aware of my own reasons, and to live with the consequences of my choices. I am not a blind follower of anything. Nor will I apologize for things others may see as a weakness, but I see as a strength. I’ve had doors shut and others open because of the number of questions I ask, or the things I believe. I haven’t met an idea that I can’t explore, at least in the privacy of my own mind. 

But this question of flying a flag seems to be less subtle than perhaps it should be. It seems to be a symbol that has been commandeered. In some respects I am conservative. I don’t show much skin in my clothing choices. I’ll choose quiet songs with strong lyrics over headbanging shouty music. I drive a sturdy car known for a high mileage engine rather than speed, although if it were a vivid lime green or electric purple that would be nice. I try to eat healthy food, but am not so deluded as to think I am anything approaching sveldt. But I don’t think any of these things are really considered conservative these days. I think they’re just quirky. I would not dream of making any of these a requirement under the law.

The flag, fifty stars on a blue field with thirteen red and white stripes, has somehow been co-opted by people who carry guns in public, who are more loudly patriotic than others, who seem to act as if free speech is for them and compulsory listening is for others, who seem to believe their moral standards are superior – but mostly when applied to others. This is not a camp I wish to join, and I fear that flying the flag will put me there. I have often passed a group of folks by the side of the road, with their red hats, waving their enormous flags. A sign on one of their trucks invites patriots to join them. If I asked, would I be welcome as a fellow patriot, with my blue hat advertising a different candidate? I fear that I would not be met with open arms.

I stood scowling on the cliff’s edge, behind the fence where it was safe. Birds circled below. Sparkles glinted off the ocean. The breeze swooped down over the manor roof bringing the aroma of roasting oats. I heard the tapping of Granny Sula’s canes on the rocks as she passed from the lawn to the granite leading up to the fence. I turned. Granny was dressed in wool trousers and jerkin, shirt sleeves billowing. Her massive patchwork silk scarf was tied around her head and shoulders. I longed for the day I could dress as comfortably. 

Clack. The cane in her right hand swished to shoulder level, pierced a lump of moss and flicked it through the fence and over the cliff. I had always understood that Granny’s canes were not to aid her in walking. I had seen them slice through the air as she rounded on a servant who fumbled clean laundry into a puddle while trying to hang it on a line too high for the poor thing to reach. I had seen the canes ward off father’s hounds when they chased the chickens, or skewer a chicken that had visited the vegetable garden once too often. I had felt their points in my own back when I slouched over my reading. “A lady must retain her posture no matter how weary.” 

Clack. So here she came to pass the morning with me. I sighed. I loved my grandmother and yet conversation with her was rarely easy. But the ring of the cane tips on the stone assured me that this would not be one of those days. Clack. “Bethina Rose!” Clack. “What are you doing there?” Clack. “Gawking at the clouds and waves!” Clack. “Catching flies?”

I adjusted my face and smiled, remembering to widen my eyes in joy at the sight of her. “Granny” I said. “How will you brighten my day?” 

“I have a surprise!” she said. “Your fate is about to take a turn.” 

“Is this the engagement Father has been planning? Has he finalized the terms, then?” I kissed Granny’s cheek and offered her mine. She gave me a kiss, then patted me on the hand. 

“Not everything is about you and your dratted marriage.” Granny’s hand moved to my shoulder and bore down as she hoisted herself to sit on the top pole of the fence. The canes leaned between us.

“Should you be doing that?” I asked. Granny had beaten me herself the last time she had caught me sitting astride the fence. 

“It all depends on whose opinion you are seeking,” She said. “Since mine is the only one that matters here, then, yes, I should.” She raised her legs, one after the other, and put them on the seaward side of the fence. She unwound her scarf and began to tie it to her feet.

“What on earth are you about? You’ll trip and fall.” I asked, sounding just like Granny. But her talk of changing my fate distracted me. “So has father done the deal? Has he found a suitable liason?”

“My gracious,” said Granny. She tried to control her scarf as it flapped in the wind. “Why ever would you think that mess with your father was finished? That could go on for years. Men are so fickle, and he is no different.”

“You said that today my fate would take a turn. I assumed marriage.”

“It will indeed, one day. But your father’s arrangements will have nothing to do with it. You young people are so self-centered.”

Granny stood on the lowest rail, leaning back against the one on which she had sat. The scarf remained tangled around her ankles as she captured the flapping ends. I grabbed the back of her jerkin, pulling her down. “Watch out there! You’ll fall.”

The pieces that made up the scarf were culled from scraps. It was a history of the family clothing flowing left to right as Granny wore it now. Nearest to me was the brilliant green of the overdress I now wore. I had helped dye it with weld and indigo. I stroked it now. Granny looked from my hands to my face. She patted my sleeve. “Such a beautiful job you did.” Rare praise, indeed. She took the left hem in her hand and inched her way up, searching. I knew she was looking for another scrap of apple green cloth, the one my mother had dyed when she made my first clothes. “Here it is. And these.” Granny pointed to pieces of mid-day blue embroidered with gold, and one of red with green vines and yellow flowers. “Strong colors for a strong girl.” She patted my cheek.

“Thank you,” I said, not sure how to take the praise, falling back on politeness.

“And here is your mother’s wedding dress,” a pale lavender, “and mine,” grey with swooping birds on the farthest border of the scarf. “The one that started it all.”

Granny stood again. “But, never mind about that,” said Granny. “Just hand me my canes.”

I kept hold of her jerkin and passed her the canes. “Let me help you back over the fence.” 

She shook her head. “No, I’m changing your fate, today,” she said as she jabbed the cane tips to catch in the corners of the scarf, “your fate and mine,” she said. Granny twisted out of my grasp, clasped the cane heads together, and leapt. The glory of her flight and the sureness of her death warred in me.

The scarf snapped out taut, a giant kite with Granny and her canes making the spines. She called out as she fell, caught an updraft, and swooped out toward the sea, scattering the birds and rising above them. The gaudy scarf was unmistakable even in the distance.

I stood, hands grasping the fence, and wept. I watched my grandmother soar and dive, gaining distance from the land, but not casting into the ocean. Then I saw a gray and silver sail emerge over the horizon. It turned toward Granny and she dove toward it. The two merged, Granny and the ship.

I don’t want to bury the lead on this. I’m not going to unfriend anyone.

I have been reading a lot of posts lately, in which people warn others to unfriend them if they voted for the other guy and are therefore harboring racist or socialist beliefs in their souls. They say that to support the people currently in power on one issue is to support them in all issues and behaviors they exemplify. 

To be honest, I don’t expect the election to change who I am in the least. If I am your friend now, I will still be your friend. I will still ask you to explain why you hold the beliefs you hold, as I always have. I will still ask for examples, as I always have. I will still strive for personal growth, understanding, finding common ground, truth, nurturing my better self, adjusting my vision to encompass things I’ve been blind to. I’m trying to do the work. Ecclesiastes has its place.

For months now, I have been posting VIGILANCE, COURAGE, UNITY. Friends asked why I was making this a daily reminder,  did I set it up as an automatically repeated event, what did I mean by those words, why now – of all times. I started posting VIGILANCE, COURAGE, UNITY in Nancy’s memory. I took up the banner she lay down on her passing. At first it was to remember Nancy’s beacon of grace and honesty. She spoke truth, garnished with love, and never shied away from calling bullshit when that was what she saw. 

As I continued the posting it became more of a prayer for these values to persist in the world. And finally it became a meditation on the values themselves. I have never set up the post as an automatic event. I wanted to be mindful of the words, intentional in my statement. 

There are so many things we need to be Vigilant of: making progress, the impact of our words and actions, threats to our own well-being, storms on the horizon and shelter at hand. 

We must have Courage to stand up for ourselves, speak truth to power, and listen when others speak their own truth. Just because theirs is not an experience we share does not make it any less true, nor make them any less Courageous for speaking out.

We must have the Courage to stand in Unity with others whose voice needs to be amplified. Unity does not mean sameness, and it does not mean “in lock step.” 

And there are times we must have the Courage to stand alone and cry “bullshit!”

Mom’s Tomten sweater with a tree of life from Barbara Walker – root system by me.

I have always been a teach-an-individual-to-fish kind of person. In my knitting circles I recently witnessed a brouhaha over reverse engineering a knitted garment and whether to share the process notes. It got me thinking about the value of shared knowledge. What am I willing to figure out? What would I just as soon pay for? What am I willing to share? Under what circumstances am I needing to be paid for my work?

I find there are several formative experiences that weigh into my responses to those questions:

First, I came of digital age when Open Source was called GNU. Anyone could tweak or add to commonly available applications; the least buggy, most useful versions would persist. Entry into the process was open to anyone, but improvements happened slowly, as needed, by people willing to innovate.

Second, I am a big fan of Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Disposessed,” a novel about a working communal society.

And third, one of the most effective teaching strategies I’ve used is talking through my process out loud. The formula I used was, basically, “I see _____, and I think _____, so I decide to _____.” (Those of you who know me realize that it was never exactly that simple.)

Figuring out how to use a new technique is a lot more fun than figuring out the technique itself. I am more likely to read about grafting one knit piece to another, and then apply that knowledge to the next sweater, scarf, or shawl I make. I use sequences and series from color theory or beginning calculus to inform how I merge Fair Isle and Shetland lace motifs. Origami and geometric shapes also appear in how I structure sweaters. Fractals and flow transformation come into play as one shape or pattern morphs into another. I might start off with little diamonds which gradually elongate to become leaves. Leaves broaden to become waves. I try out an effect first with lace, then add color, then add traveling twisted stitches to become brioche. The story is often the same rocky Maine coast, but the presentation is eternally different. This, for me, is play.

When I can’t figure out the How of something, I will pay for a pattern. I rarely make the item I paid for, mining it, instead, for information. I wanted to knit an afghan modeled after the Drunkard’s Path Quilt but couldn’t figure out how to embed a quarter circle in a square. I came upon a blanket made of knit squares that contained circles of color and bought the pattern for that and borrowed that strategy. Other times it has been more hype than usefulness as I found when the asymmetrical garter stitch shawls started to become popular. It was as I had suspected a matter of increasing on one side every row, and decreasing every second row on the other side. There it turned out the information worth buying was the percentage of yarn you needed to reserve for the bind off.

There are several folks who started off sharing techniques as they matured into accomplished designers. Bad Cat Designs, Brooklyn Tweed, and Lily Chin all started off with informative blogs explaining what they did. It was illuminating to follow their thought processes. Their early designs and advice left plenty for the knitter to figure out on their own, but provided a great start for how to consider the technical aspects of the craft. I made sweaters for both my mom (pictured above) and my son following Jared Flood’s (Brooklyn Tweed) post about modifying Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Tomten sweater for the adult wearer. String Geekery published a stitch pattern called Coffee on her blog. I flipped it upside down, reversing some of the decreases, and am using it in a shawl. I will be morphing the Coffee into a smaller, frothy-er motif. The finished piece will be called “Café Cassé.” I am grateful to those who share their knowledge. I recognize it as a way to organize thoughts, the last step in the process of “learn one; do one; teach one.”

I try to pay forward what I’ve gotten. I give away a lot: shawls, hats, baby sweaters, and advice. I give to people who need the comfort of an unexpected gift, a virtual hug. I give knowing the gift has value because and the receiver couldn’t or wouldn’t make the thing for themselves. I use the baby sweaters and hats to try out new designs; they are often prototypes. I give a shawl to each graduating niece, in the color of their choice and the fiber of mine, with or without beads. I give the nephews cook books.

Graduation Shawl – beaded, merino-cashmere 90/10

I charge for what gives me stress – if too many people are involved, or there is nothing left to tweak or learn, or there is a deadline. I knit my sister an entrelac sock for Christmas. I figured the second sock would take me at least another six hours of knitting those tiny squares, and couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. For the second sock I used the same yarn and a different pattern that focused on short rows instead. Recently she asked what it would cost a friend to have me knit a pair, both in entrelac. Twelve hours, I said. Then $120, she said. I haven’t heard back. If the friend lived nearby, I would happily coach her for free if she wanted to knit her own pair, but to knit them myself, again, I would need the incentive of money. People will say that isn’t the way to sell things; the market won’t bear the cost. True. That doesn’t bother me. Happily, I don’t need to make a living. But think about what cart wranglers at the grocery store make. 

Each September I sit with other Wednesday Spinners at the Common Ground Fair and teach people to use a drop spindle. It is my weekend to share an important part of my craft, and work with others to better appreciate the joy fiber arts can bring. I meet each learner on their own terms. With some it is just learning to spin the spindle and draft the wool to make a rough sort of yarn. With others it is chatting about the structure of each hair and the physics of spinning. I work with all ages of folk from 4 to 80 on up. I have a blast. I was taught to spin by a woman who felt it was an essential bit of knowledge for everyone. I am compelled to pass that on. The same feeling of outreach applies to knitting. But if I have to prepare a special presentation, balance a class with a variety of skill levels, teach an agreed upon set of skills in a specific period of time, then it becomes a job. I still enjoy the class, but the preparation that allows me to have fun is the work and I want compensation for that.

It turns out I am delighted to share my time or knowledge with anyone, as long as I can manage the schedule myself. I’ll coach you along your journey in person, email, or skype. If you’re having a baby, I’ll give you a one-of-a-kind sweater or hat. All else arrives serendipity, with maybe a touch of kismet thrown in.

This is an invitation to knitting friends to join me in a project. This is not really a KAL, but an opportunity to enjoy a bit of random creativity, put some good words out into the universe. I am AcadiaS on Ravelry; share there or here with what you make with these ideas.

Yesterday I saw a post about math and knitting. My heart bumped. I followed the link to this page by Naomi Parkhurst. My heart bumped again when I discovered that this was about coded knitting. Words of power hidden in a craft practiced publicly like Madame DeFarge, like Rose Greenhow, like the women of Native Tongue.

Not only does Naomi Parkhurst provide the patterns she creates, but she reveals how she does it. It is a straight up matching code, where letters of the alphabet are matched with numbers which are then applied to a charting grid. The example she gave for “sunshine” used base-6. (You can read all about it on the above link.)

I had to try it. These are my notes on Naomi’s process. If you are interested in engineering your own patterns, you’ll have to read her blog as well.

But what words to use? A poet friend shares a daily post “UNITY, COURAGE, VIGILANCE” as encouragement during these times of turmoil. They sounded like the perfect words to use. I’ll give her the project when I’m done. The the next aspects to decide:

• What base to use? I chose base-6, because that’s what Naomi used. Also because that guaranteed there would be no stretch longer than 5 stitches in any single repeat.
• How to deal with zeroes? Since in the lace rendidtion of this process marks the end of each digit with a YO, leaving zeroes as they are would create a double YO. Naomi suggests other alternatives.
• How big a block to graph? I started out with a block 9 stitches wide. UNITY resulted in 4 pattern rows with 4 ‘rest’ rows that could be either garter or stockinette based. COURAGE became 5 pattern rows and VIGILANCE became 6 pattern rows. This was problematic for knitting them side-by-side as I would need some buffer rows to make each block 6 pattern rows high. The alternitive would to be consistent in number of rows and variable stitch width. UNITY stayed at 9, COURAGE was 10 and VIGILANCE 12.
• What to make? I considered scarf variations, a stole, a cowl a hat. Grafting or not, mirroring the patterns. How much and what kind of yarn was available (OK, it’s not like there is a dearth of yarn to choose from). I had been discussing the Sufi story of the sultan who had a ring made with the words ‘This too shall pass.’ To continue my round of mystical thinking I chose a circular scarf. 180 stitches on size 7 needles provides enough to repeat VIGILANCE 15 times in a round (so that word does not get mirrored because it’s an odd number), COURAGE 18 times, and UNITY 20 times. My plan for the moment is to do each word 3 vertical repeats for a total of 72 rows, probably buffered with garter stitch.

Here are the charts I’ve made:

UNITY

  COURAGE

VIGILANCE

This week a group of boys in England wore skirts to school in protest of a “no shorts” policy. Oregon drivers can officially circle “X” on their licenses as a gender choice. Myra Breckenridge is no longer the only transgender name we know, not by a long shot.

I’d like to be able to say “This is what it means to be female. This stuff is what it means to be male,” but I can’t. I have no idea what it means to be anything except what I am in my own head. The smattering of gender trappings learned and rejected by a child of the 1950s – clothes, makeup, being safe, who may hit whom, bathroom protocol, war mongering – have blurred in the intervening decades. Women throw right hooks in the movies, but it is always accompanies a frisson of surprise. Husbands raise kids while their wives are bank managers. Ditto the frisson. Do women wear hats and hose, men put on ties, to go shopping on Saturday afternoon?

As a forty-five year old mom I had no problem marching my six year old daughter into the boys’ department of Filenes. Mid-riff baring shirts, skimpy shorts, and underpant revealing skirts found in the girls’ department were not going to happen for her no matter what common culture said was appropriately feminine dress. Rugged, skin covering clothes were practical for a kid given to skidding on her knees. So were pockets. Was this cross-dressing? Would there be long term effects?

During college orientation at URI in 1972, a boy asked “Are you a liberated woman?”
“Yes.”
“Come to bed with me and prove it.”

The exchange was mostly about gender, even though it was cloaked as sex. It was about framing as a dichotomy a question that was really multi-faceted. It seemed typically masculine, this bestowing of and either-or choice, ignoring the wealth of possibility in between.

One night, sitting with Dad when he knew he was dying, he said, “you can either be independent, or you can learn to blend in and be happy. You’ll never find a husband if you don’t.” Interesting assumptions, just like the boy twenty-five years before, as if the only choices were immersion or independence, husband or loneliness. Who needs a caretaker? Why should gender dictate choices?

I hadn’t discovered any of the hard boiled lady detectives yet, nor any of the gender fluid starship captains of Melissa Scott. John D. MacDonald had famously said that he didn’t like women in his novels because they slowed the action down. Reading The Left Hand of Darkness and a handful of similar short stories, raised the question of why gender matters at all.

I’m writing a book with a protagonist whose gender is undisclosed. I started thinking about this character in the early 1980s when I was living in a country where the cultural trappings of gender are different, but no less rigid than in the US. The character needed to be separated from the binary of social propriety. Perception of gender in the States has changed, broadened, become more polarizing. Today, lack of gender is itself a political statement. Why is there this pressure to adhere to one gender or another as if they were political parties? Why not be unenrolled or independent? What would that look like? Why let others define a limited field of choices?

While this is a modern picture, this face of the building has not changed in 35 years.

It was in 1984. University students across Morocco were on strike, so it must have been some time in February. Teachers were required to put in an appearance and spend some time in empty rooms, normally filled with 80 or more students. Looking busy was essential.

The Chair of the English Department asked to speak with the teachers responsible for teaching first and second year students grammar, composition, and comprehension. He was a Moroccan, recently returned with a Doctorate in Linguistics from a school in the US. He was the third Chair in five years, and had taken charge of the upper level students, mostly 4th years who would be leaving for teaching posts in the spring.

The man had quirks, to be sure. He was insecure and had reason to be. His wife, an American teacher in the department, helped fascilitate all meetings. Feuds with faculty members, both Moroccan and native English speakers, became common. Staff had left abruptly just three months after he had assumed the Chair. Those who had to stay because a spouse worked in another department, were desperately unhappy. Rumor had it that soon the only jobs to be available for expatriate English speakers would be in the language lab, where accent and cadence were important.

I was part of a group of four women who had been working together for nearly five years, teaching the basics to first and second year students. Two of us were French who had spent much of their lives in England. One was Welsh, and I was American. Although grammar, composition, and comprehension were billed as separate classes, we taught them as interrelated. We prepared all our lessons together, using the same texts, many of them from Time, Newsweek, or English papers, and teaching with a Chomskyan view of language. We stressed the importance of asking questions, both for clarification and to delve more deeply into the nuances of English as a language.

This all proved to be a problem for the Chair. He liked Chomsky well enough from a linguistic point of view and when handed out via lecture, but was entirely against this business of encouraging students to ask questions. They expected answers and became surly when they did not get them. They relied on logic to take the place of dogma and would actually argue their point of view. He thought a more prescriptive strategy better suited to students just starting out at university, a strategy that relied more on memorization and acceptance.

He outlined his ideas in our meeting. “No,” said the group leader.

“Do you deny that you teach them to ask questions?”

“Of course we teach them to ask questions.”

“But surely you see this is wrong?” The Chair seemed shocked.

No one, it seemed, disagreed with the facts. Early teaching of question asking techniques resulted in students continuing to ask questions as they got older. The problem was that one side saw this as a good thing, and the other saw it as bad. It smacked of religious fervor on both sides. It was surprising, to me, that he found questions evil. I believe the Chair was equally surprised.

I am sure it was not the first time I encountered this dichotomy of thought. Whether my Dad would go to Hell for having smoked (Toby Tobacco in Sunday School said yes!), or questioning God’s motivation in sending one or another band of barbarians after His Israelites (Reverend Welch said questioning God was “just not done!”) were two of my early experiences. The Civil Rights movement and Vietnam War were keystones of my youth and both had a religious aspect to them. This hatred of questioning was, however, the first time I had seen such tempers rise in a strictly secular circumstance. Passions burn hot when individuals, or groups, feel threatened in either their lack of knowledge or way of life. Those feelings can be aroused in any arena.

While the Computer, Burger, and Cola Wars are half joke, half serious, I am surprised (dismayed? astounded?) these days by authentic passion surrounding ideas that I had thought long since put to bed, like racism, equality, gender, unalienable rights.