The middle of the street outside our flat has been sinking for several years. (The western half of San Francisco was sand dunes up until the 1920s; underneath it's still just sand.) SF public works shows up periodically, dumps another load of asphalt over it, which also proceeeds to sink. This week, we must have finally made the construction schedule. There's a crew and a flotilla of large equipment, performing construction archeology on layers of asphalt, concrete, brick, then sand.
Lunch time comes and they hit the Safeway across the street, so there's the all-Hispanic work crew down there sitting at the edge of the hole in the street. Lunch consists of cokes, spicy chicken wings, and sushi, while conversing in Spanish. They casually throw the chicken bones in the hole - it's going to be covered with concrete in an hour anyway. The Chinese ancestry mailman walks up the street, asks "what you guys do to street?" They answer back, he walks on. Immigrants from former Soviet states walk down the street to the Muni stop.
Is this a great country or what?
Showing posts with label Stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stories. Show all posts
Friday, May 11, 2012
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
My Unitarian Universalist Conversion Experience
Once upon a time in a younger universe my wife and I were in the long-distance dating phase. It was the first trip where I had flown to her city. On Saturday, she asked if I would be willing to go to church in the morning.
Church!? Huh!? She's cute, she's smart, but she has a religion thing? Deep breath. What kind of church? Unitarian. What kind of religion do you believe in? I think of myself as a kind of Christian.
OK, bring out my personal way-back machine. In my high school years I had what William James refers to as a Variety of Religious Experience. (And as a good nerd I promptly read James.) I interpreted this experience in a cultural context and got baptized. A nice civilized Methodist water-on-the-head baptism in my mother's church, after my girlfriend's Lutheran minister wisely refused me.
In college I discovered the group Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF.) IVCF was right up my alley. They had a an emphasis on careful reading of the Bible with analysis of the historical background and meaning of a passage, not just quoting Bible verses. I went on weekend retreats to learn to do Bible study and then lead a study group in my dorm room. I was a self-professed Jesus Freak.
But I never really got to the point of "witnessing" and attempting to "bring someone to Jesus." The pull to me was that the Jesus I was studying in the New Testament was not the insipid twit of my childhood surrounded by lambs and lions with a sickly sweet smile. This Jesus talked about justice and tough commandments to love everyone. And in a slap to the moralizing modern Christians, his very first miracle was turning water into wine at a wedding when Mom tells him the drinks are running out; and the wine was so good that everyone noted how odd the host was for holding back the good stuff until the end of the party. Great moral teacher, cool miracles.
While IVCF emphasized the reading of scriptural texts, we all knew the answers in the back of the book. Jesus might be clever, tough, loving, and critical, but we all knew he was part of the Trinity, was born of a Virgin, and rose from the dead. Just like good Marxists, analysis was encouraged, but it all had to stay within the confines of overall correct doctrine.
As the years stretched into graduate school, the IVCF model didn't really provide anything for me, and I felt no need to attend any church. I reset to a vague mystical-atheist stance - I suggested that I thought that there might be some kind of Deity on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; I was comfortable with the Tao and Buddhism.
No.
Trinity?
No.
But those are standard Christian doctrine - if you say you're Christian, you have to believe in those.
Unitarians don't.
Pause. As a good liberally-educated nerd, I knew the name vaguely. I hadn't parsed it. Unitarians - I knew of Anti-Trinitarians. But that was a battle of centuries past. Wait a minute - you're a heretic! I thought they were all killed off a long time ago. Nope - we've got a whole church full. Some think of themselves as Christian, some Buddhist, some Pagan. The ministers refers to a fair amount of Buddhism in his sermons.
Hmm. This is a whole different kind of church. Heretics, that's OK. All right, I'll go to church with you.
* * * * *
More than fifteen years later I'm in still in that church. It's my community - the people who visit me in the hospital and bring over food to us when I come home.
My home church falls far short of its potential. The larger UUA movement is maddening and infuriating and possibly fatally flawed. But I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson who wrote "I rejoice that that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief … that there is not now a young man living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian." His forecast was off, but his position sound. Unitarian Universalism is my theological home - where else could I go when starting from a position of Reason as arbiter of belief?
Church!? Huh!? She's cute, she's smart, but she has a religion thing? Deep breath. What kind of church? Unitarian. What kind of religion do you believe in? I think of myself as a kind of Christian.
OK, bring out my personal way-back machine. In my high school years I had what William James refers to as a Variety of Religious Experience. (And as a good nerd I promptly read James.) I interpreted this experience in a cultural context and got baptized. A nice civilized Methodist water-on-the-head baptism in my mother's church, after my girlfriend's Lutheran minister wisely refused me.
In college I discovered the group Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF.) IVCF was right up my alley. They had a an emphasis on careful reading of the Bible with analysis of the historical background and meaning of a passage, not just quoting Bible verses. I went on weekend retreats to learn to do Bible study and then lead a study group in my dorm room. I was a self-professed Jesus Freak.
But I never really got to the point of "witnessing" and attempting to "bring someone to Jesus." The pull to me was that the Jesus I was studying in the New Testament was not the insipid twit of my childhood surrounded by lambs and lions with a sickly sweet smile. This Jesus talked about justice and tough commandments to love everyone. And in a slap to the moralizing modern Christians, his very first miracle was turning water into wine at a wedding when Mom tells him the drinks are running out; and the wine was so good that everyone noted how odd the host was for holding back the good stuff until the end of the party. Great moral teacher, cool miracles.
While IVCF emphasized the reading of scriptural texts, we all knew the answers in the back of the book. Jesus might be clever, tough, loving, and critical, but we all knew he was part of the Trinity, was born of a Virgin, and rose from the dead. Just like good Marxists, analysis was encouraged, but it all had to stay within the confines of overall correct doctrine.
As the years stretched into graduate school, the IVCF model didn't really provide anything for me, and I felt no need to attend any church. I reset to a vague mystical-atheist stance - I suggested that I thought that there might be some kind of Deity on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; I was comfortable with the Tao and Buddhism.
Pop out of my way-back machine. There I am sitting with Mary asking me if I'll go to church, and claiming to be some kind of Christian. From the very start, our relationship was always intellectually engaged. Let's see what the hell she's talking about. Take a deep breath and walk into this intellectual minefield.
Christian, huh? So do you believe in the Resurrection?
No.
Virgin birth?No.
Trinity?
No.
But those are standard Christian doctrine - if you say you're Christian, you have to believe in those.
Unitarians don't.
Pause. As a good liberally-educated nerd, I knew the name vaguely. I hadn't parsed it. Unitarians - I knew of Anti-Trinitarians. But that was a battle of centuries past. Wait a minute - you're a heretic! I thought they were all killed off a long time ago. Nope - we've got a whole church full. Some think of themselves as Christian, some Buddhist, some Pagan. The ministers refers to a fair amount of Buddhism in his sermons.
Hmm. This is a whole different kind of church. Heretics, that's OK. All right, I'll go to church with you.
* * * * *
More than fifteen years later I'm in still in that church. It's my community - the people who visit me in the hospital and bring over food to us when I come home.
My home church falls far short of its potential. The larger UUA movement is maddening and infuriating and possibly fatally flawed. But I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson who wrote "I rejoice that that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief … that there is not now a young man living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian." His forecast was off, but his position sound. Unitarian Universalism is my theological home - where else could I go when starting from a position of Reason as arbiter of belief?
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Anniversaries, Horses, and Seasons
Today is our 14th wedding anniversary. Once upon a time I did not think that I would see our ninth and certainly not our tenth. In July 2005 I was diagnosed with stage IV melanoma. Stage IV means the cancer has left the original site and moved into the rest of my body - gone metastatic. For melanoma at stage IV, the median survival time was quoted as seven to nine months. So far I'm at five and half years and counting.
It's been tough. I've done my time in hell. The first treatment was called bio-chemotherapy. First get a heart scan first to see if you're up to it. Then go into the intensive care unit for 5 days, receiving a cocktail of three different chemotherapy drugs and two immune-system drugs. Get really good at projectile vomiting. Come home and recover for two weeks; repeat six times total. Something like one third of the patients can't finish the full course. I finished all six.
That treatment worked, but the cancer came back. I did radiation; the cancer came back. I did another chemo drug; the cancer came back. I'm on a new wonder drug, which has made the cancer retreat, but it's still there, just smaller.
When I was first diagnosed as stage IV, I had several reactions.
One was how to think about the struggle with cancer. Melanoma is aggressive without any good treatments. So how do you mentally approach going through these treatment? There is a story I know, sometimes attributed to the Greek historian Herodotus, but also told by writer Idries Shah. Here is one version.
Another perspective comes from Ecclesiastes. It is worth reading the whole first three chapters; I include some here. Chapter 1 starts off in despair.
My wife says we don't just walk in the Valley of the Shadow of Death - we go camping there.
Some may talk about doing battle with the Angel of Death. Movie buffs might instead depict a person playing chess with with Death (or perhaps badminton.) But in the real world I think the best game to play with Death is hide and seek.
The horse hasn't learned to sing, but sometimes I think maybe I can hear him humming along with me.
It's been tough. I've done my time in hell. The first treatment was called bio-chemotherapy. First get a heart scan first to see if you're up to it. Then go into the intensive care unit for 5 days, receiving a cocktail of three different chemotherapy drugs and two immune-system drugs. Get really good at projectile vomiting. Come home and recover for two weeks; repeat six times total. Something like one third of the patients can't finish the full course. I finished all six.
That treatment worked, but the cancer came back. I did radiation; the cancer came back. I did another chemo drug; the cancer came back. I'm on a new wonder drug, which has made the cancer retreat, but it's still there, just smaller.
When I was first diagnosed as stage IV, I had several reactions.
One was how to think about the struggle with cancer. Melanoma is aggressive without any good treatments. So how do you mentally approach going through these treatment? There is a story I know, sometimes attributed to the Greek historian Herodotus, but also told by writer Idries Shah. Here is one version.
Once there was a thief who was to be executed. As he was taken away he made a bargain with the king: in one year he would teach the king's favorite horse to sing hymns. The other prisoners watched the thief singing to the horse and laughed.Another reaction is to look back on your life. What lessons or stories might you want to pass on to someone else? The first, and my favorite, story that I wrote is about my Grandmother teaching me to knit.
"You will not succeed," they told him. "No one can."
To which the thief replied, "I have a year, and who knows what might happen in that time. The king might die. The horse might die. I might die.
"Or, perhaps the horse will learn to sing."
Another perspective comes from Ecclesiastes. It is worth reading the whole first three chapters; I include some here. Chapter 1 starts off in despair.
The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem:In chapter 2, he tells how he turns to wisdom and folly, pleasure and toil. All are meaningless. But in chapter 3, the writer moves into a more philosophical vein:
“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”
What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun? ….
No one remembers the former generations,
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them.
There is a time for everything,So that's my combination: there is a time for everything; tell your stories; and maybe the horse will learn to sing.
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
My wife says we don't just walk in the Valley of the Shadow of Death - we go camping there.
Some may talk about doing battle with the Angel of Death. Movie buffs might instead depict a person playing chess with with Death (or perhaps badminton.) But in the real world I think the best game to play with Death is hide and seek.
The horse hasn't learned to sing, but sometimes I think maybe I can hear him humming along with me.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
The Recent Unpleasantness
A long time ago in a small religious institution far, far, away....
Dramatis Personae
LRC – the Liberal Religious Church
WCD - The Western Coast District of the LRC
NANCI - Chairman of the LRC National Board
SUE-ANN - former president of the WCD Board
GALINDA - Director for Congregational Control, LRC
ALICE - the District Executive of the WCD
WCD Board – the volunteer board of the Western Coast District of the LRC
LRMA - the Liberal Religious Ministers Association
JOHN CLEESE - special cameo appearance
Scene 1: (A Moderator Immoderate)
NANCI: presents standard LRC talking points about why the current districts are too complicated.
ATTENDEE: But the regions are weird. How can we have a single region for everything west of the Mississippi? How would we travel to district events?
NANCI: That's not an official map. There is no official plan.
ATTENDEE: Your talking points are very general. What specifics will this address? How will it work?
NANCI: Look at this complicated organization chart. This is what we have to deal with.
ATTENDEE: That's just a chart of the LRC. The districts are just a little corner on it. That diagram is not an argument. It's deliberate obfuscation.
NANCI (haranguing): The current system is too complicated. You're all just standing in the way.
ATTENDEE (a person of age, member of the LRC for 30 years)(plaintive): But what's broken about our district?
NANCI: You're just being selfish!
(pause - all are taken aback)
SUE-ANN (appeasing): We were at the meeting of the Board Presidents, and we, like, just had this epiphany - why do we need Districts?
WCD BOARD MEMBERS: Huh? We've all been talking at our board meetings about how we were not in favor of regionalization, you included!
(Exeunt NANCI, SUE-ANN, most of the attendees)
Some of THE WCD BOARD: What's up with Sue-Ann? She's been telling us that she was presenting our views against regionalization. Should one of us run for board president?
SEVERAL: It's not really what I want to do, but we need someone to represent our views to the LRC. I guess I could run.
ALL: OK, one of us will have to take it on.
ALL: Sue-Ann, you don't have to leave the Board!
SUE-ANN: No, I'm quitting, but not until after General Assembly.
Scene 2 (She's a witch!)
Scene 2 (The dog that didn't bark in the night)
Scene 3 (John Rawls rolls over in his grave)
Scene 1
(Email and phone)
SPOUSE: Oh nothing, just my blog.
BOARD MEMBER: That's nice, dear.
A Tragedy in Four Acts
Dramatis Personae
LRC – the Liberal Religious Church
WCD - The Western Coast District of the LRC
NANCI - Chairman of the LRC National Board
SUE-ANN - former president of the WCD Board
GALINDA - Director for Congregational Control, LRC
ALICE - the District Executive of the WCD
WCD Board – the volunteer board of the Western Coast District of the LRC
LRMA - the Liberal Religious Ministers Association
JOHN CLEESE - special cameo appearance
Act I (The Bad Beginning)
Scene 1: (A Moderator Immoderate)
WCD 2010 District Assembly, a meeting on Regionalization
NANCI: presents standard LRC talking points about why the current districts are too complicated.
ATTENDEE: But the regions are weird. How can we have a single region for everything west of the Mississippi? How would we travel to district events?
NANCI: That's not an official map. There is no official plan.
ATTENDEE: Your talking points are very general. What specifics will this address? How will it work?
NANCI: Look at this complicated organization chart. This is what we have to deal with.
ATTENDEE: That's just a chart of the LRC. The districts are just a little corner on it. That diagram is not an argument. It's deliberate obfuscation.
NANCI (haranguing): The current system is too complicated. You're all just standing in the way.
ATTENDEE (a person of age, member of the LRC for 30 years)(plaintive): But what's broken about our district?
NANCI: You're just being selfish!
(pause - all are taken aback)
SUE-ANN (appeasing): We were at the meeting of the Board Presidents, and we, like, just had this epiphany - why do we need Districts?
WCD BOARD MEMBERS: Huh? We've all been talking at our board meetings about how we were not in favor of regionalization, you included!
(Exeunt NANCI, SUE-ANN, most of the attendees)
Some of THE WCD BOARD: What's up with Sue-Ann? She's been telling us that she was presenting our views against regionalization. Should one of us run for board president?
SEVERAL: It's not really what I want to do, but we need someone to represent our views to the LRC. I guess I could run.
ALL: OK, one of us will have to take it on.
Scene 2 (I'll take my marbles and go home)
Some days after District Assembly
SUE-ANN: If I can't be president, I'll resign from the Board. ALL: Sue-Ann, you don't have to leave the Board!
SUE-ANN: No, I'm quitting, but not until after General Assembly.
Scene 3 (After General Assembly)
SUE-ANN: Messenger, send this to Alice, the WCD Board, and the LRC. I have heard from anonymous sources that Alice has been defaming me. She has to stop or I will sue her. Scene 4 (WCD Board Meeting)
Moderator: Next item of business, we have this letter from Sue-Ann.
ALL: WTF?
Member 1: That's just a parting shot from Sue-Ann. Nothing will come of it.
Member 2: I wonder...
(Fade to dark, then curtain comes down)
Act II (The LRC Strikes Back)
Scene 1 (There's a new sheriff in town)
LRC High Command
GALINDA (alone, in her office): The WCD Board members are puppets of Alice. She's been putting them up to this opposition to regionalization. And there was that business with the Dead Elm congregation. But now I have this letter from Sue-Ann. I can use that to start an investigation. Harold was too easy on them - I can get this done right. I'll show them what a Texas girl with a degree from Harvard University can do. I'll get the ministers to do the work - I'll just ask them for things they don't like about her. The group dynamics will be great - once you get it started, everyone just piles on.
Scene 2 (She's a witch!)
WCD LRMA Retreat
(The curtain rises on a dimly lit stage with gauze in front. 45 ministers are on stage, some in front and most behind in a chorus. We cannot make out their features.)
VOICE 1: I have a request from Galinda asking for all the bad things that you have to say about Alice.
VOICE 2: She made a comment a few years ago that I thought was disrespectful of ministers. I've never gotten over it.
VOICE 3: She questioned whether I should vote on a grant making committee that gave money to my church. How dare she question the integrity of a minister!
VOICE 4: She expressed a different opinion from me in front of MY congregation.
VOICE 4: She expressed a different opinion from me in front of MY congregation.
JOHN CLEESE: She turned me into a newt!
ALL: You don't look like a newt!
CLEESE: I got better.
ALL: Right. We'll leave that bit out.
CHORUS: We like her, and she has helped us. But your stories are compelling and we feel your pain, so we will stand in solidarity with our fellow ministers.
(They vote)
VOICE 1: So the vote is 40 to 0, with 5 abstaining. We will send a letter to the WCD that we do not trust her and she should be fired. Two of us will hand-deliver the message to Alice.
(exeunt Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with the letter.)
(exeunt Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with the letter.)
VOICE 2: And remember the code of omerta - no one can speak of the contents of these proceedings.
VOICE 3: Omerta is such an ugly word. What about covenant?
(Ministers disappear off stage. As they leave, a new minister appears)
MINISTER: What about compassion?
VOICE 1: You weren't here. We have voted. 'Twere well it were done quickly.
(Stage to black)
Act III (What a mess!)
Scene 1
(WCD Board Meeting)
(WCD Board Meeting)
PRESIDENT: We have a letter from the ministers telling us to fire Alice.
BOARD: For what!?
PRESIDENT: They don't say. They just say they don't trust her, and want us to fire her.
BOARD: We can't just fire her for without a reason. We have to talk to them, to find out what has made them so upset. We can arrange a special meeting and see how many will come in on a single day, and then we can talk to the rest later.
Scene 2 (The dog that didn't bark in the night)
(Board meets with some Ministers one by one)
BOARD: What is your experience with Alice?
EACH MINISTER: (Tells their story)
(at the end of one interview)
MEMBER: Is there no way to reconcile? Doesn't our Liberversalist heritage does hold up salvation for all?
MINISTER: Only in the afterlife. And we don't believe in that any more.
(Exeunt ministers)
(at the end of one interview)
MEMBER: Is there no way to reconcile? Doesn't our Liberversalist heritage does hold up salvation for all?
MINISTER: Only in the afterlife. And we don't believe in that any more.
(Exeunt ministers)
ALL: That was really weird. There was nothing there that rose to the level of firing Alice.
BOARD (various, speaking)
- A lot of that was tragic misunderstandings and differences in communication styles.
- Some of it was petty issues from years ago. A minister is supposed to be more grown up.
- A few items were upsetting - we need to hear Alice's side of the story.
- Harold came out a year ago to deal with some of that. It was supposed to be settled.
- Some of those were issues left over from before the time Alice was hired. And some of it just wasn't true.
- And to think I used to respect that minister....
MEMBER: There was a minister on the the board with us for the whole eight years that Alice has been working for the WCD. Why didn't they ever say anything?
BOARD (various, speaking)
- A lot of that was tragic misunderstandings and differences in communication styles.
- Some of it was petty issues from years ago. A minister is supposed to be more grown up.
- A few items were upsetting - we need to hear Alice's side of the story.
- Harold came out a year ago to deal with some of that. It was supposed to be settled.
- Some of those were issues left over from before the time Alice was hired. And some of it just wasn't true.
- And to think I used to respect that minister....
MEMBER: There was a minister on the the board with us for the whole eight years that Alice has been working for the WCD. Why didn't they ever say anything?
Scene 3 (John Rawls rolls over in his grave)
BOARD MEMBER: If Alice had been a minister, the LRMA rules allow her to hear the complaints, face her accusers, and defend herself.
MINISTER: But she's not a minister.
BOARD MEMBER: But that's a double standard!
MINISTER: I don't understand your point - she's not a minister.
Scene 4
(Email and phone)
GALINDA: We'll define an 8 week plan for Alice to fix the issues. (aside) And THEN we'll fire her.
WCD BOARD: No, we need a process to talk to the ministers and understand the complaints.
WCD BOARD sends a letter to LRC asking for the LRC to respect their timetable and process for finding truth by talking to the ministers, and also sends a copy of this letter to LRMA.
WCD BOARD sends a letter to LRC asking for the LRC to respect their timetable and process for finding truth by talking to the ministers, and also sends a copy of this letter to LRMA.
Act IV (Off with her head!)
Scene 1
(Email and phone)
GALINDA: This has gone on long enough.
WCD BOARD: But you never even started the plan!
GALINDA: Enough is enough.
WCD BOARD sends a letter to the LRC trustees appealing for the WCD process to be respected
WCD BOARD sends a letter to the LRMA congregational ministers asking for the ministers to stop the LRC.
GALINDA: Alice, sign this letter of resignation or you will be fired on 1/31.
ALICE: Signs letter.
WCD BOARD: Sends out message announcing Alice's unilateral termination by the LRC.
Scene 2
(In a living room, two people with laptops)
BOARD MEMBER: What are you working on?SPOUSE: Oh nothing, just my blog.
BOARD MEMBER: That's nice, dear.
(Curtain)
(FINIS)
(FINIS)
(With apologies to Monty Python, Shakespeare, and The Anti-Racism Trainings by David Reich)
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Clams
Every family has their own traditions, and habits. They range from the mundane – which car window does each kid sit by, who eats mustard and who eats ketchup – to seasonal rituals, and particularly holiday rituals – do you open Christmas presents on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning, and what are the traditional holiday meals? These traditions develop over the years, and seem unremarkable within the family circle because that's the way that it is always done. When I met Mary and took her to Tillamook for our first Christmas with my family, she was confronted with our unusual traditional Christmas Eve dinner of clam chowder and hot dogs. The roots of this tradition lay thirty years earlier in my childhood.
My family, my parents, and three grandparents grew up in Tillamook County, Oregon. Tillamook Bay is the second largest bay on the Oregon coast, about six miles long and several miles across. It is fed by five rivers and surrounded by the great forests of the Coast Range. During the early part of the twentieth century, this was a major logging area.
But in 1933, a great forest fire known as the Tillamook Burn destroyed a huge area of the forest. It was the largest single forest fire in North America until the horrible western fires of 2002. But the 1933 wasn't alone. More fires happened on a six year cycle in 1939, 1945, and 1951, feeding on the downed trees and also burning additional acres.
One result of all these forest fires was that a large amount of mud and silt was carried from the hills into Tillamook Bay. At low tides, the mud becomes exposed as great expanses of tide flats. This is not a smooth bed of mud - it has features that become exposed as the tide falls. Some areas are sticky mud, others are relatively sandy. From high tide to low tide, the water in the Bay falls almost twelve feet. There are intricate networks of channels carved by the water as it flows out of the bay twice each day. The larger channels can be as large as four feet deep and tens of feet across, filled with rushing water escaping the bay. Imagine a badlands landscape lurking underneath the flat surface of the full bay at high tide.
The sandier sections of the bay bottom are home to a kind of clam called a cockle. They are good in clam chowder. Like other fishing and hunting activities, the state sets a limit on how many cockles you can take. When I was little, the limit was 36 cockles per "hunter" per day. So sometime around the age of six, my brother and I became assistant cockle hunters.
The areas where the cockles live are not necessarily nearest the shore of the bay. (Or if they were, someone else probably cleaned out those easy pickings long ago.) So we had to walk quite a ways out on the tidal flats to get to the clam beds. The best way to allow enough time to walk out, find clams, and walk back before the tide comes back in is to go clamming at an extra low tide. Extra low tides happen during a full or new moon, and the low tide itself is when the sun and moon are on the horizon - either dawn or dusk. Dusk is not an option - it would leave us out in the bay after the sun went down. So going clamming meant getting up in the dark, well before dawn, so that we could be at the tide flats and walk out on the bay as the tide was still falling toward its lowest point.
Clamming trips happened mostly on Saturday mornings. School days were not an option, because we would have arrived back home too late to go to school, and Dad had to go to work. But there must been have times when Sunday had a lower tide than Saturday, so I think we occasionally got to skip church in order to go clamming.
As a six year old, getting up before dawn was a tough sell. It was certainly not clear why we had to get up in the dark, put on barn boots, and drive to the bay. When we arrived at the bay, we drove out on a jetty that had two split-level single lane roads. The lower road, on the side of the jetty, was outbound, and the road on top of the jetty was the return direction. When I was six, I was always concerned about what would happen if we encountered a driver that didn't understand the directional system – there was no room to pass. (This was before I understood things like "one-way" signs.) Once parked, we walked a half hour or more out over a cold, foggy, muddy bay bottom, carrying cockle rakes and buckets. The route was not straight - we had to skirt or wade the various channels of water draining the bay. Some of these were fun to splash across; some of them Dad had to help us or carry us; some were so big that we had to go upstream to find a crossing. The mud was horrible. You have to learn to walk with your feet well apart. Each foot gathers a large clump of sticky mud. If your feet brush against each other, the clump of mud spreads a little higher on each boot as you walk, until eventually, the entire inside of your legs are smeared with mud, up past your boots and onto your jeans. There is a never-ending new supply of mud on your boots, so more and more mud climbs up your legs. In the early years, I always arrived home a muddy mess. Adding to my discomfort, the rich ecosystem of the tidal flats has a strong fishy smell.
Cockles are not wily prey. They live a few inches under the sand. You rake the sand with a cockle rake - a three or four prong rake with very long teeth. When you hear or feel a click, you have hit either a buried rock or a cockle. Luckily for cockle hunters, cockles do not have an advanced escape behavior. When you click against them, they "clam up" - they close their shell tightly and hope you go away. Against most predators, this works. In the case of the cockle hunter, you just make a deeper stroke over the same area where you heard the click, and up comes a cockle. Or a rock.
To be within the letter of the law, we had to carry our cockles in our own bucket, our own cockle rake, and dig up the cockles ourselves. When we very young, Dad would find likely areas, possibly even getting a click, then we would dig them up. By later grade school years, we got the hang of finding them ourselves. The clams have a little feeder hole running to the surface, and sometimes they will squirt as you are walking above them. You also eventually develop a feel for what patches of mud and feeder tubes are going to yield a clam. Travel also got faster, because we could wade the same channels as Dad and not take as many detours, and I eventually got the hang of walking with my feet apart so that I just had the muddy clump on my feet and not all the way up my legs. Later my sister joined us as another clam gatherer, and we could share the job of helping her over the deep spots. As I reached teenage years, I also grew to appreciate the sight of the sun rising over the tree covered mountains surrounding the miles of wide bay and tidal flats, often to then disappear into the layer of coast overcast. (Although I did not appreciate it enough to turn me into a morning person - I may have seen as many dawns from staying up late as from getting up early.)
We gathered clams for a couple of hours, depending on when we had arrived and when the tide began to turn. The return trip was a much heavier load. Large cockles can be four or five inches across, about as big as a fist, so a bucket of thirty-six became quite heavy. The return route might be easier if the channels has emptied more water since the time we went out; but depending on when we arrived compared to the low tide, water might be starting back in and we would have to choose a different route.
Once we got home, the next phase began. We had a large copper kettle that we filled with water, dumped in the clams, and built a fire under. As the water heated, the clams would begin to open. This would allow Dad to pry them open with a stout knife and cut the clam away from the shell. In my teenage years, I also took on this task. You have to be careful - prying open a clam with a sharp knife requires just the right pressure and direction, or you wind up cutting yourself instead of the clam.
Once the clams were out of the shell, they became Mom's domain, for making clam chowder. Clam chowder was a Sunday evening meal. Mom, Dad and Grandma liked clam chowder. We kids didn't. It's a dish that takes some time to prepare. I thought of it as a long, smelly process. It began with frying chopped bacon, adding chopped onions when the bacon was partly cooked, and cooking until the bacon was crispy. As a kid, I hated the smell of frying onions in bacon fat. (Telling it now, it sounds pretty good.) The bacon and onions were added to a big pot with the clams, water, diced potatoes and seasoning, and the whole thing placed on low heat for a long while, adding condensed milk near the end. Clams have a somewhat fishy, gamy smell, which just added to my olfactory distress.
So at Sunday dinner, this was a meal for Mom, Dad, and Grandma. But in the interest of learning new foods, we were each required to eat a token amount of chowder on the bottom of our soup bowl. We hid the clam taste by adding an equal volume of saltine crackers. We discovered that if you place an unbroken cracker in the thin layer of chowder, it will slowly expand to almost double its original size as it slowly absorbs the liquid. Once we had finished playing with crackers and eating our chowder, we were allowed to have one of our favorite foods: hot dogs. The net result was that we actually looked forward to clam chowder days, because once we got past the chowder, we could have hot dogs.
Many of the clams were frozen for later in the year. Besides Sunday dinner, clam chowder was also the traditional meal on Christmas Eve, accompanied by fried oysters (also from Tillamook Bay.) This meant there were also the requisite hot dogs. As we kids got older, we all acquired the taste for clam chowder; but the hot dog chaser never went away. It just seemed obvious that chowder went with hot dogs. And it remained that way thirty years later when I took Mary home for Christmas.
-- Tom Wilson, San Francisco, 9/11/2005
Zen Knitting-Master Grandma
My grandmother taught me to knit. And a way of thinking about doing things. But it's a round-about story.
Grandma lived in Bay City, where my mother had grown up, a long 9 miles from our house. Every week we went to the little Methodist church in Bay City, brought Grandma back to our house, and Dad drove her home in the evening after dinner. Grandma sat in her big comfy chair at our house and knitted.
In fifth grade in Tillamook, all the kids in grade school automatically belonged to 4-H. Each 4-H member chooses a project for the year. The project consists of something that you will produce, a budget, a work plan, a review after you have completed it, and finally submitting the project for judging at the County Fair. I forget what my project was for the fifth grade. For some kids the project was obvious because they lived on farms, and their project was raising a calf to be shown at the Fair - and such a project was a tradition that they all knew from siblings and cousins. My family was rural but not farmers, so raising an animal wasn't as easy an option for me. (We did raise and have butchered three beef cattle during the time I grew up - but that was a once every few years event.)
So ignore my fifth grade project. The crucial part for me was at the end of the year. We all went to a week-long 4-H camp - my first time away from home. We lived in cabins amongst dunes at the beach, ate in a mess hall, went to classes in the morning about trees, plants, and crafts, and in the afternoon signed up for activities of our choice. The activities were the high point for me.
Rowing boats on a lake - my first time in a rowboat, and none of us were very efficient at it. But we charged around the lake, and discovered that the coffee cans intended for bailing out water were also very efficient water cannons for flinging water at other boaters.
And the swing ride around the tall tree. On the side of a ridge, the camp had cut all the branches from a large spruce for the first seventy feet, and attached a cable to a high limb. At the end of the cable was a rope loop, which a camp counselor carefully attached as a sling around our torso and under our arms. Then we ran up a path along the ridge until the cable went tight, lifted us into the air, and we circled around the tree and landed again. Because the tree was on the side of a fairly steep ridge, during the middle of the ride we had a lot of empty air beneath our feet. It was especially a long way down to a to a fifth grader. Of course, once this maneuver had been completed, the cable was wrapped once around the tree. The counselors or selected big kids had the job of unwinding the cable by going in reverse. This was tougher because they landed on the path running downhill and had to stop by themselves. But they got lots of rides as result.
I was hooked. 4-H camp was the coolest thing ever - I wanted to row boats and ride the big swing, even if it meant putting up with crafts and classes about identifying trees, ferns, and mosses. But after fifth grade, you were on your own. 4-H wasn't offered via the school. You had to find your own 4-H leader and group, choose your own project, and carry it through yourself. What was I to do?
Well, my grandmother was a 4-H leader for knitting. I think she actually had three knitting groups at once - two of all girls, and a small group of boys. So she allowed me to join the boy's 4-H knitting group, with some special arrangements. Grandma's boys' knitting group was in Bay City, which was too far away to attend after school. (This was before the days of parents taxiing their children to all their many events.) So I couldn't attend the regular meetings of the group. Instead, we had our 4-H meetings each Sunday when she came to our house after church. She took this seriously. For one hour each Sunday afternoon (after I had already endured the boredom of Sunday School and the church service) I had to show her my progress for the week and knit while she knitted, observed me, and talked to my mother. For that hour, to me, she was not my grandmother; she was the 4-H leader. I sat beside her chair, and if my attention wandered, she would rap me on the top of the head with her thumb, which was armored with a heavy metal thimble.
Each stitch had to be correct. There are many ways to make an incorrect knitting stitch. Every stitch has to be picked up and transferred from the left needle to right needle. If you don't, the fabric will have a run all the way down the to start. Every stitch has to slide from the left needle to the right with the correct twist. This is difference between a knit and a purl, and one lies flat and the other poufs out. Do it wrong and you have the wrong pattern on the fabric. Every stitch has to be picked up without splitting the yarn in the needle. If you do this wrong, it's a split stitch and causes a weak spot in the fabric, because the yarn isn't completely interwoven. Every stitch has to pick up the same stitch in the same row, not from the row below, or you will have a pulled spot in the fabric. Every stitch has to have exactly the same tension as you pull it tight - otherwise the fabric will have tight and loose spots.
My grandmother did not allow incorrect stitches. None. Zero. Zip. She reviewed my work, and if there was a mistake, I had to rip out the rows back to the mistake and reknit it. Some errors can be fixed without ripping out the rows, if you have the knowledge and skill, so sometimes she would relent and fix those for me. Later I had to learn to fix even these myself, or rip out the rows back to the mistake.
You start by knitting potholders. Even badly done, a potholder has a certain sense of accomplishment. It is functional - it will insulate the hand from when picking up a hot pan, it can sit under the pot as a hot pad, and even if it is truly misshapen, it can function as a dishrag. Of course, as with children's pottery coffee mugs, there is a limit to how many potholders a home really needs.
Fortunately, knitting clicked with me. (Pun not intended, but I'll take it.) I have an inclination for this attention to detail. (Other people have had other names for it.) I soon had perfectly square, tight, thick pot holders. We advanced to slippers. Some of these were submitted to the County Fair, and I got blue ribbons for them.
But more importantly, I got to go to 4-H camp again! This time, there were fewer kids, because it was not the entire sixth grade, but just those who had continued on in 4-H. So it also drew kids from other school districts - I met the other boys in my phantom Sunday knitting group. And there were more chances for rowing boats, and shorter lines on the big swing.
This 4-H camp was also different for me because the kids from other schools didn't have preconceived stereotypes of me. At my home school, I was the slowest runner, last picked for baseball (really), and first picked for spelling bees. But at 4-H camp, we were all unknowns to each other. It was great. At sixth grade 4-H camp, I even met a girl from another part of the county and had a huge grade school crush on her. I think her name was Martha. I don't think I ever saw her again.
I was hooked (on 4-H camp!) But there was a catch. Each year, the 4-H project had to be more complex. I could not just keep knitting potholders and slippers. I had to advance to sweaters. So for seventh grade, I had to make a sweater. And for each year of 4-H, the complexity of the sweater had to increase.
A sweater is a big step up from a slipper. There are only a few designs for a knitted slipper, and your teacher just gives you one and you make it. For a sweater, you have to first go through pattern books and find a pattern you like. Your teacher has to approve the pattern as being a step up but still within your potential for that year. If you're lucky, you find a pattern you like, and within your abilities, in one of the pattern books that your mother or grandmother already has. If that fails, you have to take the traumatic step (for a boy) of visiting a fabric store to browse the pattern books. Many of the patterns in my mother's and grandmother's books were beyond me, so I had to visit the fabric stores.
Once you choose a pattern, there is the question of what color and how much yarn to buy. You have to buy all the yarn for a sweater at the same time, because it all has to be from the same dye lot (color batch from the factory.) You cannot go back to the store later and get another skein or ball of yarn, because the colors don't match exactly between different dye lots. So you have to choose from the available colors that have enough skeins available for your pattern. Or you have to go to another store to see what they have.
In addition to all the knitting mistakes I listed above, a sweater also presents the problem of "gauge." Gauge is the number of stitches per inch and rows per inch. A knitting pattern is written to create a garment of a certain size, assuming that the knitter knits at a specific gauge. Potholder gauge doesn't matter much, because potholders can come in any approximate size. Slippers will stretch, or if too large, a fifth grader will grow into them in six months. But sweaters must have the right gauge.
To knit at a specific gauge, you have to knit at the same tension as the designer of the pattern. You have to maintain this tension consistently for the whole time you work on the garment. If you don't do this, your sweater will be the wrong size or be misshapen. Or you may run out of yarn - leading back to the dye lot problem; but the foresight solution to this is to always buy one extra skein. (You can always use the leftovers for slippers.)
So first you create a test swatch - using the size of needles specified in the pattern, about three inches by three inches. You measure this against the pattern gauge. If you are lucky, you match the gauge, rip out the test swatch, and start the sweater. If not, you change the size of needles you are using and try again to match the gauge. If you are very clever, you can knit at more than one tension, and you retry the test swatch at the same needle size and different tension. But this requires you use the same unnatural tension for the entire garment. I think my grandmother could do this - I can't. But I was lucky - I had natural "standard gauge" - my test swatches almost always matched the pattern. My mother was a little jealous - sometimes she had to change needle sizes.
Sweaters also have a pattern. Potholders are made by always doing knit stitches. Slippers can be done the same way, or by a combination of all knit and all purl. But the intricate patterns on sweaters require combinations of knit, purl, slip, twist, and so forth that vary with each row. So your mind and hands have to pay attention to each stitch in a more complicated fashion.
My seventh-grade sweater was solid sage green with three cables up the front. I finished it to my grandmother's satisfaction. Early that summer, there was again the pay-off of another week at 4-H camp.
At the end of summer came the Fair and a surprise. County Fair judging for knitting and sewing has two separate competitions. One is called "construction" - how well is the garment made. For potholders and slippers, this is the only category, and the one that that I had been competing in. But for more complicated garments, there is also the "style" competition. This has two phases. First you wear your garment in front of a panel of judges to see how well it fits. At the County Fair, these are usually a bunch of other knitting teachers also my grandmother's age who have you stand in front of them, turn, raise your arms, and examine you like a prize heifer. They also ask you some questions about how hard it was to make, how you like knitting, and so forth. This phase happens a day or so before the fair opens for the public. The second phase is truly terrifying: the style show. It happens during the Fair itself, and is attended by all the parents, dragged-along siblings, knitting teachers, and all the old knitting and sewing ladies of the town. You have to walk out a runway, do a 45 degree turn to one side of the audience, walk across the base of the runway, do another turn, and walk back, with perfect posture and smiling all the while.
My grandmother and mother had not told me until the Fair that I was also entered in the style competition. Seventh-grade boy me, and about 200 girls from seventh grade through seniors in high school. All in front of an audience of several hundred strangers.
So I spent an afternoon learning to walk, turn, and smile. And keeping my hair straight, and trying not to sweat. And smile. There was a practice session with all the contestants, so we could make sure we knew who we followed, and could keep the show on schedule. I was helped by the fact that my year-older cousin Sharon was also in the competition. She didn't count as a girl - she was just my cousin. So at least there was somebody there I could talk to.
Well, the sweater fit, and I smiled and turned, and won Reserve Champion in the junior high category. Which meant the next night I went out with the five other (girl) champions and reserve champions and be presented a large ribbon in front of the entire grandstand at the closing ceremonies of the Fair. It also meant that I went to the State Fair as a contestant from my county. So in late summer, Mom and Dad took me down to the State Fair and dropped me off to stay overnight for the competition. I didn't get any special prizes, but at least there was one other boy in the knitting competition. After we did the practice the first day, he and I spent all evening on carnival rides that the fair - which were a whole step up in excitement from the rides at the County Fair.
For eighth grade, I made the big step up to a ski sweater. A ski sweater has a multi-colored pattern. To do this, you knit each stitch with one of the colors, and carry the other color woven in the back of the garment. The extra thickness makes the sweater thicker, so that it would only be worn in very cold weather - hence a ski sweater. So now there is a colored pattern, that changes with each row, and two sets of yarn to keep track of and make sure they are interwoven so it the inside of the fabric is smooth. The pattern I chose was emerald green and white with a striking horizontal and diamond pattern over the entire sweater.
Everything went as usual, knitting on the sweater each evening during fall and winter. Come spring, I was all done. One afternoon, I was in the final stretch. I had sewed the seams on the sleeves, and was sewing up the side seams between the front and the back. Halfway up the back I found something horrifying. The front and the back patterns did not match up. At first, I thought that maybe I had just mis-sewn farther down and just mismatched the pieces. But I checked and the seam so far was correct. The reason for the mismatch was that I had skipped two rows in the pattern on the back of the sweater. The knitting above the missing two rows was about thirty or forty hours of work.
I looked at it for a couple of minutes, and then I called in my mother to confirm the mistake. There was really no discussion. We looked at the sweater lying on the floor for a few minutes, and then I tore out the half-finished side seams. We sat down and each of us took a color and started carefully ripping out the interwoven knitting on the back piece down to the point of the missing rows, carefully rewinding the yarn onto balls. My father came home during this process and saw the piece on the floor and asked what were doing. I explained about the missing two rows and how we had to tear it out. He said something like "I'm sure glad I don't knit."
So after we had torn it out, I reknitted the back correctly and sewed it together.
That summer, I didn't go to 4-H camp. As a pre-high schooler, I went to 4-H Summer School. 4-H Summer School was held on the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis. We had to apply and be accepted with an allotment per county. We stayed in the dormitories with a roommate, and ate in the cafeteria or the student union. In the mornings we selected classes to attend, a lot of them about college and career choices. In the afternoons we selected activities like swimming. We also had discussion groups to talk about a range of topics.
Girls weren't quite as scary as they were last summer at camp. I met one girl and we hung around with during the time, and on the next to the last night at summer school, I kissed a girl for the first time. It was about as awkward as you might expect. I think she had kissed a boy before.
The county fair came, with both the construction and style review competition. This year there were a couple more boys from my grandmother's knitting group in the style review, including my one-year-younger brother. I won Champion in my age class. At the completion ceremonies at the end of the fair, I once again went out to the review stand in front of the grandstand. They announced the winners in each category. There was one final award in the fashion competition - the Grand Champion across all age classes, both knitting and sewing, for both construction and style show. This award was a secret until the final ceremony, and usually went to one of the junior or senior high school girls for something like an evening gown. But that year I won the Grand Champion trophy. It came with a two-foot high trophy that had the each year's winner engraved on it, and stayed at our house until the next year. I don't think I have ever been more surprised by anything in my life. (Maybe equal, but not more.) I think the crowd was a little surprised also, with an eighth grade boy winning over the high school girls.
So I went to State Fair again. I remember the review judges from that year. At the State Fair, they were fashion professionals, not just the other knitting teachers. Oregon at that time had an active knitting-based industry - Jantzen, White Stag, and Pendleton were all Oregon-based. One of the three judges was a man, and he asked if I had ever considered a career in fashion. I didn't even know that there were such things as "careers in fashion", but I told him that I planned to become an astronomer or physicist. I think I won a blue ribbon at State Fair that year. And I think I met another girl at the style review - one boy to two hundred girls is pretty good odds, after all - and we went on a bunch of rides at the Fair.
I made more sweaters in freshman and sophomore years, which progressed to additional levels of complexity. One of them was a calf-length car-coat for which I had to cut, sew, and stitch in a cloth lining. But I also gained other interests in high school, especially speech and debate, which also offered frequent chances to go to other places and meet people. My other sweaters went to State Fair in construction and got blue ribbons, but I never placed as highly again in the style review. My sophomore year was my last year in 4-H and 4-H Summer School.
My grandmother was not well during her last few years. As a child and young adolescent, I wasn't aware of all the details, but I know she had breast cancer, diabetes, and heart problems probably related to being very overweight. In September of my senior year in high school, she was in the hospital in Tillamook. One evening my mother received a call from the hospital and she and I drove the three miles to Tillamook General - Dad was away from home that night. Another member of our church congregation had already arrived at the hospital. Mom went into grandmother's room, and came out a short while later. I don't know if grandma had died before we arrived or after but it doesn't really matter to my telling of the story. My mother came over to me and hugged me and cried on my shoulder. I drove home.
Grandmother's memorial service was one of the largest ever held at that church. I was just one of her many knitting students. Today I am a software architect. Programming is a lot like knitting, but that's a different story. I think I owe a lot of my success in software, and in life, to my grandmother.
And I still have the ski sweater.
-- Tom Wilson, San Francisco, July 12, 2005
Grandma lived in Bay City, where my mother had grown up, a long 9 miles from our house. Every week we went to the little Methodist church in Bay City, brought Grandma back to our house, and Dad drove her home in the evening after dinner. Grandma sat in her big comfy chair at our house and knitted.
In fifth grade in Tillamook, all the kids in grade school automatically belonged to 4-H. Each 4-H member chooses a project for the year. The project consists of something that you will produce, a budget, a work plan, a review after you have completed it, and finally submitting the project for judging at the County Fair. I forget what my project was for the fifth grade. For some kids the project was obvious because they lived on farms, and their project was raising a calf to be shown at the Fair - and such a project was a tradition that they all knew from siblings and cousins. My family was rural but not farmers, so raising an animal wasn't as easy an option for me. (We did raise and have butchered three beef cattle during the time I grew up - but that was a once every few years event.)
So ignore my fifth grade project. The crucial part for me was at the end of the year. We all went to a week-long 4-H camp - my first time away from home. We lived in cabins amongst dunes at the beach, ate in a mess hall, went to classes in the morning about trees, plants, and crafts, and in the afternoon signed up for activities of our choice. The activities were the high point for me.
Rowing boats on a lake - my first time in a rowboat, and none of us were very efficient at it. But we charged around the lake, and discovered that the coffee cans intended for bailing out water were also very efficient water cannons for flinging water at other boaters.
And the swing ride around the tall tree. On the side of a ridge, the camp had cut all the branches from a large spruce for the first seventy feet, and attached a cable to a high limb. At the end of the cable was a rope loop, which a camp counselor carefully attached as a sling around our torso and under our arms. Then we ran up a path along the ridge until the cable went tight, lifted us into the air, and we circled around the tree and landed again. Because the tree was on the side of a fairly steep ridge, during the middle of the ride we had a lot of empty air beneath our feet. It was especially a long way down to a to a fifth grader. Of course, once this maneuver had been completed, the cable was wrapped once around the tree. The counselors or selected big kids had the job of unwinding the cable by going in reverse. This was tougher because they landed on the path running downhill and had to stop by themselves. But they got lots of rides as result.
I was hooked. 4-H camp was the coolest thing ever - I wanted to row boats and ride the big swing, even if it meant putting up with crafts and classes about identifying trees, ferns, and mosses. But after fifth grade, you were on your own. 4-H wasn't offered via the school. You had to find your own 4-H leader and group, choose your own project, and carry it through yourself. What was I to do?
Well, my grandmother was a 4-H leader for knitting. I think she actually had three knitting groups at once - two of all girls, and a small group of boys. So she allowed me to join the boy's 4-H knitting group, with some special arrangements. Grandma's boys' knitting group was in Bay City, which was too far away to attend after school. (This was before the days of parents taxiing their children to all their many events.) So I couldn't attend the regular meetings of the group. Instead, we had our 4-H meetings each Sunday when she came to our house after church. She took this seriously. For one hour each Sunday afternoon (after I had already endured the boredom of Sunday School and the church service) I had to show her my progress for the week and knit while she knitted, observed me, and talked to my mother. For that hour, to me, she was not my grandmother; she was the 4-H leader. I sat beside her chair, and if my attention wandered, she would rap me on the top of the head with her thumb, which was armored with a heavy metal thimble.
Each stitch had to be correct. There are many ways to make an incorrect knitting stitch. Every stitch has to be picked up and transferred from the left needle to right needle. If you don't, the fabric will have a run all the way down the to start. Every stitch has to slide from the left needle to the right with the correct twist. This is difference between a knit and a purl, and one lies flat and the other poufs out. Do it wrong and you have the wrong pattern on the fabric. Every stitch has to be picked up without splitting the yarn in the needle. If you do this wrong, it's a split stitch and causes a weak spot in the fabric, because the yarn isn't completely interwoven. Every stitch has to pick up the same stitch in the same row, not from the row below, or you will have a pulled spot in the fabric. Every stitch has to have exactly the same tension as you pull it tight - otherwise the fabric will have tight and loose spots.
My grandmother did not allow incorrect stitches. None. Zero. Zip. She reviewed my work, and if there was a mistake, I had to rip out the rows back to the mistake and reknit it. Some errors can be fixed without ripping out the rows, if you have the knowledge and skill, so sometimes she would relent and fix those for me. Later I had to learn to fix even these myself, or rip out the rows back to the mistake.
You start by knitting potholders. Even badly done, a potholder has a certain sense of accomplishment. It is functional - it will insulate the hand from when picking up a hot pan, it can sit under the pot as a hot pad, and even if it is truly misshapen, it can function as a dishrag. Of course, as with children's pottery coffee mugs, there is a limit to how many potholders a home really needs.
Fortunately, knitting clicked with me. (Pun not intended, but I'll take it.) I have an inclination for this attention to detail. (Other people have had other names for it.) I soon had perfectly square, tight, thick pot holders. We advanced to slippers. Some of these were submitted to the County Fair, and I got blue ribbons for them.
But more importantly, I got to go to 4-H camp again! This time, there were fewer kids, because it was not the entire sixth grade, but just those who had continued on in 4-H. So it also drew kids from other school districts - I met the other boys in my phantom Sunday knitting group. And there were more chances for rowing boats, and shorter lines on the big swing.
This 4-H camp was also different for me because the kids from other schools didn't have preconceived stereotypes of me. At my home school, I was the slowest runner, last picked for baseball (really), and first picked for spelling bees. But at 4-H camp, we were all unknowns to each other. It was great. At sixth grade 4-H camp, I even met a girl from another part of the county and had a huge grade school crush on her. I think her name was Martha. I don't think I ever saw her again.
I was hooked (on 4-H camp!) But there was a catch. Each year, the 4-H project had to be more complex. I could not just keep knitting potholders and slippers. I had to advance to sweaters. So for seventh grade, I had to make a sweater. And for each year of 4-H, the complexity of the sweater had to increase.
A sweater is a big step up from a slipper. There are only a few designs for a knitted slipper, and your teacher just gives you one and you make it. For a sweater, you have to first go through pattern books and find a pattern you like. Your teacher has to approve the pattern as being a step up but still within your potential for that year. If you're lucky, you find a pattern you like, and within your abilities, in one of the pattern books that your mother or grandmother already has. If that fails, you have to take the traumatic step (for a boy) of visiting a fabric store to browse the pattern books. Many of the patterns in my mother's and grandmother's books were beyond me, so I had to visit the fabric stores.
Once you choose a pattern, there is the question of what color and how much yarn to buy. You have to buy all the yarn for a sweater at the same time, because it all has to be from the same dye lot (color batch from the factory.) You cannot go back to the store later and get another skein or ball of yarn, because the colors don't match exactly between different dye lots. So you have to choose from the available colors that have enough skeins available for your pattern. Or you have to go to another store to see what they have.
In addition to all the knitting mistakes I listed above, a sweater also presents the problem of "gauge." Gauge is the number of stitches per inch and rows per inch. A knitting pattern is written to create a garment of a certain size, assuming that the knitter knits at a specific gauge. Potholder gauge doesn't matter much, because potholders can come in any approximate size. Slippers will stretch, or if too large, a fifth grader will grow into them in six months. But sweaters must have the right gauge.
To knit at a specific gauge, you have to knit at the same tension as the designer of the pattern. You have to maintain this tension consistently for the whole time you work on the garment. If you don't do this, your sweater will be the wrong size or be misshapen. Or you may run out of yarn - leading back to the dye lot problem; but the foresight solution to this is to always buy one extra skein. (You can always use the leftovers for slippers.)
So first you create a test swatch - using the size of needles specified in the pattern, about three inches by three inches. You measure this against the pattern gauge. If you are lucky, you match the gauge, rip out the test swatch, and start the sweater. If not, you change the size of needles you are using and try again to match the gauge. If you are very clever, you can knit at more than one tension, and you retry the test swatch at the same needle size and different tension. But this requires you use the same unnatural tension for the entire garment. I think my grandmother could do this - I can't. But I was lucky - I had natural "standard gauge" - my test swatches almost always matched the pattern. My mother was a little jealous - sometimes she had to change needle sizes.
Sweaters also have a pattern. Potholders are made by always doing knit stitches. Slippers can be done the same way, or by a combination of all knit and all purl. But the intricate patterns on sweaters require combinations of knit, purl, slip, twist, and so forth that vary with each row. So your mind and hands have to pay attention to each stitch in a more complicated fashion.
My seventh-grade sweater was solid sage green with three cables up the front. I finished it to my grandmother's satisfaction. Early that summer, there was again the pay-off of another week at 4-H camp.
At the end of summer came the Fair and a surprise. County Fair judging for knitting and sewing has two separate competitions. One is called "construction" - how well is the garment made. For potholders and slippers, this is the only category, and the one that that I had been competing in. But for more complicated garments, there is also the "style" competition. This has two phases. First you wear your garment in front of a panel of judges to see how well it fits. At the County Fair, these are usually a bunch of other knitting teachers also my grandmother's age who have you stand in front of them, turn, raise your arms, and examine you like a prize heifer. They also ask you some questions about how hard it was to make, how you like knitting, and so forth. This phase happens a day or so before the fair opens for the public. The second phase is truly terrifying: the style show. It happens during the Fair itself, and is attended by all the parents, dragged-along siblings, knitting teachers, and all the old knitting and sewing ladies of the town. You have to walk out a runway, do a 45 degree turn to one side of the audience, walk across the base of the runway, do another turn, and walk back, with perfect posture and smiling all the while.
My grandmother and mother had not told me until the Fair that I was also entered in the style competition. Seventh-grade boy me, and about 200 girls from seventh grade through seniors in high school. All in front of an audience of several hundred strangers.
So I spent an afternoon learning to walk, turn, and smile. And keeping my hair straight, and trying not to sweat. And smile. There was a practice session with all the contestants, so we could make sure we knew who we followed, and could keep the show on schedule. I was helped by the fact that my year-older cousin Sharon was also in the competition. She didn't count as a girl - she was just my cousin. So at least there was somebody there I could talk to.
Well, the sweater fit, and I smiled and turned, and won Reserve Champion in the junior high category. Which meant the next night I went out with the five other (girl) champions and reserve champions and be presented a large ribbon in front of the entire grandstand at the closing ceremonies of the Fair. It also meant that I went to the State Fair as a contestant from my county. So in late summer, Mom and Dad took me down to the State Fair and dropped me off to stay overnight for the competition. I didn't get any special prizes, but at least there was one other boy in the knitting competition. After we did the practice the first day, he and I spent all evening on carnival rides that the fair - which were a whole step up in excitement from the rides at the County Fair.
For eighth grade, I made the big step up to a ski sweater. A ski sweater has a multi-colored pattern. To do this, you knit each stitch with one of the colors, and carry the other color woven in the back of the garment. The extra thickness makes the sweater thicker, so that it would only be worn in very cold weather - hence a ski sweater. So now there is a colored pattern, that changes with each row, and two sets of yarn to keep track of and make sure they are interwoven so it the inside of the fabric is smooth. The pattern I chose was emerald green and white with a striking horizontal and diamond pattern over the entire sweater.
Everything went as usual, knitting on the sweater each evening during fall and winter. Come spring, I was all done. One afternoon, I was in the final stretch. I had sewed the seams on the sleeves, and was sewing up the side seams between the front and the back. Halfway up the back I found something horrifying. The front and the back patterns did not match up. At first, I thought that maybe I had just mis-sewn farther down and just mismatched the pieces. But I checked and the seam so far was correct. The reason for the mismatch was that I had skipped two rows in the pattern on the back of the sweater. The knitting above the missing two rows was about thirty or forty hours of work.
I looked at it for a couple of minutes, and then I called in my mother to confirm the mistake. There was really no discussion. We looked at the sweater lying on the floor for a few minutes, and then I tore out the half-finished side seams. We sat down and each of us took a color and started carefully ripping out the interwoven knitting on the back piece down to the point of the missing rows, carefully rewinding the yarn onto balls. My father came home during this process and saw the piece on the floor and asked what were doing. I explained about the missing two rows and how we had to tear it out. He said something like "I'm sure glad I don't knit."
So after we had torn it out, I reknitted the back correctly and sewed it together.
That summer, I didn't go to 4-H camp. As a pre-high schooler, I went to 4-H Summer School. 4-H Summer School was held on the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis. We had to apply and be accepted with an allotment per county. We stayed in the dormitories with a roommate, and ate in the cafeteria or the student union. In the mornings we selected classes to attend, a lot of them about college and career choices. In the afternoons we selected activities like swimming. We also had discussion groups to talk about a range of topics.
Girls weren't quite as scary as they were last summer at camp. I met one girl and we hung around with during the time, and on the next to the last night at summer school, I kissed a girl for the first time. It was about as awkward as you might expect. I think she had kissed a boy before.
The county fair came, with both the construction and style review competition. This year there were a couple more boys from my grandmother's knitting group in the style review, including my one-year-younger brother. I won Champion in my age class. At the completion ceremonies at the end of the fair, I once again went out to the review stand in front of the grandstand. They announced the winners in each category. There was one final award in the fashion competition - the Grand Champion across all age classes, both knitting and sewing, for both construction and style show. This award was a secret until the final ceremony, and usually went to one of the junior or senior high school girls for something like an evening gown. But that year I won the Grand Champion trophy. It came with a two-foot high trophy that had the each year's winner engraved on it, and stayed at our house until the next year. I don't think I have ever been more surprised by anything in my life. (Maybe equal, but not more.) I think the crowd was a little surprised also, with an eighth grade boy winning over the high school girls.
So I went to State Fair again. I remember the review judges from that year. At the State Fair, they were fashion professionals, not just the other knitting teachers. Oregon at that time had an active knitting-based industry - Jantzen, White Stag, and Pendleton were all Oregon-based. One of the three judges was a man, and he asked if I had ever considered a career in fashion. I didn't even know that there were such things as "careers in fashion", but I told him that I planned to become an astronomer or physicist. I think I won a blue ribbon at State Fair that year. And I think I met another girl at the style review - one boy to two hundred girls is pretty good odds, after all - and we went on a bunch of rides at the Fair.
I made more sweaters in freshman and sophomore years, which progressed to additional levels of complexity. One of them was a calf-length car-coat for which I had to cut, sew, and stitch in a cloth lining. But I also gained other interests in high school, especially speech and debate, which also offered frequent chances to go to other places and meet people. My other sweaters went to State Fair in construction and got blue ribbons, but I never placed as highly again in the style review. My sophomore year was my last year in 4-H and 4-H Summer School.
My grandmother was not well during her last few years. As a child and young adolescent, I wasn't aware of all the details, but I know she had breast cancer, diabetes, and heart problems probably related to being very overweight. In September of my senior year in high school, she was in the hospital in Tillamook. One evening my mother received a call from the hospital and she and I drove the three miles to Tillamook General - Dad was away from home that night. Another member of our church congregation had already arrived at the hospital. Mom went into grandmother's room, and came out a short while later. I don't know if grandma had died before we arrived or after but it doesn't really matter to my telling of the story. My mother came over to me and hugged me and cried on my shoulder. I drove home.
Grandmother's memorial service was one of the largest ever held at that church. I was just one of her many knitting students. Today I am a software architect. Programming is a lot like knitting, but that's a different story. I think I owe a lot of my success in software, and in life, to my grandmother.
And I still have the ski sweater.
-- Tom Wilson, San Francisco, July 12, 2005
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