Free-Range Knitter (19 page)

Nowadays, I have what my younger self would think was an outrageous yarn budget. If the nineteen-year-old me bumped into the forty-year-old me, she would probably make fun of her. (I suppose
nineteen-year-olds mock forty-year-olds a fair bit anyway, but you see my point, I’m sure.) In my grown-up, got-a-job reality, I still can’t haul off and buy exactly what I want or as much as I want, and I still avoid making direct contact with cashmere at the yarn shop in case it weakens me, but mostly I can have what I want if I’m smart about the budget or save up for a while or something.

In these intervening years, I have learned some things about yarn. Not just that you get what you pay for, with some notable exceptions, but some things about perception. I’m a lot less likely to judge another knitter, whether they are using crap or cashmere, and I’m a lot more likely to know that one knitter might not really be able to get the priorities of the other. I bet during the years I was really poor, more than one other knitter shook her head sadly at me when she saw me try to knit an heirloom baby blanket with plastic mill ends, and I bet there were plenty more who watched me unravel thrift store sweaters for the wool and couldn’t figure out why I didn’t just go and get a couple balls of $1 yarn and be done with it. (For that one, I point them to the blanket melting incident. Never again.) Other people have problems and priorities that we can’t understand, and I don’t even try to figure out why they think differently than me anymore. We are different, so we behave differently. That’s it.

Still, old troubles and traumas linger in my psyche, and I can’t always let go, and that shows up in a multitude of quirks. For example, to this day (and despite my “we are all different and like different things” mantra) if I see a knitter carrying a bag of
yellowy-white discount mill ends, my nostrils suddenly fill with the ghastly reek of melted baby blanket, and the urge to run full-tilt at her and body-check her flat out into a snowbank while hurling the bag like a landmine before she suffers a fate worse than bad knitting is almost more than I can bear. (I admit, this urge is sometimes tempered only by the fact that the knitter holding the bad yarn is a full-grown man twice my size. I’m occasionally evangelical about yarn, but I’m not stupid.)

Sometimes, though, when I see a young knitter, nestled among my friends in the yarn shop, a knitter who somehow reminds me of me at that age, a knitter who’s young and broke and expertly cabling an intricate sweater made of absolutely crappy yarn or constructing a baby blanket that could be nothing short of a personal legacy, were she not knitting it out of yarn that will be one of the only things that survives the apocalypse, sometimes I still want to rescue her. I want to go up to her and say, “You’re a fantastic knitter. I can see that. I can tell you’re destined for knitterly greatness, so please believe me when I tell you this: Your talent is not enough. You are not going to be able to rise above that yarn. You are going to be great, but that yarn is crap, and no amount of your formidable skill is going to change that.” And then, in this fantasy, I pull out a big bag of decent yarn from my stash, and I press it into her hands with a fervor, and I tell her, “Here. Take this. It’s not the best that there is, but it’s better than what you’re using by a lot. I’ve got a lot more, and I just want you to have this so that you can see what’s possible,” and in that crazy place in my
head, she doesn’t run screaming away from me, or look at me the way other people do when I love yarn more than society suggests is appropriate. No, no, in this daydream, she takes a little out of the bag and holds it in her hands, and turns it over, feeling the difference that a little money makes. Maybe she casts on, and as she does, her face fills with a light and a joy that tells me that she totally gets it, she totally understands that if you start with junk you end up with junk and that having this means that she’s not going to make junk anymore, even though she’s really talented. I lift a veil from her eyes … and it is good. Her talent and the better yarn are going to combine to make masterpieces.

I never do that, though. Not just because it would be odd, and odd people who press yarn into the hands of strangers are subject to all rules of society, and one of those rules just might end up with me dragged off the nervous knitter while screaming, “No! No! You don’t understand! Just touch it! Just touch it!!” No (although that is a compelling vision), I don’t give knitters like that good yarn, not until they have found out for themselves what a difference it can make, because I don’t want to be blamed. It turns out that in this culture, really, if you give someone just a little bit of something you say is delicious, expensive, and fantastic—something that you claim will solve their problems, will enlighten them, and might be entirely out of their reach, something you profess can transform their experiences and yet could cause an addiction that they cannot afford … people don’t call you helpful. They call you a pusher.

Yarn shops make me nervous.

Don’t get me wrong, I love them. I feel like I belong in them, and I almost always feel welcome in them. I find yarn-shop owners pretty universally kind, or if not kind, at the very least quite predictable. I’ve been in hundreds of shops, being the traveling knitter that I am, and I find it very reassuring that yarn shops are the same all over. Yarn, patterns, needles, hooks, and me giving them all my money.

That’s why they make me nervous. When I’m in a yarn shop, I know that I am vulnerable. Weakened. I don’t know whether it’s just the logical negative consequence of being surrounded by that much of your favorite stuff, I don’t know whether it’s the giddiness induced by that much possibility in one place. I’ve even supposed that it could be a chemical reaction, that after this many years I’ve become sensitized to the wool fumes or the glue on ball bands, but I can tell you that every single minute
I’m in a yarn shop I know that I’m just one “here, feel this” away from a trunkload of alpaca, an empty bank account, and a dirty feeling. I have virtually no defenses against yarn, and so while I’m in there, I try not to let my guard down. I try to be aware of the subtle marketing ploys yarn shops use against me, things like placing little impulse items by the cash register, or putting the cashmere by the half-price sock yarn to lure you into its sphere of influence. I attempt to remain aware that the shop owner and employees are particularly dangerous. I love them, I feel welcome and cherished by them, but I also know that I am a vital part of their business plan, and a weak knitter like me might as well have a sign stapled to me that says, “I will give you all my grocery money if you show me the merino.”

Knowing that this is the reality, I try to keep my wits about me, and trying to maintain alertness only makes me more nervous. Once I’m alert I start worrying about being too defensive, and that leads straight to a concern that I’ll offend them by avoiding their ploys, and once I’m upset about trying not to offend the shop owner, I slide all the way to a little weird and jumpy. Once I know I’m being weird and jumpy, I try not to be worried about that, and by then I’m so nervous that I do the only reasonable thing, which is to fold like a deck of cards, buy seventeen skeins of sock yarn, and get the hell out.

Now, I know that this is unreasonable, and I’m eternally grateful that yarn shop owners can’t seem to tell that I’m freaked out (or are at least pretending they don’t notice and have agreed
on a store policy that involves approaching me with some caution). I’d love to come to grips with my nature and learn to relax around wool for sale, but as long as it has the upper hand this way, I’m bound to make mistakes.

The fact that I am certain to make these mistakes compounds the problem, because I’ve never been the sort of person who knows how to recover from a mistake. I always know that there’s a simple way out of what’s gone wrong, but at the time it never seems like the right thing to do, or I don’t think of the simple, obvious solution until after I’ve gotten through it in some other, less graceful way, figuring out the perfect way my accidentally odd behavior should have been handled four hours later when I’m at home. I know that if a sweater kit gets the better of me and I enter the yarn-store shame spiral and find myself standing outside the shop in the cold hard light of day with a pattern for a sweater I’ll never knit and seventeen skeins of yarn in a color that, now that I have a little distance from the store, I suddenly understand will make me look both anemic and jaundiced, the simple thing to do, finding myself having fallen down that way, is to breathe a little fresh air and then go back in and say, “I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know what happened there. I got carried away and, darn it, I don’t want this, and I’d like to return it,” but I can’t. I worry I’ll look stupid or, because so much of my business life is wrapped up in knitting, that I might look unprofessional. (Somehow, I don’t worry that it looks sort of stupid that I just bought the ugly yarn she’s been
trying to unload for seven years.) I worry that they’ll take my moment of clarity the wrong way and that I’ll hurt their feelings or offend them by bringing them back their beloved yarn. In the absence of a truly safe course of action, I always do the same thing. I go home, put the yarn in the stash, and stare at it for nineteen years until I can’t stand it anymore and give it away. (Nobody said it was a good system. Just a system.)

Once when I was sixteen, I was late for school. (I was actually late fairly regularly, but I don’t know how many of my failings I’d like to reveal at once.) I’d turned out of my lane onto the larger street that led to the high school and started hoofing along. The street was deserted, except for far up ahead of me, where I saw my friend Julie walking. I called out to her and began to run. “Julie! Hey, Julie,” I shouted, but she was too far away to hear me. I picked up the pace and ran closer. “Julie!” I called, my legs beginning to burn from the run. I ran and shouted and ran and shouted, until I was really quite close and breathlessly exclaiming, “Julie (pant, pant)! Hey, Jules, wait up!” and in a horrible moment I’ve always remembered, as Julie turned around to see who was running after her and shouting her name, I realized … it wasn’t Julie. It was a total stranger, and entirely befuddled, just like at the yarn shop, I couldn’t figure out how one extracted oneself gracefully from this scene, and I had a sense that I was in too deep, so I solved it my way.

I kept running.

I ran right by that girl, still shouting “Julie, hey, Jules” at,
well, nobody, since there wasn’t a single other person in sight for miles. Once I’d made that decision, that split second when I didn’t know what do about my mistake, I felt that I’d missed the moment where I simply said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.” Once I was past her, still running and yelling, I couldn’t stop then. I kept right on running. I ran a couple of suburban blocks until Not-Julie couldn’t see me anymore, and then I collapsed gasping on the grass, thinking, “You idiot, you have got to learn to think faster.”

I’ve tried to find good ways out of bad mistakes ever since, but the lingering knowledge that I don’t really think fast when I’ve made a mistake has stayed with me, and it only makes me more nervous when I’m in a situation where I might make a mistake, which only makes a mistake more likely, which in turn makes me more nervous. (It’s a terrible loop.)

Such was my mood in a yarn shop not too long ago. It was reasonably new, and I’d been in there only once before, and both times the place was empty. The charming owner was being very welcoming and clearly wanted my financial support, and I liked her a lot and wanted to support her endeavor. Since the best thing you can do to please and support a yarn-shop owner is to buy yarn, I had been perusing the store for a while, trying to find something I wanted. I was there with my yarn budget for the month, determined to spend it, and I was getting increasingly nervous. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by not buying something, but what she had really wasn’t to my taste. Once I got nervous and
started worrying, my fate was sealed. I felt the familiar fear, and I know I don’t think well under those circumstances, so I decided to try and get out before I attempted to explain how surprised I was that she had achieved the near miracle of buying an entire inventory of yarn that I hated, so I grabbed the only thing I almost liked in the whole shop and went to the cash register, doing what I always did when I was up against the wall. Me and the yarn, forking over a credit card, feeling some relief about how well I was doing. I hadn’t done anything strange or said anything strange, I hadn’t accidentally insulted her, and as far as I knew I didn’t have toilet paper stuck to my shoe. I was thinking it was all coming off so well that I was actually starting to think there was no reason to be nervous, when it all came crashing down.

The owner asked for my name, and I gave it to her. She typed it into her shop computer, and since I’d been in there once before, my customer profile came up on the screen facing her. As the owner looked from the screen to the yarn, then back to the screen again, it all started coming back to me.

“Oh,” the owner said, looking unexpectedly nervous herself, “funny you’re buying this kit. Didn’t you buy it the last time you were in?” And I knew it was true. Damn it. I was caught in the headlights again. If she’d just said, “Hey, you already bought this,” if it had been stated as a fact, then maybe I would have done the right thing. Maybe then I would have looked at her and said, “Oh, silly me,” and gotten away, but she didn’t. She
had asked me whether I had it (even though she could see right on that screen that I did), and somehow, just like always, I inexplicably couldn’t face up to it. I couldn’t open my mouth and say it. I should have said, “Oh, yeah, I did, but I love it so much that I wanted a second one.” That would have been fine. Perfectly acceptable. She would have been complimented, I could have still given her the money. It was elegant and perfect, and somehow none of those possibilities occurred to me. Instead I looked right at her, set my feet squarely, and said, “Nope.”

A confused expression flickered on her face; she glanced back at that screen and said, “Are you sure? If you have a big stash….”