Ending the curse.

I started this post a while ago to document the magical cursed man sweater. And considering the way things have been going, I decided to go ahead and finish it. Here is the ridiculously long story of my sweater curse.

Or just scroll down to see the pretty sweater.

The magic bra

When I was ten, I had a lacy black sports bra, which served as my training bra. One morning, I opened my drawer and found two black bras rolled there. I laid the bras out next to each other and puzzled over them. They were identical. I looked at the Dean Koontz novel next to my bed, and out the frosty window. It seemed unlikely that a fairy had sneaked in and left me a bra. Maybe my old bra had reproduced like a tribble. Maybe my dresser had a double in another dimension and a cosmic rift had opened. My young heart pounded. An enchanted bra was not the gateway to magical realms that I would have hoped for, but I'd take it.

As it turned out, the bra belonged to our neighbor, who gave it to my mother after seeing mine on the laundry line because it was a cheap thing that didn't offer enough support for actual breasts. My mother put it in my drawer. The mystical bra-fairy poofed out of existence. But the possibility had opened briefly.

And this brings me to...

The Magical Man-Sweater

This fall makes 5 years since events unfolded, and I am ready to be over it. An idea formed. I would knit the man a sweater, and by making it, the sweater would become magical. Every stitch would bind me to him and graft shut the injury to my heart. He would wear it and feel loved. And if he fucked up again, I could choke him with it.

And this is exactly why boyfriend sweaters are cursed.

So, knowing I was setting myself up for disaster, I decided to take the thing one step further; this project needed to teach me to be a better knitter, from the foundations up. There are two rock stars of knitting in particular who I consider to be exact opposites of each other in philosophy: Alice Starmore and Elizabeth Zimmerman. I would hitch this sweater to them and ride it to victory like a woolly chariot.

In her books, Alice Starmore has explicit directions, complicated charts, and even her very own yarns - all of which must be used exactly to achieve her elaborate designs. Starmore referred is to in the knitting community as "LSD" -Litigious Scottish Designer; even mentioning her name here on my little blog sets me up for a potential slap on the wrist. I was a bit nervous. I just wanted to KNIT A MAGICAL SWEATER, OK?

Elizabeth Zimmerman, on the other hand, gives gentle advice instead of instruction; she guides you through the process of making a thing and leaves it up to you to fill in the gaps with your own good sense and imagination. And math. Lots of hateful math. She assured me I am smart enough to do this, but I don't think she has seen me counting the bank deposit for work.

So I bought the yarn ($60), ordered the books ($25.00), and got ready to do some math.

My design sketch:

The books: Knitting Without Tears, by Elizabeth Zimmerman, and Aran Knitting, by Alice Starmore.

I've loved the the cables in Starmore's St. Brigid for a long time. The sweater is complicated and terrifying.

I wanted the cables to go up the sleeves, paired with Zimmerman's classic Seamless Hybrid sweater, which has folded hems and clever construction to complement broad, manly shoulders.

Hmm, where are the sizes and measurements and charts?
Oh, there AREN'T ANY.

The yarn arrived. Plymouth merino superwash in heathered grey. I love it.

 

I got out my needles, ready to cast on. Zimmerman tells me that I MUST make a swatch. "Otherwise you may sup the porridge of regret with the spoon of sorrow." Well, shit.

She suggests making a hat as a swatch, but I am too cheap and lazy, so I cast on 30 stitches and worked up a little rectangle, instead. Perhaps not off to the best start. I got the numbers I needed and promised to be more faithful to methodology in the future.

It took 7 measurements to determine my gauge: 5 stitches per inch on size 7 needles. I took a sweater from the man's closet and measured 41 inches around. That seemed kind of huge. He has a 36-inch chest and a 31-inch waist (jerk), but if I went by that, he would look like this:

After 3 tries, my math skills told me that 5 x 41 = 205 stitches. I decided to start with a sleeve, to warm up, and realized that I had no size 7 double-pointed needles. Or contrasting color for the inner hemming. Ordered the stuff ($18.50) and cast on the body, instead.

It started well. I toted the sweater to work with me and knit on lunch break while listening to audio books, and toted it home again to knit in front of weeknight tv with a cup of tea and my bottles of antibiotics.

And then I dropped it out of a moving car.

There was a moment of horror when I looked down at the knitting on my lap and saw the tail leading under the driver's side door. I yanked the car over and jumped out, waving traffic around, and ran down the middle of the lane for 200 yards to roll it all back up into a ball on my hand. Tourists in renta-mustangs swerved, and I tossed a length of yarn over onto the grass, where it became snarled in sticker bushes. After a bit of yanking and cussing, I jammed the wad of snarled thorny yarn into the car and fled the scene. I suspected things were beginning to go wrong.

Things happened very quickly after that.

The man was laid off. We lost our lovely home, had to put the car up for sale. Moved into a cramped subdivision house along a busy road. Picked up our new neighbor's dog when it was run over in front of us. Lost a friend in a terrible way, with tasers and drugs and an attempt to break into city hall naked.

"BIND OFF THE SWEATER ALREADY," the man said. So I snatched it up from where it was sitting like a wad of explosives in my knitting basket and got to work, expecting a car to come plowing through the wall at any moment.

Today it is finished.

Zimmerman was a genius. The seamless shoulders are very clever, and look great across his back.

Inside the hem, I worked in a secret message, which took me a few days to decide on. All the world of literature and love poetry to choose from, and I finally went with "dxfh".

 

dear ex-fucking-husband

I learned more than I intended with this project. Mostly, don't fuck with the fates. I whined about my heartache, and got punched in the nose. Aww - does it hurt now? Ok, fine. I'm great now, thanks.

"could be worse" curse

Typing on phone, sitting in windowsill to catch 1-foot pocket of 3G.

Night 1: Hated the house. Hated the stray dogs and feral cats and speeding cars and tourist neighbors and stifling mugginess. Couldn't sleep. Cried. Embarrassed with self for being snively, said, "It could be worse." Suspected I had made a terrible mistake.

Night 2: toddler peed in his sleep. Mostly on me. Changed bedding and jammies, realized as I was stuffing the wet sheets in washer that the laundry soap was at the old house. Just as I sighed about this and decided to go back to bed, my guts made a sound like a water cooler, and I spent the rest of the night in the toilet.

The moving doesn't stop for la grippe, and I cemented my insides with my mind powers for 6 hours while scrubbing down the old house and closing it up for the last time. Got home, body immediated re-asserted its attempt to invert itself.

Crawled to bed early, near hysteria from lack of sleep and dehydration. Listened to ocean, tried to convince self that inner Scottish seafarer should be soothed by it, drifted to sleep finally, and BLAMMO! the house rocked, plaster raining from the ceiling. Shot out of bed, smelling gun powder. Ran outside in undercrackers with flashlight. No bullet holes, firework remnants, exploded gas tanks, exploded cats, toppled furniture, or ambulances. When I was 16, our neighbor blew his head off, and it sounded like that. Either one of our neighbors is as yet to be discovered headless, or some asshole drove by with a shotgun to welcome in July 4th.

Well, FANTASTIC. Our new house is fucking awesome.

The road strikes

Early morning. Pulled a shard of glass from my foot in the kitchen, sighed at my coffee pot because I was out of sweetener, and sat down with a sliced banana for the infink to watch cartoons in our jammies. A truck roared by. A dog screamed. I looked out to see our neighbor's mama-dog tumble and crumple on the roadside in front of us. Leaped up, yelling for the man. He jerked awake and yanked on his shorts as I scooped the infink onto my hip. The man ran to the road and I ran to the neighbor's house. The dog died as Mike held her. He walked down with her in his arms, the neighbor cried out, and the puppies are without a mother.

After she had gone to bury her companion, I propped a handwritten card against the angel statue on her step. Felt helpless and ineffectual.

Sad, horrible morning.

uprooting

Now that it is evident that we are not going to be homeless or starve to death, the household is falling into their own reactions to the changes. I have become narcoleptic and distracted, yawning through the day with clothes pins stuck to my bra. The man is going through a giddy end-of-school streak of freedom, plotting his new incarnation and career. The infink is using the expanse of empty floor to stage elaborate Lego wars and break dance. The cats are working through a backlog of small creatures to kill, and then barfing them back up all over the moving boxes. There is paperwork, and hauling, and immune systems threatening to keel over. I need vitamin C. And maybe a shot of albuterol.

I'm not a Power of the Secret person, or even a cup-half-full person, but when things get taken out of my hands I tend to watch them go and trust that things eventually balance out, somewhere. You'll get yours, and I'll get mine. I'm good at waiting, and I have hope in shovelfuls.

Other things:

found myself at a party with gorgeous tattooed people who were far cooler than me.

made off with produce and lau lau.

saw a guy honk his wife's cooter in line at Costco.

consolidated phone plans to cut bills and somehow ended up with an [older model] iPhone. Taking pictures of absolutely effing everything. Sorry, unsuspecting people.

amazingly, came home to find the yard had been visited by the riding mower fairy. I don't know who did it.

Our people are fantastic. I am going to sleep until Tuesday now.

Alone (note to axe murderers: disregard)

The presents were bought, the tickets were nonrefundable, and so we flew to Oahu for my mother's birthday, which we celebrated in a pile of construction debris and Thai food containers. The boys were kept behind to finish renovation, and I was mailed back to Maui by myself to face a week of work and house hunting. I sat in the back seat between my sons and gripped their knees as we drove to the airport in the small blue VW - which may soon catch a barge over to replace the Chevy. And it is stick-shift. I decided to spend my week of isolation lifting weights and doing chin-ups, as this certainly means that I will also be needing to behead zombies and punch sharks (things, like driving stick, I also claim I would be able to do in a crisis). My superstitions are competing to determine which would cause less disaster; complaining about how everything can eat a bag of dicks and die in a fire, or greeting the challenge with optimism and manic enthusiasm. Opting to squint at it suspiciously and wait, for now.

After the initial grief of being left at the curb while my children cried and pressed their hands to the car windows, I broke into a state of emotional detachment. Walked across the tarmac to a roller skate on wings. The flight attendant appeared to be a young marine who had been plucked from a bar during his third shot of Cuervo and draped in a limp plastic life vest. The rattles of turbulence didn't bother me (and I once tried to steal valium from my cat on a bumpy plane ride). Found the car, paid up for parking, and drove to the grocery store for a cart load of Spinster Chow; fruit, Lean Cuisine, diet soda, beer, cat food. Drove home, listening to a Dean Koontz novel and skipping ahead through all the sappy bits.

So I'm here. With the cats and the quiet and all the pillows (also: locked doors and pepper spray), writing up lists and plans and sad emails to delete.

overwhelmed

Sarah knows things. You were just uncurling your talons to take hold of the first centimeter of the earth and exhale and then fuckity fuck, there goes the rug.

My entire life has been a slow-motion disaster film. We've always been moving forward toward the next destination. My mother grew up on Guam, lived on a boat her father built and sailed to Japan, Yap, and Hawaii. My grandfather earned his doctorate in Bloomington, and my teenage mother met my father at the Chinese restaurant where she worked as a waitress. A year later she was hospitalized for 3 months in Newfoundland, waiting for me to be born while her kidneys shut down. She worked through college, became a teacher, and the two of us moved to Arizona. We lived on the Navajo reservation in a small trailer. Then in a bigger one. We saw the small dramatic scenes of a rural community -  murder and gunshots and natural disaster. When the white folk at the nearby trading post town began getting shot, it was time to go. My aunt lived in Honolulu, and so we crossed the Pacific. We lived in a cramped city apartment, then a condo on Molokai, then a glass house in the clouds. We saw the redwoods at my youngest aunt's wedding, and Vancouver at my grandmother's bedside in the cancer ward. I flew off to Florida for art school, and moved from dorm to apartment to smaller apartment, driving north to swim in Lake George and fall in love and get a lot of speeding tickets in the Monte Carlo. Then back to Hawaii - rapid-fire years of birth, marriage, grad school, first job, divorce, heartbreak. I fled to the redwoods, walked through Seattle and San Francisco, had a short love affair, a reluctant reconciliation, an unexpected miscarriage, and a second pregnancy with my stupid lovable ex-husband. Fuck it all, I thought, and moved back to Hawaii with my son and huge belly and apologetic man. I found a corner and sat myself down and thought, finally, this is where I'm staying. Right here. I'll let the road take me, or a landslide, and I'll finally be home when it comes for me. 3 years have gone by. This last year was probably the best I've had since I was small enough to be carried to bed by my mom.


More overwhelming than the shock of the layoff has been the community response. People I've known for only months and years are pulling around me with tears, tight hugs, phone calls, moving arrangements, construction plans. This is where you belong, they tell me. This is your home, and we're keeping you and seeing your children graduate and growing old with you.

And so I am digging in my talons. This centimeter of earth is mine. For as long as I can keep hold.

blindsided

Long weekend. I dragged out the mower and chewed paths through the tall grass, kicking off my pants when it got too hot and impressing the mongooses with my Led Zeppelin undercrackers. We went to a kiddie party, and saw a naked mountain hermit lady lope across the driveway like a pink sasquatch. The power went out all day yesterday, and I took a page from the naked hermit and sunned my no-no bits in the back yard all afternoon while the infink splashed in his paddling pool. We ate Thai food in town, knocked papayas from our trees, collected lilikoi, then made green papaya salad and grilled pork chops with homemade passion fruit and tomatillo salsa. I knitted a hat. We played rummy by the light of the oil lamp and drank home-brewed Hefeweisen.

It was a golden, gorgeous weekend.

And this morning the power came back on, the email buzzed, and the man got his lay-off notice from his company in New York. There is much flailing and phone calling and shoulder-weeping going on today. 

I really don't know what we're going to do.

ogre dancing

I went to a dance party. I knew better than to go to a dance party.

It started well. I tarted myself up, took a look in the mirror, and thought, yep, respectably do-able.

It was dark, and loud, and crowded. There was strobe, and everyone looks fantastic under a strobe. Even the most uncoordinated flapping looks sexy when you can't see half of it. I huddled with a group of other furtive professionals and we shook our jiggly bits until our joints fused up. Just as I secretly suspected that I was an ice-skating prodigy the first time I pushed off and faceplanted at an ice rink, I swung my arms and felt certain that I was unleashing an untapped fount of dancing SENSATION.

And then the Facebook tagging began the next morning.

Recreation:

My evening of magic and mystery was revealed to be 3 hours of this:

I hate you, Facebook.

a week of librarianing

143

Four books were dry-humped to tatters by some randy 2nd grade boys.

The class of 2nd graders was subsequently humiliated and terrified by my surprise visit to explain the consequences of oofing pictures of bikini girls in the Guinness World Records. While I pointed at the cartoon cocks drawn on the Most Downloaded Woman, my son grinned across his desk at his classmate, who was trying to shrink into his own sleeves. 

My co-worker dumped a bag of silicone grains into a vase of water and woke up to a living room full of gel marbles. We now have a giant pretzel jar full of little jiggly blue balls in the staff room, which my teenage shelver and I could not resist digging our arms into and shuddering.

eldritch horror 

Someone asked me to check on a vomiting woman in the public bathroom. I stood in the door and said, "Um, are you alive?" at the arms splayed across the floor under the stall, and received a whargle in reply. Good enough for me. 

At home, I got things in the mail.

future infink quilt for the Bunk Bed of Sadness

because I needed one skein of grey and got this instead

And I made things (hint: DEATHMATCH).

Recognize the homespun, sarahapple? Yours is next, Robotaday!

And the infink danced.

(video broken)

Tomorrow: CHICKEN BALLS! 

The burning of the boyfriend boxes

It was a lighter, as I said. And a damned classy one, too.

The boxes looked innocuous. The most recent one had accumulated detritus, a bit of which I had added as recently as last spring. I packed the tokens and photos into a bag and set them aside. I'm trying to find closure, not death by toxic fumes.

The first to go: the RETURN TO SENDER. Just like the song! Only much, much suckier. It was an act of chivalry which, while appreciated, was nevertheless as effective as turning it on its edge and stabbing it straight into my chest.

At this point I began shaking a bit, so I balled up the bag, tossed the letters back into the box, and looked inside the second one. This box was much older, and fell apart when I rummaged it. Mostly recess notes and complaints about how mean our parents were.There were also assorted photos and remnants from high school jammed in there. It was sad sorting through it; I broke up with this boy very poorly. I was 17, and self-absorbed, and casually cruel. I've been sorry about it for a long time.

The burning spot had grown over, and I needed to pull a lot of wild jungle weeds out of it. Mongooses flew through the brush like popping weasels as I crashed around yanking on vines.

I got the Mormon Lady pot out and filled it with water, in case I started a brush fire. Because a pot of water will totally stop a raging brush fire.

I was scared of the lighter, which didn't have a safety clip. If there is no safety, HOW WILL I NOT BURN OFF MY FACE?! I lit a note, puffed out the lighter, and dropped it. I had to hunt around for it when the first paper died out. It is possible that dropping a hot lighter into the grass and losing it may not be the best way to avoid a brush fire.

Somehow, I did not ignite my pants or hair. I fed the papers in one by one, and only had to put the grass out once. It took a surprisingly long time, and I was alarmed by how hot it was. Obviously, fire is supposed to be hot, but when you watch a movie with a hero on one side of a wall of fire, it's easy to think, oh, just jump through it, you weenie! No. Fire is fucking hot. I'm so sorry, Dennis Quaid.

When I had watched the last one wither to grey ashes, I dumped the pot of water on the pit and went back to the house with the empty boxes.

I don't feel jubilant, or free, or closured (closed? closurated? clostophicated?) but I haven't started crying or scraping all the ashes into an urn to sleep with at night, so that's good. If my motorcycle lessons end in disaster, these old secrets are safe with me. And if that's the last reparation I can make, well, that's something, at least.