a little me, a little musing

So I'm starting this blog without a digital camera. But, hell, it's a new year. And so I won't focus on what I don't have. I'll focus on what I do: An undying, never ending, burning desire to talk about knitting and to share the experience of knitting with other people. Because I also do other stuff, like read and write and socialize and dream of a better world, this won't solely be a knitting blog (especially since there won't be many pics for a while!) , but knitting will certainly be the catalyst for talk of other things.

I'll have a camera soon enough. Right now, since I am a writer, I'll paint the pictures with words.

I live in Los Angeles. In the heart of the city. Place called Miracle Mile, to be exact. Next month will mark my 4th anniversary here. I have only just begun to like it. Before here, New York City. Before there, Toledo. Not Spain. Ohio. The knitting's been part of my experience since March, when there I was, minding my own business at the Will and Ariel Durant branch of the public library and before me, in the form of a table tent, was an annoucement for a free knitting class.

The urge to knit wasn't foreign to me. In the fall of 2002, I'd taken a bunch of knitting books out of the library. I had big plans to learn the craft in the solitude of my own home and to emerge with a humble scarf, maybe a hat or two. Then my husband, Alem, hereforth known as Bubba, and I changed homes, moving from a single (aka, a bachelor apartment -- the Southern California equivalent of an efficiency) to a two-bedroom so that our kids, Andre and Michael, aka Schmin and Mike, could have a place to sleep when they either a) visited us or b) decided to live with us upon having grown tired of living with their respective other parents. In the maelstrom of The Great Move of '02, I lost track of the library's knitting books, having put them aside after opening 2 or 3 of them and reading the words "Make a slip knot." Weeks later, to the tune of a $50 library fine, I found them sitting in a box in the new second bedroom and when I returned them, the librarian took pity on me and made me promise never to return so many books so late again and once I did, cut my fine to $25 and a tsk tsk tsk.

And there was the time in childhood when my aunt stepped forth to teach me to crochet. Maybe I was about nine or so. This particular aunt, God rest her, was an alcoholic. Perhaps she hadn't had her gin on the rocks that day, because she had nary a smidgeon of patience for teaching a child the fine art of any form of handcrafting. I left her house believing myself a craft-tard. Naturally I would be thrown by "slip knot."

But on a fateful day in March, the 23rd to be exact, something told me, as my grandmother would say, something told me to go and take that class. I did. It resulted in tears. But by the next week's session I had my head on straight and my stitches on the needle. They were backward, but I was on my way.