Knit All November, Day 2
First Project: Socks
Yesterday was pretty frustrating. I knew when I started the 2nd sock that I didn’t have enough blue yarn. Changing yarns isn’t a big deal, I expect I’ll run out of pink yarn as well, and I am happy to let my first socks really look like they’re my first socks. The tough bit is turning the heel. I redid it about 3 or 4 times last night, but it kept looking wrong. This one finally looks about right. Not excellent, but pretty good.
My dad was always full of anecdotes and little stories he was going to pull together into a book someday. Whenever he saw me knitting, he liked to tell me about some relation of ours, maybe his mom or grandmother, who would try to make socks, but would just keep knitting them longer and longer, until they were absurdly long, because “she could never work up the courage to turn the heel.” Dad also liked to mime knitting whenever somebody said, “Darn!”
I recently heard someone say that every time someone dies it’s like a library burns to the ground. In that case, trying to describe him is like passing around burnt scraps of paper and hoping you’ll get the plot of Hamlet out of them. It’s impossible, but I want everyone to have known my dad. He was gentle, kind, and thoughtful in a world that is so often dark, complicated, and harsh. Maybe the pieces of him that stay with me can persist in the way that we can quote literature we’ve never read. “To be or not to be.”
Probably not all my posts will be so morose. Processing loss is hard.
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