HOBBIES

WHEN WE INTERVIEW the residents for the directory, one of our questions is "What are your hobbies?". For the staff directory, I changed the query to "When you have spare time, what do you like to do?" When the subject is holding down two full time jobs, the answer is likely to be, "Relax". Alas, no time for hobbies.

Recently I've taken up my knitting needles again and am working on a project that gets more and more difficult to interpret the instructions. There's always the danger that I'll put the venture aside, never to be picked up again; therefore when Diane invited me to join her Saturday morning class I readily accepted, in the hope that it will spur me onward. The 103 year old, expert knitter here at the Manor recently died and no other resident volunteered to keep the knitting group going, so when I arrive at a stumbling block, I'm stuck. The other class members are working on needlepoint, so I'm the odd duck in the group, left to figure out my own dilemmas. When it gets difficult, it no longer feels like a "hobby", but life is that way, as we're demonstrating these days. We're in a hard part right now.

I think you all can guess at one of Mr. Bob's hobbies, in fact I think it's the only one he has left. Sleep, beautiful sleep. A few minutes ago he appeared in our living room, sat down in his recliner, got up and brought me a glass of water for my pills and headed back to the bedroom, saying he guessed he wasn't ready to get up after all. He's indulging in his hobby, just as I'm going to do as soon as I take my shower and hike to the parking lot to drive up the hill to our old stomping ground. Those ladies may not know how to figure out my knitting pattern, but they're damned good company.

“Properly practiced, knitting soothes the troubled spirit, and it doesn't hurt the untroubled spirit either.”                                                                                                                     Elizabeth Zimmermann

MADAME DEFARGE*

I KNIT. Therefore I am. But I'm not a very disciplined person and I don't plan ahead the way we're supposed to. As in life, I kind of make it up as I'm going along. In our early marriage, I used to knit Bob argyle socks. That is, until he requested that I stop, which I did, but it sort of hurt my too-tender feelings. The act of knitting, when it's going right, is soothing. In my opinion, following directions is hard. I can always interpret things in several different ways and can't determine which one is right. In the sample below, when I was doing the brown block with a stripe of orange through it, by following the instructions I increased stitches until there wasn't a circular needle in the world big enough to hold the 1,421 stitches which finally told me that I couldn't possible be doing it correctly. A call to the knit shop set me on the right track. Silly old me.

You may recall that over a year ago I began to knit a colorful wrap. It started off in a pleasing manner, but as it grew, it became less lovely and my dissatisfaction increased in direct ratio. My problem lay in choosing which color to put next to 


which. That's where a plan would have been wise. I was okay with it as it looks in this photo, but subsequent blocks did not please me. Here's the shameful part........ rather than working through my displeasure by ripping out my stitches and choosing another color, I did another "drop out" which is my usual reaction to something that falls short in my experience. And I started the project all over again with different yarn.

When we disembarked from our cruise ship last October I asked Tim to stop at a splendid yarn shop in Encinitas, just north of San Diego. I bought enough yarn to do a second wrap and that yarn was waiting in its original shopping bag against the time I might complete the first project. It was called into service early.

That's a little brighter than it actually is, but you'll get the idea that it's variegated or self striping or just call it interesting when it's knitted up.

I like the way it's progressing, but then I was pleased at this stage on the first wrap, too. Maybe someday I'll go back and tackle the original one........... that would be after I complete the fluffy afghan I started five years ago.

"Really, all you need to become a good knitter are wool, needles, hands, and slightly below-average intelligence.  Of course, superior intelligence, such as yours and mine, is an advantage."  
                  ~Elizabeth Zimmerman




 * Madame Defarge

Possessing a remorseless bloodlust, Madame Defarge embodies the chaos of the French Revolution. The initial chapters of "The Tale of Two Cities" finds her sitting quietly and knitting in the wine shop. However, her apparent passivity belies her relentless thirst for vengeance. With her stitches, she secretly knits a register of the names of the revolution’s intended victims