Free-Range Knitter

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Cass’s slogan could be “Evolve or die.” She changes whatever she has to, whenever she has to, and I stare at her in wonder. I am bad with change to the point that I could spend a year contemplating switching breakfast cereals and might still feel nervous about my choice. Although she was educated in private schools, studied the liberal arts abroad, and can tell me that my latest writing is “structurally laborious” (and be right), Cass is the sort of person who, when her father died unexpectedly, inherited a business that manufactures (of all things) prison phones, and she didn’t miss a beat. I would have been sobbing under a bed somewhere at the thought of taking my extensive knowledge of English romantic literature and my grand plan for my life and flushing it down the toilet, and all Cass did was say, “I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I will.” I’m not going to pretend for a minute that what happened next was easy or pretty, or that Cassandra shifts huge things painlessly, but she took a big hit to her life and her plan, and instead of railing against what needed to happen, she changed. Where someone else might have been paralyzed, a few years later, Cassandra had a whole new life. She had moved to New Jersey, taken up knitting with a passion, found a passel of new friends as a result, and packed a little house right full of yarn before she woke up one bright and shining day and discovered that she had suddenly become the sort of woman who was at a conference in Texas talking to wardens about penal communication systems with expertise and confidence. “I can’t believe this is where I am,” she said. I think she was surprised that so much had changed, but she might have found it just as unbelievable that it was Texas.

  I don’t, for the life of me, know why Cassandra can’t believe it. The way she knits sums her up. Cass is changeable without being flighty, adaptable without being reckless; she can devise a new approach in a heartbeat if she has to, and she does it all without losing track of her central self. Cass changes her breakfast cereal all the time, and she doesn’t even consider it a risk. I love, I am enchanted by, the way that she perpetually does what it takes and is ever moving forward but doesn’t have any idea at all that she’s doing it. In fact, Cass often thinks she’s stuck, both physically and spiritually.

  I have never, ever understood how she can feel this way when she’s practically the poster child for spiritual growth and remarkable adaptability. I don’t know how the sort of person who learns something new every ten minutes and has to tell me to loosen up every fifteen can think of herself as stuck, but I have wondered whether Cass gets this message because her life doesn’t have very many of the traditional markers and milestones that we use to manage the progress of a woman’s life. She’s single, she has no kids, and she owns her own business, so it’s not even like she gets promoted for learning or doing a good job. In my life, I get clues that there is movement. I have a career where success is measured in one project coming after the other, my kids get older and more accomplished, and my relationship with my husband matures, even if that only means that I finally understand that he’s never going to be on time for anything. I couldn’t possibly feel stuck; there’s movement showing me the flow of my progress all around me. Cass gets up every day and the backbone of her life stays the same, and I think that can make her think she’s in a loop and not on a journey.

  All of this has turned out to be tremendously ironic, because when Cass stomped into my life at a thousand miles an hour, I thought I was moving forward, and she thought that she was going nowhere, both of us tricked by the things around us. I had very good friends, and I wasn’t, when Cass turned up, in the market for more. I am the sort of person who forms good and long friendships, and the friends I had at the time were all the same friends I had enjoyed for decades. They were very good friends, and they still are, but I believed, because I had not had a new friend in so long, I believed that I had been given my lifetime allotment of them, and like eating the same cereal every day, that didn’t bother me at all.

  Enter Cass, who broke the seal on all my beliefs about friendship with her flexibility, changeability, and knack for adaptation. Her ability to do whatever worked was a challenge to my system (my system being to keep doing whatever I was doing, whether it was working or not), and this same flexibility has turned out to be the best foil for my nervous nature. I tend to come reluctantly (if by reluctant you understand that I resist it as cats resist bathing) to new things, even good things, and Cass found ways to convince me that new things and new people could fit into my life, if only I would loosen up, follow where she was leading, and see that change could look good on a person. Only someone as flexible (and persistent) as Cass could have possibly unlocked someone as rigid as I was, and her arrival and consequent bashing down of my internal door marked the beginning of what I now think of as the second wave, a group of women that I simply cannot do without, that Cass brought me at this unexpected time in my life, when I really thought I had a system and all the friends I was going to get.

  When I think about my natural reticence about new things or new people and how it almost held me back from discovering this wonderful friendship; when I think about all the other people the goddess Cassandra dragged into my life with me twitching and screaming; when I look at her knitting like that, switching whole systems to get from knit to purl, I know why she’s here. Cass has taught me a thing or two about there being more than one way to solve a problem, more than one way to look at things, and that if you knit your way across a row, you haven’t made a permanent decision about how you have to hold your hands when you purl back. Without Cass, I wouldn’t be anywhere near where I am today, and I have no idea at all how I made it this far without her. She is a walking testament to flexibility and movement in a human, and everything about her has taught me a lot about opening myself up to possibility, friendship, and the things that knitting and people can bring you, if only you can be flexible enough to see the potential. She’s shown me, in short, which one of us was stuck, and that there is more than one way for a woman to measure her success.

  I may also change my breakfast cereal. Maybe.

  A List of People Who Are Not Getting a Knitted Gift from Me and the Reasons Why

  (I know that’s sort of a long title, but I think it is justified. Something must be done.)

  My aunt Christine. Removed from the list for telling me that the scarf that I knit her looked “almost as good” as the one that my cousin got her from Wal-Mart. It was all I could do to contain myself. Seriously. What sort of world are we living in where one woman could spend hours and hours and hours of her time making something, by hand for another human, essentially creating something out of hours of her own life, and someone could think that it’s okay to compare the result of those hours of human effort to a stinking machine-knit commercial thing from an uber-conglomerate with no soul? Seriously. No knits for you.

  My husband, Joe. For not trimming his toenails to a length that I feel is safe for handknit socks. I am tired of the argument that the holes that develop right over his big toenails are a coincidence or a consequence of his shoes. It happens in boots, it happens in shoes, it happens in sneakers, and it happens when he is shoeless. Dude, it is your toenails. Kindly cut them to a length I consider secure for handknit socks, or I’m pulling your supply. (Okay. I’m not pulling the supply. I am thinking about being a little slow with the next pair, though. Better watch your step.)

  My friend Ken, for telling me that the last pair of socks I knit him were “too purple” and perhaps “not manly” or “for real men.” The last time I checked, my notorious friend, you were lucky to be getting handknit socks at all, and what you should be feeling, my good buddy, even if your socks are pink and frilly with big honking ruffles over the heels, is nothing but gratitude that I have been so good as to knit you a pair. Too purple indeed. Real men suck it up. The next lace pair I make are going to be in your size.

  That lady on the bus who explained to her friend that knitting was simple and fast and took hardly a minute. I’ve got nothing against you, lady, but there’s no way I’m ever knitting you s
omething if you think that all this stuff falls off me while I’m walking. No way.

  My ex-boyfriend Stewart from the eleventh grade. He knows why.

  The baby next door who doubled his birthweight in forty-five days and had the audacity to outgrow the sweater I made him, having only worn it once. (He is not off the list permanently—just until he stops growing faster than I can knit or his parents stop feeding him so well.)

  My cat, since there is a stunning felted cat bed I made her that she hasn’t even looked at. I have discovered that it is important to my happiness that I do not knit for beings that do not say thank you, may not use what I knit at all, and may not even admit that the beautifully knitted gift is in the room with them. Now that I think about it, there’s a cousin I’m taking off the list for the same reasons.

  Anyone, ever, who has, when I asked them if they would like a hand knit, replied with “Ummm.”

  Anyone with a foot size greater than men’s 13, or a chest (of either gender) that measures more than 52 inches. I want to be able to continue to like you when I’m done knitting for you and not hold you in contempt for your size and its attendant effect on my sanity. (Or lack thereof.) Would you like a scarf?

  Margaret, or so her name tag read, an employee of my local grocery store who, noticing me knitting as I stood in the exceedingly long line for the checkout, said to the employee she was walking with, “Wow. How lame does your life have to get before you’re reduced to knitting at the grocery store?” She does not respect the Knit-Force, and knits will not be bestowed upon her. I hope she’s chilly.

  All Knitters

  I have an obsession. Beyond being rather unnaturally interested in knitting as a whole, knitters in general, and yarn in specific, I am absolutely captivated by the actual act of knitting. Not knitting as it turns out sweaters and hats and socks, but the movements that make up the act of knitting. How a knitter’s fingers go, what a knitter’s hands do … where and how they hold the yarn. I haven’t always cared about this or watched knitters knit, and I know that if you’ve never done it, really watched them, this little interest of mine probably sounds a little as if my other hobbies might be watching paint dry or grass grow. It began when I tried to learn to knit another way. I wanted to be able to do two-color knitting with two hands, and since I’ve always carried the yarn only in my right hand, my left hand needed to be taught a lesson. I sat down to work it out, and I sat down with confidence.

  At the time I had been knitting “my way” for more than twenty years. I cannot even begin to guess how many stitches I had knit, but it had to be millions. I was sure that there would be a learning curve on this, but I’m proud of my skills as a knitter, and I’m a fast learner. Well, pride goes before a fall, let me tell you. The minute I put the yarn in my left hand the whole thing fell apart. Not just apart where you carry the yarn, either; the entire system came apart. Every knitting skill I had ever had just dissolved. The yarn slipped off my finger no matter how I tried to tension it; I dropped needles. I knew what had to happen, I knew what went where, but it was like I couldn’t get a message to my hands. Within a few minutes I was incompetent and tangled, and since patience isn’t really my forte, I got more and more frustrated. I am used to being ungainly and inept when I’m doing almost anything else, but knitting is not an area of my life where I’m used to feeling like I can’t manage. Knitting is what I do to reassure myself that I’m not an absolutely inadequate moron, and I don’t have a lot of coping skills for abject knitting failure. I started to curse and behave sort of badly, and then, in a moment that I admit was not the pinnacle of my maturity and I’d rather my children had not witnessed, I threw the knitting (or lack of it) on the floor and stomped off. (It is only because I feared puncture that I did not stomp on the knitting itself.)

  Badly unsettled, I took a couple of turns around the house and then sat down to knit … my way. Maybe I was missing something. I took up the needles and twined the yarn around my fingers, and I felt everything settle into its familiar place. I began to effortlessly make stitches, one after another, and I boggled. How could I go from this string of perfect stitches to mere moments later acting like I’d never held a set of needles, just by changing one simple thing? I looked down at my hands as they knit, trying to figure out what I was missing. I watched myself make a stitch, watched it slip from one needle to another. I watched the whole thing, and as I watched, I realized something. Knitting wasn’t simple. Well, knitting was simple. Knitting was just pulling one loop through another using a stick. Knitting was the simplest thing in the world; it’s how I was doing it that wasn’t simple.

  If I just quickly looked at my hands, it looked like my left hand was still, just holding the needle, and that my right hand moved its needle into the stitch, flicked forward to wrap the yarn, then pulled back and took the finished stitch off the left needle. Three steps. In, around, off. In, around, off. That’s all I was trying to replicate. In, around, off. Any idiot could do it, and that’s when I noticed something.

  My left index finger. I thought that I had just been holding the needle between that finger and my thumb, but suddenly I became aware that my finger was doing something. As I began each stitch, that finger subtly moved the stitch along the needle to the tip, holding it for the right needle and separating it from its peers. I stared at my hand. This explained a lot. When I tried to reverse my knitting and learn a new way to do things, I hadn’t even thought about this. I had no finger doing this job. I was just doing “in, around, off.” I stared at my finger. How incredible that this finger had this whole vital knitting job that I didn’t even know existed. Here I am, having knit a hundred million stitches over decades of experience, and I didn’t even know that finger was vital. No idea. I knit another stitch, watching my clever index finger do its thing. I sped up, and so did my finger. Suddenly I noticed that my thumb was active as well; that while my index finger moved the stitch to the tip of the needles, the thumb on top held back the others. I looked at my other hand, and while I knit I got enchanted. I know that sounds terribly self-absorbed, but I can’t help it. All my fingers had jobs. None were entirely passive. It was a beautiful, complex finger dance, and I had been doing it this whole time. I was so oblivious that I didn’t know that the whole knitterly house of cards was going to come crashing down if I changed even one wee thing.

  I switched the yarn to my other hand, ready to try again. I got it now. What was going wrong was that I couldn’t just decide to do my finger dance another way. There were a thousand little tiny movements going on, and all of them were minute, intricate, and interrelated. My fingers were obviously smarter than I was, and I just needed to hang in there long enough for them to catch up with what I wanted. Once I knew how complicated the whole thing was, how many things needed to be relearned in another way to compensate for making a change, I felt way better, and I gave myself the time to learn it. Or at least I stopped throwing stuff around quite as often.

  After that day, I started watching knitting. The way I knit was all designed by my particular brain and body to do things the way that was best for me, and I reasoned that there was no way that anyone else could possibly knit the way that I did. I was unique, and if I was … so was everyone else. In that instant, my obsession with knitting, as a series of movements, was born.

  I took to watching people while they knit. (I tried to be discreet. I may not always have been successful.) I began to investigate theories. What did the way you knit say about you? Do you knit the way you do because of personality traits? Physical traits? Were people who were tight knitters wound tightly themselves? Were loose knitters relaxed? I looked at the body posture of knitters, the way the needles sat in their hands, the way that they wrapped the yarn around the needles, and as I watched, an enormous thing began to reveal itself. No two knitters knit the same way. Even knitters who on the surface appeared to have identical styles—both holding the needles the same way, both carrying the yarn in their left hands, both wrapping the yarn with the sam
e movement—on examination they were worlds apart. One would lean forward over her work with rapt attention, the other would lean back in her chair. One would push stitches along with an extra finger, the other would move stitches with the needle, resting her finger along the back of her work. Alice was quick; Margaret made large swoops with her throwing hand; Hannah scooped up the yarn in a tiny, efficient movement; Genevieve kept her work close to her because she doesn’t like to wear her glasses, but Jane holds it farther away because she has an ample “front porch.” Ken has no such barrier. They were all unique, their own style grown up from who they are and what they’ve learned and how their own stuff works.

  I have been watching knitters semiprofessionally for years now, and I have yet to find any two who knit in a way that is absolutely identical, and that’s pretty staggering, because when you think about it they are all getting exactly the same product. All of them. If I asked fifty knitters to knit me a square of garter stitch, knit at five stitches to the inch, I would get fifty very identical squares. I would never in a million years be able to see the degree of personality that went into making them. I know that I probably wouldn’t even be able to pick my own out of the pile. In the absence of a very personal error or two, they would all be indistinguishable and identical, and that makes me so happy that I almost laugh out loud.

  Think about it. People have been knitting on Earth for, at our best guess, about a thousand years. I won’t even begin to try and calculate how many knitters that means there have been, but know that at present there are about 50 million people who know how to knit in North America alone, and we’re less than 10% of the world’s population. Think that over, add in the rest of the world (remember, China is superbig, and knitting is superbig in China), multiply it by that thousand years, and wonder how many tens of thousands of millions of knitters have all held the needles the way you do today, only nothing like you do. Every single one of them, all knitting. All knitters use needles, all knitters use yarn. All knitters wrap the yarn around the needles and pull a new loop through, all knitters, all millions and millions and millions of them, making billions and billions of stitches that all look exactly the same when they are done, and not one of them, out of all that human history, not a single soul is doing it exactly the way that you do.