Free-Range Knitter (17 page)

My children did, after careful, direct exposure, learn to knit. They learned it the way that most of us have a pretty good idea of
how to drive before we sit down at the wheel. They learned it the way that we know what a waltz looks like, even if ours is sloppy. They learned it because they had lived it, and they just knew how. It was the way the children of fishermen know (mostly) how to fish. It was the way that farmers’ children know how to plant. It was just in them, somehow, through the process of osmosis. They were smart, resourceful children, and after all, knitting is not exactly rocket science. There are only two stitches, knit and purl, only two movements to learn to make. All of my kids had names they could write by then, and all of them were longer than two letters. If they had the coordination to write their names, the intelligence to read, and the patience to bug me to give them a cookie for twenty minutes straight, why was I surprised that they could knit?

I thought then about what my kids had learned and how easily they had learned it. I thought about the natural gifts of human beings. Dexterity, cleverness, being good with code and symbols. I thought about how hard it is for a child to learn even to write her name, and I began to think that maybe I had been wrong about this knitting class. That maybe all I needed was to go down there and facilitate knitting, not ever really teach them to knit, you know? Just lead them to it and watch the magic happen. Maybe I needed a little faith in these children, in knitting and in myself. I gathered up some yarn and needles, I straightened myself out, threw back my hair, and dammit, I went down to the toy store. What kind of a woman is afraid to teach some little kids to knit?

A smart one. That’s what sort, let me tell you.

Three hours later I was home with a cold compress on my head, shattered nerves, lessons learned, and an agreement between the toy-store owner and me that perhaps I was not cut out for this work at all. Nothing about my experiment with my kids had prepared me for the experience of trying to teach knitting to a bunch of kids who have not been raised since birth to be ready for it. Here is what I learned in my brief journey as a children’s knitting teacher.

• Knitting is easy.
  

• Knitting is hard. I know it seems contrary to have learned those two things at the same time, but it’s all about who is doing what when. I can promise you that the kid who finds it easy will inevitably be seated beside the kid who finds it hard, just to guarantee a little bonus conflict. There’s only so much a seven-year-old who is trying to knit can take from the cocky eight-year-old next to him, purling away.
  

• I used the knitting poem “Up through the front door, Dance around the back, Down through the window, and Off jumps Jack,” and it made all the difference in the world to help the kids remember the steps in a knit stitch.
  

• Although that poem and others like them really do help kids remember how to make a stitch, they lead to hard-hitting, non-knitting questions like “Who is Jack?,”
  “Where does he live?,” “Is it the same Jack as the beanstalk?,” and, in the case of one charming little girl who leaned forward when I got to the end of the poem, “What happened to Jack after that?”
  

• Kids get yarn for free. I don’t know why this is, but it seems to be something I can’t duplicate in my own life. It may be because they are cute, or maybe because they are tricky (or maybe because they use their cuteness to trick you), but if you are six years old someone will give you all the yarn you want. (It may also be because fellow knitters see the opportunity to bring a child over to the dark side, and if all it takes is a couple of balls of yarn, then that’s a small price to pay for the creation of a full-blown, life-long knitter.)
  

• A seven-year-old boy in a class with his nine-year-old sister will find it impossible to resist the urge to poke her with a knitting needle. She will likely retaliate by snatching his remaining needle out of his knitting and dropping all his stitches. It is probable that he (having been infuriated and provoked by knitting insult) will respond by throwing the ball of yarn attached to the knitting of the child next to him at his sister, thus invoking the wrath of his wee neighbor harpy, and in mere moments the whole knitting lesson will degenerate into some kind of a scene that makes
  The Lord of the Flies
  look like a tea party for princesses. Separate siblings. Stay on your toes.
  Put down revolts swiftly and surely. Don’t ask me how I know. I’m still not over it.
  

• Consider plastic rather than metal needles. Consider that metal needles can conduct electricity. You know, in a worst-case scenario.
  

• If a child knits it himself, no matter how terrible the yarn is, he will never, ever think it is scratchy.
  

• If your child knits it for you, it will be extra warm.
  

• I still believe every child is capable of knitting. However, I may be capable only of teaching them one at a time, and only in my natural habitat. Please don’t make me go back there.
  

Even though Rachel is one of my knitting friends, and mostly when I see her it is either Knit Night or a knitting event, lately I don’t see her knit a lot. In fact, when I closed my eyes to imagine her knitting so I could write about it, what I came up with was a series of other images. Rachel laughing, Rachel opening wine, Rachel handing someone a gift that she’d found for them and picked up just as a little treat, or Rachel snuggling a baby so that the mum can have a little knitting time. I know Rachel knits. I’ve definitely seen her do it, and she has lots of knitted stuff that proves that she gets it done. She’s even a good and competent knitter with a great many skills. When I mention this to Rachel, that I don’t see her knit a lot at Knit Night, she laughs and calls herself an impostor.

Rachel knits just enough, she claims, to get into the club. She’s all about the people, because knitting has given Rachel more than it’s given most of us, and that’s saying something, since I like to call knitting the gift that keeps on giving.

Rachel has always been bright, vivacious, pretty, and a general go-getting problem solver. She has a startling ability to give people exactly what they need, and you would be stunned at her level of organization. She’d be the last person to tell you how valuable she is as a friend, an employee, or a mother but the first to tell you she had a terrible struggle with depression.

On the outside, it looked as if Rachel had nothing to be depressed about. She was married, with a really terrific son and a great job. She had a lovely little house and a car, her bills were paid, she was skilled at everything she took on, and she was naturally thin at thirty-five. That’s a lot to be grateful for, and Rachel was grateful, but all was not as it seemed. All this success was also a trap. She hated her job but couldn’t leave it since she had all that success to maintain, and the marriage (not to mention the husband) was, to put it mildly, a disappointment. Since Rachel had always been the bright architect of her own success, she began to mull over the opposite. If she had what she had because she had earned it, what did that say about her bad marriage? She became consumed with the idea that she was a failure because she couldn’t fix it, and although that didn’t make any sense, it turns out that depression isn’t really interested in logic.

The weight of it fell on her and drove her to her knees. Rachel remembers getting up in the morning (or not getting up, depending on how bad it had her that day) and trying to talk herself out of it. She gave herself stiff lectures that included
phrases like “Buck up, lil’ camper,” but depression isn’t a good listener, and the way she couldn’t just “get over it” made her feel like even more of an abject loss. Pretty soon she was on leave from work, poking around home with an unemployed husband who clearly thought she should just pull herself together, being treated for her illness and trying really hard to just put one foot in front of the other. It was at the darkest time that, in a moment of prescience that makes perfect sense to me but was an enormous leap for Rachel, she got online and ordered a huge afghan pattern and an outstanding twenty-six balls of yarn to make it.

When I first heard about this, I thought the woman had just bought herself a one-way ticket to Make-It-Worse-If You-Can Land. The last thing I thought Rachel needed was a huge undertaking. The last thing. People who feel hopeless, I thought, should be making mittens or hats or things that were done quickly so that they could get a sense of movement. An afghan the size of a small island? I wasn’t so sure.

Rachel was, or maybe she wasn’t, but when all those balls of double-knitting wool showed up, she got out her 3.75-mm needles and cast on. The pattern started with a smallish square of garter stitch, just about a foot across. When you had that done, you knit another square that attached to that one, then an even larger rectangle that spanned both the squares. If you got that far, then a fourth even larger rectangle went on at right angles to the first one, and so on and so on, until the last immense shape was the full length of the entire afghan and a couple of
feet deep. Should you still have control of your faculties, or give a care about it in any way, you then picked up an enormous border around the entire thing and knit until you begged for mercy. Every stitch of the thing was a knit. No purls, no pattern, no amusements for the knitter at all. Just garter stitch forever, and ever, and ever.

I saw Rachel at the yarn shop on Wednesdays, when I came in for Knit Night. She would be sitting in her chair, garter stitch square on the needles, head down, working, working, working. She was, without a word of exaggeration, a creature possessed. A Buddhist monk who had been studying the art of sitting meditation for twenty-five years would look like a tragic victim of attention deficit disorder if you had compared his hours of mediation with Rachel’s involvement with that afghan. She made stitch after stitch after stitch. She knit.

It all looked a little nuts, but she was so fragile that we thought mentioning it to her didn’t seem right, and the truth was that she was a little nuts. As her friends, we were a little unsure how to handle it.

Little did we know, those of us watching Rachel slide deep into this blanket, that she wasn’t getting herself into something, she was getting out of it. Twenty-six balls of yarn was two miles of yarn. Imagine two miles being worked up one little stitch at a time. Each wrap around the needle used up, at best, a half inch of her yarn, meaning that she intended to knit, at a minimum, 228,346 stitches to finish the thing. It seemed to be a daunting
task, maybe almost impossible, but Rachel sat there, knitting and knitting at the speed of what she calls an arthritic tortoise on downers. (I’d defend her, but Rachel’s a good knitter, not a fast one.) Without knowing it, Rachel had done exactly the right thing. This project made perfect sense on the inside of her, no matter how counterintuitive it looked from the outside.

The project had to be big because what Rachel was working through was big. Really big. Completing a hat to give you confidence that someday you’ll be joyful again is like throwing peanuts at a rhinoceros bearing down on you in the savanna and thinking you can take it down. Coming back from her dark place was slow and arduous, and like the blanket, it was taking months, and in that way, it was a good match. There were days, Rachel will tell you now, that all she did was work on that blanket. Days that she got up and couldn’t face anything in the world at all. On those days she sat with that damned blanket, and she knit. Stitch after stitch, small accomplishment after small accomplishment. It didn’t seem like much, a few rows on a behemoth of a thing, but it did make a difference. It added up. No matter how slowly the blanket was getting done, it was getting done. The blanket was undeniably slow movement, but it was absolutely forward movement, and it was resonant for Rachel. Even if she didn’t feel better or look better, that blanket gave her the knowledge that it was possible to be better, a little at a time, even in the face of something that seemed surely insurmountable.

Months passed, and as they did, the squares got bigger. Not coincidentally, Rachel’s ability to handle bigger things got bigger, too. She started turning up at the yarn shop more often. She helped stock books. She bought coffee. She laughed more often. There were starting to be times when she didn’t just sit and knit like it was the only sure thing she could hold onto. Every day she worked on that blanket. Every day, she made some more forward movement. Progress was black and white while she was knitting. There was no way to be a failure. If she knit even one stitch, she was closer to done, and that was a grand and uplifting thing. Rachel knit on, and by the time she was picking up more than a thousand stitches around the edge of the ocean of garter stitch so she could knit even more garter stitch, I knew she was going to be all right. That much of an edge simply can’t be attempted without a certain faith in yourself and your abilities.

Rachel finished the blanket one day while I wasn’t there, and I’m sorry I missed the final moment. Legend has it that she sailed into the street outside the yarn shop with it furled out behind her like a cape and accosted another knitter in the road, just to share the glee. In what Rachel says is a remarkable coincidence, that day came at about the same time as she finally got the upper hand on depression. I’m not sure it’s a coincidence at all. I’m not suggesting that major depression can be treated with knitting alone, nor am I implying that making a king-size garter stitch blanket could stand in the place of the very good drugs
and therapy that Rachel also got, but I am saying this: I think she knit her way out of it. I think my funny, bright, vivacious, undeniably kind friend got a little lost. That the disease made her forget that if you get up in the morning and take care of your kid and are kind to yourself and your fellow humans, it’s not possible to be a failure. I think her standards were too high for herself, and I think she lost track of what it felt to move forward, to accomplish things, and to be competent, and I think that knitting two full and undeniable miles of garter stitch gave it right back to her. That’s what I think.