Free-Range Knitter (5 page)

I practically had to put my head between my knees while she was talking. That happens sometimes when I talk to Cass. I’m not a flexible person. I am a creature of habit and routine, and things or people that break up my system or have no system upset me. I am a nervous overthinker, and I tend to stick with what I know, and that means I never say, “I just make it work.” I do make things work, I really do, but things working out for me is the direct result (I think) of planning, an attempt at organization, an agonizing amount of contemplation, and a striking relationship with lists and an overdeveloped fondness for office supplies. Even the way I knit is the result of a carefully contrived efficiency developed over thirty-five years. This idea, what Cass was saying, that she had no idea what she was doing or how, but was doing it anyway, was entirely alien to me. She might just as well have been offering me information in Swahili, and I had to hit the reset button on my psyche and remember
again why Cass is in my life. At the risk of sounding like the sort of person who makes her own granola (which I do, but that’s not the point), I believe that everyone is here for a reason, that every person has a purpose, and that as itchy as it makes me sometimes, I know why I love Cassandra in my life.

Cass’s slogan could be “Evolve or die.” She changes whatever she has to, whenever she has to, and I stare at her in wonder. I am bad with change to the point that I could spend a year contemplating switching breakfast cereals and might still feel nervous about my choice. Although she was educated in private schools, studied the liberal arts abroad, and can tell me that my latest writing is “structurally laborious” (and be right), Cass is the sort of person who, when her father died unexpectedly, inherited a business that manufactures (of all things) prison phones, and she didn’t miss a beat. I would have been sobbing under a bed somewhere at the thought of taking my extensive knowledge of English romantic literature and my grand plan for my life and flushing it down the toilet, and all Cass did was say, “I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I will.” I’m not going to pretend for a minute that what happened next was easy or pretty, or that Cassandra shifts huge things painlessly, but she took a big hit to her life and her plan, and instead of railing against what needed to happen, she changed. Where someone else might have been paralyzed, a few years later, Cassandra had a whole new life. She had moved to New Jersey, taken up knitting with a passion, found a passel of new friends as a result, and packed a little
house right full of yarn before she woke up one bright and shining day and discovered that she had suddenly become the sort of woman who was at a conference in Texas talking to wardens about penal communication systems with expertise and confidence. “I can’t believe this is where I am,” she said. I think she was surprised that so much had changed, but she might have found it just as unbelievable that it was Texas.

I don’t, for the life of me, know why Cassandra can’t believe it. The way she knits sums her up. Cass is changeable without being flighty, adaptable without being reckless; she can devise a new approach in a heartbeat if she has to, and she does it all without losing track of her central self. Cass changes her breakfast cereal all the time, and she doesn’t even consider it a risk. I love, I am enchanted by, the way that she perpetually does what it takes and is ever moving forward but doesn’t have any idea at all that she’s doing it. In fact, Cass often thinks she’s stuck, both physically and spiritually.

I have never, ever understood how she can feel this way when she’s practically the poster child for spiritual growth and remarkable adaptability. I don’t know how the sort of person who learns something new every ten minutes and has to tell me to loosen up every fifteen can think of herself as stuck, but I have wondered whether Cass gets this message because her life doesn’t have very many of the traditional markers and milestones that we use to manage the progress of a woman’s life. She’s single, she has no kids, and she owns her own business,
so it’s not even like she gets promoted for learning or doing a good job. In my life, I get clues that there is movement. I have a career where success is measured in one project coming after the other, my kids get older and more accomplished, and my relationship with my husband matures, even if that only means that I finally understand that he’s never going to be on time for anything. I couldn’t possibly feel stuck; there’s movement showing me the flow of my progress all around me. Cass gets up every day and the backbone of her life stays the same, and I think that can make her think she’s in a loop and not on a journey.

All of this has turned out to be tremendously ironic, because when Cass stomped into my life at a thousand miles an hour, I thought I was moving forward, and she thought that she was going nowhere, both of us tricked by the things around us. I had very good friends, and I wasn’t, when Cass turned up, in the market for more. I am the sort of person who forms good and long friendships, and the friends I had at the time were all the same friends I had enjoyed for decades. They were very good friends, and they still are, but I believed, because I had not had a new friend in so long, I believed that I had been given my lifetime allotment of them, and like eating the same cereal every day, that didn’t bother me at all.

Enter Cass, who broke the seal on all my beliefs about friendship with her flexibility, changeability, and knack for adaptation. Her ability to do whatever worked was a challenge to my system
(my system being to keep doing whatever I was doing, whether it was working or not), and this same flexibility has turned out to be the best foil for my nervous nature. I tend to come reluctantly (if by
reluctant
you understand that I resist it as cats resist bathing) to new things, even good things, and Cass found ways to convince me that new things and new people could fit into my life, if only I would loosen up, follow where she was leading, and see that change could look good on a person. Only someone as flexible (and persistent) as Cass could have possibly unlocked someone as rigid as I was, and her arrival and consequent bashing down of my internal door marked the beginning of what I now think of as the second wave, a group of women that I simply cannot do without, that Cass brought me at this unexpected time in my life, when I really thought I had a system and all the friends I was going to get.

When I think about my natural reticence about new things or new people and how it almost held me back from discovering this wonderful friendship; when I think about all the other people the goddess Cassandra dragged into my life with me twitching and screaming; when I look at her knitting like that, switching whole systems to get from knit to purl, I know why she’s here. Cass has taught me a thing or two about there being more than one way to solve a problem, more than one way to look at things, and that if you knit your way across a row, you haven’t made a permanent decision about how you have to hold your hands when you purl back. Without Cass, I wouldn’t be
anywhere near where I am today, and I have no idea at all how I made it this far without her. She is a walking testament to flexibility and movement in a human, and everything about her has taught me a lot about opening myself up to possibility, friendship, and the things that knitting and people can bring you, if only you can be flexible enough to see the potential. She’s shown me, in short, which one of us was stuck, and that there is more than one way for a woman to measure her success.

I may also change my breakfast cereal. Maybe.

(I know that’s sort of a long title, but I think it is justified. Something must be done.)

1. My aunt Christine. Removed from the list for telling me that the scarf that I knit her looked “almost as good” as the one that my cousin got her from Wal-Mart. It was all I could do to contain myself. Seriously. What sort of world are we living in where one woman could spend hours and hours and hours of her time making something, by hand for another human, essentially creating something out of hours of her own life, and someone could think that it’s okay to compare the result of those hours of human effort to a stinking machine-knit commercial thing from an uber-conglomerate with no soul? Seriously. No knits for you.
   

2. My husband, Joe. For not trimming his toenails to a length that I feel is safe for handknit socks. I am tired of the argument
   that the holes that develop right over his big toenails are a coincidence or a consequence of his shoes. It happens in boots, it happens in shoes, it happens in sneakers, and it happens when he is shoeless. Dude, it is your toenails. Kindly cut them to a length I consider secure for handknit socks, or I’m pulling your supply. (Okay. I’m not pulling the supply. I am thinking about being a little slow with the next pair, though. Better watch your step.)
   

3. My friend Ken, for telling me that the last pair of socks I knit him were “too purple” and perhaps “not manly” or “for real men.” The last time I checked, my notorious friend, you were lucky to be getting handknit socks at all, and what you should be feeling, my good buddy, even if your socks are pink and frilly with big honking ruffles over the heels, is nothing but gratitude that I have been so good as to knit you a pair. Too purple indeed. Real men suck it up. The next lace pair I make are going to be in your size.
   

4. That lady on the bus who explained to her friend that knitting was simple and fast and took hardly a minute. I’ve got nothing against you, lady, but there’s no way I’m ever knitting you something if you think that all this stuff falls off me while I’m walking. No way.
   

5. My ex-boyfriend Stewart from the eleventh grade. He knows why.
   

6. The baby next door who doubled his birthweight in forty-five days and had the audacity to outgrow the sweater I
   made him, having only worn it once. (He is not off the list permanently—just until he stops growing faster than I can knit or his parents stop feeding him so well.)
   

7. My cat, since there is a stunning felted cat bed I made her that she hasn’t even looked at. I have discovered that it is important to my happiness that I do not knit for beings that do not say thank you, may not use what I knit at all, and may not even admit that the beautifully knitted gift is in the room with them. Now that I think about it, there’s a cousin I’m taking off the list for the same reasons.
   

8. Anyone, ever, who has, when I asked them if they would like a hand knit, replied with “Ummm.”
   

9. Anyone with a foot size greater than men’s 13, or a chest (of either gender) that measures more than 52 inches. I want to be able to continue to like you when I’m done knitting for you and not hold you in contempt for your size and its attendant effect on my sanity. (Or lack thereof.) Would you like a scarf?
   

10. Margaret, or so her name tag read, an employee of my local grocery store who, noticing me knitting as I stood in the exceedingly long line for the checkout, said to the employee she was walking with, “Wow. How lame does your life have to get before you’re reduced to knitting at the grocery store?” She does not respect the Knit-Force, and knits will not be bestowed upon her. I hope she’s chilly.
    

I have an obsession. Beyond being rather unnaturally interested in knitting as a whole, knitters in general, and yarn in specific, I am absolutely captivated by the actual act of knitting. Not knitting as it turns out sweaters and hats and socks, but the movements that make up the act of knitting. How a knitter’s fingers go, what a knitter’s hands do … where and how they hold the yarn. I haven’t always cared about this or watched knitters knit, and I know that if you’ve never done it, really watched them, this little interest of mine probably sounds a little as if my other hobbies might be watching paint dry or grass grow. It began when I tried to learn to knit another way. I wanted to be able to do two-color knitting with two hands, and since I’ve always carried the yarn only in my right hand, my left hand needed to be taught a lesson. I sat down to work it out, and I sat down with confidence.

At the time I had been knitting “my way” for more than twenty years. I cannot even begin to guess how many stitches I
had knit, but it had to be millions. I was sure that there would be a learning curve on this, but I’m proud of my skills as a knitter, and I’m a fast learner. Well, pride goes before a fall, let me tell you. The minute I put the yarn in my left hand the whole thing fell apart. Not just apart where you carry the yarn, either; the entire system came apart. Every knitting skill I had ever had just dissolved. The yarn slipped off my finger no matter how I tried to tension it; I dropped needles. I knew what had to happen, I knew what went where, but it was like I couldn’t get a message to my hands. Within a few minutes I was incompetent and tangled, and since patience isn’t really my forte, I got more and more frustrated. I am used to being ungainly and inept when I’m doing almost anything else, but knitting is not an area of my life where I’m used to feeling like I can’t manage. Knitting is what I do to reassure myself that I’m not an absolutely inadequate moron, and I don’t have a lot of coping skills for abject knitting failure. I started to curse and behave sort of badly, and then, in a moment that I admit was not the pinnacle of my maturity and I’d rather my children had not witnessed, I threw the knitting (or lack of it) on the floor and stomped off. (It is only because I feared puncture that I did not stomp on the knitting itself.)

Badly unsettled, I took a couple of turns around the house and then sat down to knit … my way. Maybe I was missing something. I took up the needles and twined the yarn around my fingers, and I felt everything settle into its
familiar place. I began to effortlessly make stitches, one after another, and I boggled. How could I go from this string of perfect stitches to mere moments later acting like I’d never held a set of needles, just by changing one simple thing? I looked down at my hands as they knit, trying to figure out what I was missing. I watched myself make a stitch, watched it slip from one needle to another. I watched the whole thing, and as I watched, I realized something. Knitting wasn’t simple. Well, knitting was simple. Knitting was just pulling one loop through another using a stick. Knitting was the simplest thing in the world; it’s how I was doing it that wasn’t simple.