Things I Learned From Knitting (13 page)

• Both marriage and knitting, as Samuel Johnson said (though he wasn't speaking of knitting), are “the triumph of hope over experience.”

I CAN UNDERSTAND THAT
we knitters can look a little greedy, what with our stashes overflowing and that way we behave at yarn sales, and I know that
generosity
is not the word that springs to mind when we observe the look on a knitter's face when she's asked to part with the last of her cashmere, but I have proof.

Wait for winter, then look around. See all those people wearing knitted things? Hand-knits everywhere: little children with mittens, babies with sweaters and blankets, scores of people wearing hand-knit socks, men with hats, mothers with shawls, teenagers loafing on the couch under enormous afghans. There are a lot of knitters in the world, but there's just no way that all of those people made their own stuff. (Especially not the babies. Humans who can't feed themselves lack the hand-eye coordination to be good
knitters). All those non-knitters got their garments somewhere, and because the number of people wearing hand-knits is far greater than the number of knitters, it only stands to reason that these knitters must be a very generous species.

There are many theories about what might make knitters so generous that one knitter can cover her entire immediate circle with toasty warm evidence within a season or two. One suggestion is that you don't have to knit very long to understand the special warmth and loveliness of a knitted thing, and that knitters want to share this fantastic feeling with others. Another idea has to do with knitting being a gift of time and love rather than wool, and that giving someone a hat is an expression of the time and warmth a knitter wants to share with another person. Some people think that knitting simply attracts those who are already generous and sweet, rather than converting them. (Having witnessed the dog-eat-dog mentality at a 50-percent-off yarn sale, I'm not sure I can get behind that one.)

I humbly propose another theory. Your average knitter, obsessed as we are with the art form,
is quickly going to begin producing far more in the way of warm things than are needed by even an arctic-bound knitter. Knitting breeds generosity, true … but perhaps only because knitters better get generous in a hurry to avoid burying ourselves in hand-knits. There are only so many scarves one knitter can use.

ONCE UPON A TIME
, a very nice knitter with a fair bit of experience decided to knit a sweater. She'd knit sweaters before. Despite some rather significant setbacks that she'd chosen to overlook (like the cardigan that didn't button in the front due to a misunderstanding about the size and location of her breasts, or the sweater with the very long arms resulting from a significant misread regarding the rate of decreases), the knitter had no qualms about beginning. For reasons to do with human hope and happiness, her past failure meant nothing to her.

She found a pattern she liked, found yarn she thought was excellent, conveniently forgot all the other projects she had underway, and launched into the sweater. She looked at the pattern and circled the instructions for her size. She read all the instructions and she even knit a swatch and,
after some trial and error, got accurate gauge, both row and stitch.

Following the pattern, she cast on for the back, and she knit as the pattern indicated. She practiced due diligence and was a good and careful knitter. Maybe that was why she ignored the sweater when it started to look a little short. After all, when you do everything right, you should be able to have faith. When she reached the armholes and found that the thing was definitely too short, she overlooked the fact again and placed the armholes anyway. She knit to the recommended length. Despite the fact that the sweater was screaming, “Too short, way too short!” she kept going.

When the time came to sew up the shoulders and start the sleeves, the knitter finally had to acknowledge the shortness. She took a minute and made sure the sweater was the length the pattern indicated. It was. That was enough acknowledgment. She pressed on. She knit the sleeves carefully (thinking it was sort of funny that they were that much longer than the sweater body), but the whole time, some part of her, the
hopeful part, did not suggest that she try on the sweater. Instead, it allowed her to check the pattern and suggested she re-measure the sweater to see if it matched the instructions. This rosy, sunny place inside her knitter's heart did not want her to try it on. That would have shattered the illusion that everything was perfect. The sweater was beautiful — beyond beautiful — and the knitter did not allow her suspicion that the thing was too freaking small to bloom. No way.

She finished the sleeves; she sewed the beast up. Then, she tried it on, and inevitably, with a sinking and shattered heart, she discovered that it was too short. She was absolutely shocked.

This is a peculiar trait of knitters. Whether knitting attracts people who are unusually optimistic or whether knitters are just plain delusional I don't know, but every knitter has demonstrated a version of this behavior. You know a piece of knitting is wrong, but you don't stop knitting. You see that the sleeve is too long, that the stitch is blue instead of red, that the yarn-over is in the wrong spot in your lace. You make a hat that will cover head and shoulders
when finished or a sweater that will be short enough to display a middle-aged belly button to the world. You knit on, even when you see that you're creating a sweater with a neckline that accidentally plunges so low that Cher would feel risqué.

There are so many pieces of knitting that a knitter knows are wrong, knows are plainly unacceptable, even knows deep in her heart, are entirely unwearable. Yet you keep right on knitting. I don't know if it's denial, I don't know if it's optimism, and I certainly don't know if it's fantasy, but it proves that with knitters, hope always springs eternal.

SOMETIMES, IF I AM
having a very, very bad day and much of humanity vexes me entirely, one of the only things that keeps me on the straight and narrow in this life is the knowledge that not all prisons have a knitting program.

THE CULTURE OF KNIT IS RIFE
with the stories of knitters helping one another. In fact, knitterly kindness is almost endemic.

It is not at all uncommon for a knitter (say, in Connecticut) who has run out of a discontinued yarn close to the end of a sweater to post a desperate request on an Internet mailing list asking if anyone can help her find a little bit more so she can finish. Once they read her plea, knitters worldwide will immediately implement an international stash search for the stuff in question, combing shops and closets far and wide. When the needed yarn is found in a stash in Germany, the knitter who locates it may happily mail the skein to the desperate knitter in Connecticut, often with absolutely no mention of compensation for the wool, time, or even postage.

I've known knitters to spend hours rescuing a knitter in technical trouble and to take the
time to mail a book or a lost pattern. I can't tell you how often I've seen bilingual knitters translate patterns into other languages, almost always asking nothing for their time but the satisfaction of another good work knit. It is remarkable, when you consider the “you can't get something for nothing” attitude prevalent in the world right now, to find an entire subculture of people who are so likely help each other this way. It's refreshing.

Probably, this generosity and kindness is driven by empathy and understanding. Who among us can't imagine the absolute horror of knitting a whole sweater only to fall 13 yards short of yarn at the end of a sleeve? Or the sinking feeling of being far from home, stash, and a local yarn shop with nothing but free time to knit when you realize you don't have the pattern with you? Who among us, knowing the pain that knit-trauma can cause, would not respond to their pleas and rescue who we can? Most of us feel that if the ability to save even one of our fellow knitters from her wooly pain exists within us, we'd be remiss in failing to make the attempt.

I have learned, from watching the thousands of kindnesses enacted by knitters around the world, that there is little a knitter will not do for her fellow human in wooly need. Knitters' hearts are huge, their stashes open, and their generosity unbridled. A knitter's love and compassion for her fellow knitter knows no bounds.

Except at a yarn sale, when the gracious and generous knitter who just went through her stash and volunteered the needed skein of purple merino to a desperate fellow knitter now body-checks you into the sock-yarn display because that hand-painted laceweight she likes is 50 percent off and it looked you might get there before her.

Knitting is still trying to teach me …