knitting, again.
I started knitting again recently. Oh, you didn't know I could knit? Oh, sure--Tucker's mom taught me in college, back in the days when I wore an old pair of Birkenstocks every. single. day. Back in the days when I had boyfriends with names like Tucker, and I read and reread poetry and lovely, thick novels literally written by authors who were paid by the page, back when I was a vegetarian and that really just meant I ate rice and beans for dinner every night, because that was what the Kenyon College dining hall provided for vegetarians. Every night, mind you. I had friends from lots of walks of life (limited, of course, by whoever the Kenyon College admissions team had decided to let in), and one of my friends, who we will call Ed, because that was his name, was in a fraternity-- not just any fraternity, but the Dekes, golden-haired sons of Greek Gods, who were destined for careers in investment banking (that's what it was in those days--today they would be destined for careers in private equity), young men full of hubris with starry blue eyes, the stars gently deposited their by their adoring parents, all the better to seduce girls (i.e., the freshmen, who would now be known as the first years, and I'm getting ahead of myself--we didn't have the #me too movement yet, but we did have date rape, boy did we have date rape), anyhow.
My friend Ed was a Deke, and he was a beautiful man, a football player, and a player. He loved literature and he sought me out as a friend because I had a reputation as someone who would help you with your papers. We struck up an odd friendship, especially as I increasingly spent my time in the women's center, surrounded by books like Against Our Will and Our Bodies, Ourselves, and he never stopped loving being a Deke, loping around campus like a wolf on the prowl. How did I do that friendship now, I wonder, but at the time, I think I honestly thought I would change Ed in the process of editing his papers and eating omelets with him late at night. Anyhow, to bring this full circle, Ed used to say I was eating "food of the people" when I sat down with my rice and beans. And I loved that he teased me, because in my family, we showed affection by teasing one another. Now that phrase sounds ignorant, even offensive. That's true about a lot of things which have had the time to be distilled in my mind.
Anyhow, one time when I was visiting my boyfriend Tucker's home in Concord, Massachusetts (that's right, for those of you following along at home, Concord, where I now, essentially live, in the sense that Carlisle borders Concord and we share a regional high school--although Concord is known as the more aloof, shall we say stuck-up, town, and Carlisle as the more crunchy, bohemian community (bohemian, of course, in the unique way that towns where the median house price is $725,000 and the zoning requires two acre minimum lots, can be, which is to say, the fathers wear Patagonia fleeces to the soccer games, with their perfectly worn t-shirts untucked, and the mothers wear their black leggings tucked into expensive boots, and their blonde hair is beautifully disheveled and people really buy Williams and Sonoma free range chicken coops--priced now at $1499.95--I kid you not, go look it up, cedar chicken coop and run with planter)), where I was completely bewitched by the history of the town (the Concord, as in the Revolutionary War, not to mention the literary history of the town, (the Thoreau, as in the Walden Pond), and just how un-Ohio it all was, with the stone walls running at the edge of the gorgeous lots of land, the endless conservation land (which just looked to me like forests out of Narnia), and the huge houses set back from the stone walls, nestled in the snow with their beautiful holiday lights twinkling in their black framed windows. I wanted all of this, and now I have it, and boy, I am not here to tell you it fails me. I can be as sarcastic as the next about the money and the advantage and the private school around the corner from the other private school around the corner from the almost comically overfunded public school, and the mud-spattered BMW and Mercedes sports utility vehicles pulled into the gravel parking lot at the kindergarten soccer game where no one publicly thrills to their own child's athletic abilities because it would be unseemly, which is a far cry from the Melrose soccer lots, where my first round of children grew up, where sometimes the police would have to be called to separate the parents from the referees who had foolishly risked limb and called the foul--although to be fair, that wasn't kindergarten, but high school, but the fire was stoked in kindergarten certainly, as wittily sarcastic as the next transport from Melrose, but I love living here. I love the stone wall in our front yard and the deer in the back forest which we own, it's actually our land, and the poet's corner in the graveyard in Concord, and the precious fact that my children swim, actually swim, in Walden Pond. You can take the girl out of Ohio...
but I transgress.
I learned to knit one holiday break in Concord, and proceeded to knit several big projects including, god help me, an Irish Fisherman's sweater my senior year of college, which, if you know LL Bean, you know is a complicated creamy white sweater filled with complicated cables. And I have picked knitting up a few times since, but never for real, so that every time we moved, I would find an unfinished project jammed into a drawer and have to make the call--should we actually move this bedraggled bag of yarn cast onto needles, but where in the hell are the instructions, or the fourth skein of yarn, or the time, for that matter. Tucker's mother patiently taught me, and I'm so grateful, especially now because, I don't know if I have told you about the Virginia Thurston Healing Garden in Harvard, Massachusetts, but I have been spending some real time there. It's this lovely, low-slung building in the deep woods, down a road made treacherous by winter storms, and there is a Mary Oliver poem in the doorway (what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life), and inside are classes, and support groups, and healing folks who give massages and perform acupuncture and reiki and the like. The first day I was there, I came upon a circle of women, you had to think coven, who were sitting in a light splashed room, in a circle of comfortable chairs, each one different from the next, a different beautiful quilt draped over each chair, and a fire in the fireplace, and each woman, as it turns out, all a bit older than me, almost all with breast cancer in some phase or another, was knitting. They meet every Thursday afternoon and they brought me right in.
So I am now knitting a scarf for one of my girls, and I deliberately picked an uncomplicated pattern so I just knit then purl row after row, so I can listen without screwing up the scarf. One thing they have taught me already is how strange it sounds, in some circles, to bemoan loss of career when you have already been approved for disability payments. Oh, one woman said, almost enviously, they give you disability benefits no questions asked when you're stage four. So that's a perk.
But it's been enlightening to recenter myself in this new world with some occasional help from these women who think I've hit the holy grail in being awarded disability benefits because now I don't have to work, I can just, well knit. Or read, or cook, or spend time with one of the many people I made, or the people those people have picked as companions. And the coven has a good point that makes me feel abashed for mourning the loss of ambition and striving which marked the last twenty years of my life. I retired from all that on the toss of a coin this past June, and it really is helping me adjust to sit in that circle of women and just knit and listen.
Speaking of Kenyon, I heard, as one does, from a long lost friend via Facebook just two days ago. Who knows, she might be reading these words even as we speak. After we spent a few text exchanges catching ourselves up on everything that has happened since graduation--captured I would say by the phrases early marriage disappointment, kids and no kids, career with horses, career without horses, the love of reading and writing carried in the heart of almost everyone who attended Kenyon, and then, and I'll protect her a bit, she asked me about an incident she is now thinking about in terms of the #metoo movement. And I had to pause, because I just don't quite remember the incident of which she speaks, but then again, maybe I do. I had forgotten she was there that night. My memory of that night, which I'm not going to pursue here, is jumbled and has become part of my history in a broad stroke way. It's hard for me to get my memory to isolate onto one particular night from that time, one particular hazy party, any one particular fraternity brother.
I do remember, like it was yesterday, sitting on one of the benches that line Middle Path, the mile-long pathway that cuts across the beautiful Kenyon campus, linking the newer, uglier part of the campus which was built in the very late sixties to house the women who were allowed onto the campus in the very early seventies to the old part of campus, which had the beautiful old buildings where the fraternities were housed. Kenyon is a bit unique in that there is Greek life, whatever that means exactly, only for men. Women never chose to bring sororities to campus. The power dynamic on the campus was just super chillingly clear. I remember sitting on one of those benches in the early fall of my senior year, with a friend, watching the freshmen walk down Middle Path to the frat parties, their colored invitations clutched in manicured hands, and murmuring, full of myself, heady with experience, "like lambs to the slaughter."
Sigh.
There are some things you can't teach. I can't really teach you what it is like to live this close to death, to engage in the "both/and" dance about my own mortality on a nightly basis, trying to hold close calm hopefulness while being jarringly truthful about what is really happening in my body now, as I type, as I sleep, as I fret. You can't really teach me with your words what it is like for you as you navigate your own troubled waters. And my friend and I couldn't, or at least we said we couldn't, teach those young women why they should not be flattered or seduced by the invitation slipped under their door, the invitation to the seemingly adult world of grain alcohol and fraternity boyfriends. It didn't help to politely point out that all the freshmen girls were invited, that it wasn't special, it was potentially tragic. We sounded like shrews.
At first, when my old friend invited me to think back on one particular night, because, as she put it, she had been thinking about the #metoo movement in the context of this memory, I resisted. I am busy with cancer I thought. But that night--shadowy memories of it, or was it another night? why is there more than one night from which to choose?--has been dogging at my heels all day, haunting as it slowly unravels in my mind. I'm actually glad to do the work to pull apart that memory and to talk about it in the context of how we might think about these things now. Not because I have any intention of writing some letter to someone, in the style of the laying out of the details of a date with Aziz Ansari, but because this old friend of mine is bothered by something, a memory that won't be still, a memory with legs. She wants resolution, and it might be in the turning over of the story, letting it air out in the cold chill of the coming spring, so that we can go back to thinking about Kenyon in terms of authors and late nights writing honor theses in the gorgeous library. A time before both of us began our travels in the post-college world of bills, and interrupted careers, of failed marriages and late-in-life love. Or maybe it always has to be both/and.
All of this is making me feel really old, and distinctly not light-hearted. I'm going to go knit with those women later this week, because they have the power to set me up right again. I wouldn't have met them were it not for cancer, and I'm not going to say I'm glad I have cancer, but I'm going to say, I'm glad to be knitting again.
My friend Ed was a Deke, and he was a beautiful man, a football player, and a player. He loved literature and he sought me out as a friend because I had a reputation as someone who would help you with your papers. We struck up an odd friendship, especially as I increasingly spent my time in the women's center, surrounded by books like Against Our Will and Our Bodies, Ourselves, and he never stopped loving being a Deke, loping around campus like a wolf on the prowl. How did I do that friendship now, I wonder, but at the time, I think I honestly thought I would change Ed in the process of editing his papers and eating omelets with him late at night. Anyhow, to bring this full circle, Ed used to say I was eating "food of the people" when I sat down with my rice and beans. And I loved that he teased me, because in my family, we showed affection by teasing one another. Now that phrase sounds ignorant, even offensive. That's true about a lot of things which have had the time to be distilled in my mind.
Anyhow, one time when I was visiting my boyfriend Tucker's home in Concord, Massachusetts (that's right, for those of you following along at home, Concord, where I now, essentially live, in the sense that Carlisle borders Concord and we share a regional high school--although Concord is known as the more aloof, shall we say stuck-up, town, and Carlisle as the more crunchy, bohemian community (bohemian, of course, in the unique way that towns where the median house price is $725,000 and the zoning requires two acre minimum lots, can be, which is to say, the fathers wear Patagonia fleeces to the soccer games, with their perfectly worn t-shirts untucked, and the mothers wear their black leggings tucked into expensive boots, and their blonde hair is beautifully disheveled and people really buy Williams and Sonoma free range chicken coops--priced now at $1499.95--I kid you not, go look it up, cedar chicken coop and run with planter)), where I was completely bewitched by the history of the town (the Concord, as in the Revolutionary War, not to mention the literary history of the town, (the Thoreau, as in the Walden Pond), and just how un-Ohio it all was, with the stone walls running at the edge of the gorgeous lots of land, the endless conservation land (which just looked to me like forests out of Narnia), and the huge houses set back from the stone walls, nestled in the snow with their beautiful holiday lights twinkling in their black framed windows. I wanted all of this, and now I have it, and boy, I am not here to tell you it fails me. I can be as sarcastic as the next about the money and the advantage and the private school around the corner from the other private school around the corner from the almost comically overfunded public school, and the mud-spattered BMW and Mercedes sports utility vehicles pulled into the gravel parking lot at the kindergarten soccer game where no one publicly thrills to their own child's athletic abilities because it would be unseemly, which is a far cry from the Melrose soccer lots, where my first round of children grew up, where sometimes the police would have to be called to separate the parents from the referees who had foolishly risked limb and called the foul--although to be fair, that wasn't kindergarten, but high school, but the fire was stoked in kindergarten certainly, as wittily sarcastic as the next transport from Melrose, but I love living here. I love the stone wall in our front yard and the deer in the back forest which we own, it's actually our land, and the poet's corner in the graveyard in Concord, and the precious fact that my children swim, actually swim, in Walden Pond. You can take the girl out of Ohio...
but I transgress.
I learned to knit one holiday break in Concord, and proceeded to knit several big projects including, god help me, an Irish Fisherman's sweater my senior year of college, which, if you know LL Bean, you know is a complicated creamy white sweater filled with complicated cables. And I have picked knitting up a few times since, but never for real, so that every time we moved, I would find an unfinished project jammed into a drawer and have to make the call--should we actually move this bedraggled bag of yarn cast onto needles, but where in the hell are the instructions, or the fourth skein of yarn, or the time, for that matter. Tucker's mother patiently taught me, and I'm so grateful, especially now because, I don't know if I have told you about the Virginia Thurston Healing Garden in Harvard, Massachusetts, but I have been spending some real time there. It's this lovely, low-slung building in the deep woods, down a road made treacherous by winter storms, and there is a Mary Oliver poem in the doorway (what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life), and inside are classes, and support groups, and healing folks who give massages and perform acupuncture and reiki and the like. The first day I was there, I came upon a circle of women, you had to think coven, who were sitting in a light splashed room, in a circle of comfortable chairs, each one different from the next, a different beautiful quilt draped over each chair, and a fire in the fireplace, and each woman, as it turns out, all a bit older than me, almost all with breast cancer in some phase or another, was knitting. They meet every Thursday afternoon and they brought me right in.
So I am now knitting a scarf for one of my girls, and I deliberately picked an uncomplicated pattern so I just knit then purl row after row, so I can listen without screwing up the scarf. One thing they have taught me already is how strange it sounds, in some circles, to bemoan loss of career when you have already been approved for disability payments. Oh, one woman said, almost enviously, they give you disability benefits no questions asked when you're stage four. So that's a perk.
But it's been enlightening to recenter myself in this new world with some occasional help from these women who think I've hit the holy grail in being awarded disability benefits because now I don't have to work, I can just, well knit. Or read, or cook, or spend time with one of the many people I made, or the people those people have picked as companions. And the coven has a good point that makes me feel abashed for mourning the loss of ambition and striving which marked the last twenty years of my life. I retired from all that on the toss of a coin this past June, and it really is helping me adjust to sit in that circle of women and just knit and listen.
Speaking of Kenyon, I heard, as one does, from a long lost friend via Facebook just two days ago. Who knows, she might be reading these words even as we speak. After we spent a few text exchanges catching ourselves up on everything that has happened since graduation--captured I would say by the phrases early marriage disappointment, kids and no kids, career with horses, career without horses, the love of reading and writing carried in the heart of almost everyone who attended Kenyon, and then, and I'll protect her a bit, she asked me about an incident she is now thinking about in terms of the #metoo movement. And I had to pause, because I just don't quite remember the incident of which she speaks, but then again, maybe I do. I had forgotten she was there that night. My memory of that night, which I'm not going to pursue here, is jumbled and has become part of my history in a broad stroke way. It's hard for me to get my memory to isolate onto one particular night from that time, one particular hazy party, any one particular fraternity brother.
I do remember, like it was yesterday, sitting on one of the benches that line Middle Path, the mile-long pathway that cuts across the beautiful Kenyon campus, linking the newer, uglier part of the campus which was built in the very late sixties to house the women who were allowed onto the campus in the very early seventies to the old part of campus, which had the beautiful old buildings where the fraternities were housed. Kenyon is a bit unique in that there is Greek life, whatever that means exactly, only for men. Women never chose to bring sororities to campus. The power dynamic on the campus was just super chillingly clear. I remember sitting on one of those benches in the early fall of my senior year, with a friend, watching the freshmen walk down Middle Path to the frat parties, their colored invitations clutched in manicured hands, and murmuring, full of myself, heady with experience, "like lambs to the slaughter."
Sigh.
There are some things you can't teach. I can't really teach you what it is like to live this close to death, to engage in the "both/and" dance about my own mortality on a nightly basis, trying to hold close calm hopefulness while being jarringly truthful about what is really happening in my body now, as I type, as I sleep, as I fret. You can't really teach me with your words what it is like for you as you navigate your own troubled waters. And my friend and I couldn't, or at least we said we couldn't, teach those young women why they should not be flattered or seduced by the invitation slipped under their door, the invitation to the seemingly adult world of grain alcohol and fraternity boyfriends. It didn't help to politely point out that all the freshmen girls were invited, that it wasn't special, it was potentially tragic. We sounded like shrews.
At first, when my old friend invited me to think back on one particular night, because, as she put it, she had been thinking about the #metoo movement in the context of this memory, I resisted. I am busy with cancer I thought. But that night--shadowy memories of it, or was it another night? why is there more than one night from which to choose?--has been dogging at my heels all day, haunting as it slowly unravels in my mind. I'm actually glad to do the work to pull apart that memory and to talk about it in the context of how we might think about these things now. Not because I have any intention of writing some letter to someone, in the style of the laying out of the details of a date with Aziz Ansari, but because this old friend of mine is bothered by something, a memory that won't be still, a memory with legs. She wants resolution, and it might be in the turning over of the story, letting it air out in the cold chill of the coming spring, so that we can go back to thinking about Kenyon in terms of authors and late nights writing honor theses in the gorgeous library. A time before both of us began our travels in the post-college world of bills, and interrupted careers, of failed marriages and late-in-life love. Or maybe it always has to be both/and.
All of this is making me feel really old, and distinctly not light-hearted. I'm going to go knit with those women later this week, because they have the power to set me up right again. I wouldn't have met them were it not for cancer, and I'm not going to say I'm glad I have cancer, but I'm going to say, I'm glad to be knitting again.
Your writing, and your stories, are always beautiful. Even more beautiful, you're in among the people who lift you up.
ReplyDeleteI hope my comment shows up and won't be swallowed by whatever it is that lurks in the cyber space. We shall see.