Standing hose and What I do and What I don't do

“Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual difference.”  Paul Valery, poet and philosopher (1871-1945)

So I started making a pair of Kilt Hose for my uncle last Friday.  Kilt Hose are BIG socks.  Knee-high Man Socks.  These are knit on US Size 2 knitting needles, with sock-weight yarn and start at a staggering 108 stitches per round.  Breathe deep with me, because there is hope, as they diminish with the lovely curve of the human calf to a more manageable 76 stitches for the ankle and the rest of the (man) foot.  

Here is what they looked like sometime earlier this week, with the cuff folded up.  Maybe about five inches total.  

Here is what they look like this morning.  With the two inch cuff folded, they now come in at just a shade more than seven inches, and they still stand up on their own.  Pretty impressive since they’re not knit in a tight gauge.  In fact they are squishy-soft and completely yummy to hold in my hands.  Any bets on how much longer they’ll stand on their own?  Nine inches?  Twelve?!

In other news of the crafting type, I am still elbow deep in Halloween costumes.  I came across this Suburban Kamikaze post the other day.  I love this—both the idea and the loving and irreverent sarcasm—and if a knight had been requested in this house, there’s an entirely good chance that we would have sought an acceptable substitute for chain mail.  Like window screen maybe.  

Before you go grumbling in your tea about Suburban Overachievers, I think a defense is in order.  

It takes time to do these insane things that I do.  Time that gets deducted from other things, like sleep and eating.  I don’t like giving up sleeping and eating, so the time that I take to make ridiculously large socks or insanely complicated Halloween costumes for small children that will be worn once and then relegated to the dress-up bin has to come from something else.  

I have three kids.  Partner and I do all of the things that three kids need parents to do.  Including a lot of laundry.  When I’m not writing, I do sew, I do knit, I do walk an awful lot, I do volunteer a little bit at the school, I do bake all of our bread, I do cook weird things sometimes.  I like to color in coloring books with my kids and to build things with K’nex.  

Whether I’m writing or not, I do not watch more than two or three hours of television a week.  I do not wear make-up, paint my nails, shave my legs, or color my hair.  For that matter, I do not blow-dry, curl or style my hair beyond combing it—sometimes with my fingers.  I do not ascribe to the consume-as-much-as-possible model of democracy and patriotism.  I do not believe in the “Bush Doctrine” (unless we’re talking about sex).  I also do not iron, my house is generally messy, and I spend an absolute minimum time shopping for anything.  

How much time out of the week do/would these things take me?  

These choices obviously do not suit everyone, and that’s great.  How boring would a world full of me be?  (Oh hush, you know it would be maddening.  After a while anyway.)  Every parent has limited time.  Every parent has to seek a kind of harried balance in one way or another.  Trade-offs will be made for the things you find important and happy-making and useful.  This is my balance point.  It teeters this way or that sometimes.  But so far it hasn’t fallen over completely.  

I won’t kick myself with guilt over the things I do and don’t choose, as long as you don’t kick yourself with guilt over the things you do and don’t choose.  And we can get together over kamikazes.  Or tea.  Whatever you choose.  

Treasure

When I was little, I wasn’t really into tea parties.  I played with friends and cousins who had tea sets, but never really liked them.  Often they were plastic, unsuitable for hot tea.  Or dirty because the cups had been used to dig in the sand.  What was the point, really, if the cups weren’t functional?  I do remember, for a short while, that I had a tea set from my grandmother that I used.  I liked it much better because I could  pour real tea into the cups.  It was a bit intimidating, though, because it was a real china tea set—therefore fragile—and was decorated with pink cabbage roses—therefore a bit too frilly for my taste.  I’m not sure what happened to that tea set.  And I’m not sure whether my brief experience with functional (albeit fussy) tea cups as a child had anything at all to do with my current predilection for tea.  

Though I drink tea every day, often several times a day, I have for years functioned with boiling my water in a tea kettle or microwave, brewing my tea cup by cup directly in the vessel that I planned to drink out of.  Namely my mug.  

I have frequently admired tea pots.  I am absolutely in love with the idea of the sublime and ridiculous in tea cozies.  But until now, I have not owned a tea pot.  

Surprise me, I received birthday treasures in the mail last weekend (what, I wondered, happens to packages destined for areas afflicted by hurricane?  what happens to mail when areas are evacuated or destroyed?).  My step-mother has been throwing pots for a couple of years, and has sent me the loveliest of surprises, her first tea pot and a set of four cups.  I love them.  I think they are so fantastic.  Beautiful without being the least bit fussy.  Dense to hold in the heat.  Each cup with enough individual character that each user can know which cup is his or hers.  

There is something really lovely about the purposefulness of using a tea pot to brew the tea.  It is an extra step that many would find unnecessary or cumbersome.  That extra step demands that I slow down, consider the elements of the experience of the tea.  The smell, the temperature, the feeling of the steam.  I pour the hot water from kettle to pot.  I pour the tea from pot to cup.  The sound of the liquid falling into the vessel is different at each step.  There is a particular sound as the lid of the tea pot slides just a bit when I hold it to pour.  A solid, earthy sound,  of stone with an echo of life.  A cup of tea from a tea pot is a cup of tea to ponder over.  A cup of tea to share with a friend.  

Come have a cup of tea with me. 

My Weirdness This Week, and Shaun Tan's Gem

My toe is sore today.  Actually it’s been sore for a couple of days because I dropped a glass on it the other night.  I knew it the moment I set the glass down on the corner of my desk.  Actually thought to myself, ‘Don’t put it there.  You’ll knock it over.’  Pah on that inner voice.  I set the glass on the corner of my desk so that I could close the curtain to the right, and turn on the lamp to the left.  As I simultaneously pulled my hand gracefully away from the lamp switch and started to sit down in my chair, I caught the top edge of the glass with my hand and tipped it toward myself.  The contents of the glass splattered first against me (spraying in a sort of arc behind me), then after the glass hit my foot, it spun and sprayed more liquid around in front of me, before bouncing onto the tile and breaking.  

While I screamed ow ow ow ow standing in a glassy puddle on one foot, my lovely Partner got towels and brooms and ice.  I’ll be fine.  It was actually sort of funny.  Did I mention that it was a glass of wine?  Wine that I’d taken barely a sip out of before the spectacular spraying of wine all over the room?  Did I mention that it miraculously missed the computer on its track to soak the tile as well as a towel that has been wedged under the thousand-pound filing cabinet for the last year to keep the metal cabinet from scraping the tile?  Or that there is no way to remove this towel from under the cabinet without emptying the files out of it?  

The living room now has the lingering aroma (thankfully pleasant) of a 2005 Australian Shiraz Cabernet that I really liked and was disappointed to have dropped on my foot.  

Perhaps the fumes led to the next weirdness, which was measuring out a level teaspoon of salt to put in my tea yesterday morning.  No, I realized my mistake before I drank the tea, thank you very much.  

All of this should not, however, cause you to doubt my next enthusiastic endorsement.  We came across Shaun Tan’s The Arrival in the juvenile fiction section of the library last week.  I guess you’d call it a graphic novel, in that there are no words, only pictures.  Don’t assume though that the pictures and its location in the library make it kids’ stuff.  The word that comes to my lips anytime I try to describe it is ‘beautiful.’  

The Arrival tells the story of one man’s journey from his home country to make a new life, first for himself, and later for his family in a magical fictionalized world.  Each page, each panel is filled with magic.  You will choke up when the main character holds the hands of his wife and daughter before boarding the boat.  You will understand the awe, the frustration, the loneliness, the fear, the hope that immigrants must have felt when stepping off the boat at Ellis Island more than a century ago.  The pages are filled with fantastical elements meant to illustrate the foreignness, the exoticness, the seeming magic of this new place.  Also embedded in the pages is the generosity of the shared immigrant experience, the way in which one person helps another through the initial confusion, how each person has a different story that led him or her to this place at this time.  The pictures are shaped with subtle details, small beauties and wonders that you will linger over.  

While perfectly appropriate for young people, it should not be overlooked by adults, who will understand the complex choices we sometimes make to care for our families, who might see reflected, if not one’s own experience, then perhaps that of a parent or grandparent.  A great book to share in any language.

If you enjoyed The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, you’ll love this book.  (And if you’ve never read The Invention of Hugo Cabret, you should go find that one too.)  

Shor'nuff

So I couldn’t stand it one more humid, sweaty minute.  

I went to a very exclusive stylist.  In fact, he is so exclusive that he has cut my hair only one other time.  He is so exclusive that he only has four other clients.  He always uses the most avant garde techniques though.  Last time, he used the electric clippers to crop my locks into an elfish buzz.  This time he reverted to the pinking shears (those zig-zaggy scissors usually used for cutting fabric to sew).  

What?  

Ok, so I talked Partner into cutting my hair (he was reluctant and yes, once, a long time ago, I convinced him to shave my head with the electric clippers; and yes, he did use the pinking shears today, at my insistence).  I pulled it all back into a neat ponytail with two rubber bands and told him to aim between the bands.  That’s it.  No fiddling, no finishing, no evening it out.  It is now a lovely, shaggy bob, longer in the front than the back.  And I think it’s curlier than last time.  Or perhaps it’s just humid.  Ha!  When is it not humid here.  

It’s my first haircut in two years, almost to the date.  If you count the blue tiles in the picture, you’ll see that he cut off a smidge more than a foot of hair, which will be donated somewhere.  I sent my last batch to Locks of Love.  

Oh, and we finished grouting the tile today.  

Frigorific

Today is my mother’s 54th birthday. I might wish her a happy birthday, but I don’t think she has internet access. And I can’t call her on the phone.

Eight years ago, my mother was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without opportunity for parole for the shooting death of my step-father. I’d really like to say that I’m making that up, but I’m not.

I don’t know what other people do in situations like this, but I’ve had a really hard time maintaining communication with my mother since her conviction.

There are pragmatic challenges. She is more than a thousand miles away from me. Prisons in the U.S. are controlled places, with all communication in and out observed and sometimes filtered. That has a chilling effect on communication all by itself.

More important though, are the emotional challenges. Like the fact that my mother—an important person in my life—was convincted of killing my step-father—another important person in my life—with a really rather pathetic tale of theft and deception as the explanation. That pretty much makes effective communication something like swimming in frozen molasses.

Open and honest communication with my mother has always been a challenge. She grew up in difficult and confused circumstances. Spending a childhood guessing and speculating about the feelings of those around her, I’m sure she found it difficult as an adult to function any other way. It’s one thing to speculate about feelings and motives; it’s another thing to take those guesses, choose the most sensational (even if it’s the least likely), and believe it as truth. To function ever after with that guess-cum-truth (truth-cum-guess?) locked in her thinking as if she had witnessed it first-hand. Such is one facet of my mother’s mental state.

If I could condemn my mother, my feelings and therefore my actions could be so much simpler. But my mother, the one I loved, is hard to condemn.

There was a time that I thought she was beautiful. I can remember her long brown hair with the silver streak that plagued her in childhood. When I was small, it was long enough for her to sit on it, and thick and silky. Most people remember her for her wicked sense of humor. She was sharp and archly funny in even the challenging situations. I’m sure it was her best coping mechanism. And she was my Mother. She cared for me when I was sick. She encouraged me and made me feel smart and pretty even when I was an awkward, spindly, little, four-eyed geek. I loved that mom.

For just today, in honor of her birthday, I wish I could set aside the death, and the lies, and the imperfections, the fickleness, the fear, the mistrust, the sadness, and the very deep pain. Today, I wish I could send a bit of love to my mom on her birthday.

As hard as she is to condemn, she is equally hard to forgive. I thought, perhaps, that as a mother myself, I might find forgiveness easier. Thought perhaps I could find some kind of empathy for her. But just the opposite is true. I find it that much harder to empathize with someone who treated her children so disproportionately. Who put her children at such risk, took so much from us, at such a tender point in some of our lives, and then raged when we all turned away in dazed confusion and grief and anger.

I’ve coped, in my own way, with the loss of my step-father. But she took away my Mother too. And that, as you can see, is still a struggle sometimes.