All Wound Up

by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  All Wound Up copyright © 2011 by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.

  Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC

  an Andrews McMeel Universal company

  1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106

  E-ISBN: 978-1-4494-0208-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2010921939

  www.andrewsmcmeel.com

  Cover design by Erica Becker

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  CONTENTS

  This Isn’t Working

  January

  Ode to a Washer: A Love Story in Three Parts

  Personal Filters

  Out of the Closet

  A Little Demoralizing

  Death Notice

  Knit Junkie

  Things to Learn

  Mother’s Day

  Temporary Treasure

  That Sort of Mother

  An Irresponsible Multiplier

  The Point System

  Until We Meet Again

  October

  Failure to Think

  Ode to Slow

  Once Upon a Time

  The Fat Sweater

  Productive

  Losing Ground

  Landmines

  Crytoscopophilia

  Fair Trade

  The Deep Dark

  The Time of the Big Not Knitting

  Snacks

  The Cool Table

  THIS ISN’T WORKING

  itting in an office, not too long ago, I was knitting away while I waited my turn. There was a woman opposite me, about my age and station, who was waiting as well—or I should say “was waiting also,” because she really wasn’t waiting well at all. While I worked, turning useless wait time into a few inches of a sleeve, she rotated through a series of activities that included complaining, pacing, flipping through magazines, and, finally, sighing frequently and loudly. I’ve mothered three teenaged girls. I’m used to a flounce, a flop, and a sigh actually meaning that someone wants to talk, so when we got to the sixty-seventh sigh, I caught on that it might be a form of communication. “The wait’s getting to you?” I asked, smiling and continuing to knit.

  “It really is!” the woman exclaimed, while slamming another elderly magazine back onto the table. “This wait is way past stupid,” she pouted, then rearranged her hands in her lap again, wringing them briefly, and then finally crossing them across her chest. “You have a lot of patience,” she said, looking at my knitting.

  “I don’t really,” I replied, glancing at my chart and then back at my knitting. “I’d be out of my mind if I didn’t have something to do. The knitting really helps me be patient. Without it I’d have harassed the receptionist or rifled your purse for something interesting by now.” We laughed and chatted for a few minutes. She asked me what I was making, if it was hard, and whether it took me long to learn—all the standard questions—and then slouched in her chair, trying to be civil despite the fact that we’d been trapped in a government office for so long that we were visibly aging. Eventually she leaned forward, looked at my knitting, and said, “It looks like fun. I wish I had time to knit, but I’m just too busy.”

  There it was. That sentence. The one that puts me right over the top. The one for which I’ve yet to figure out a snappy comeback. Every time someone tells me that they don’t have time to knit, I come almost publicly undone—and it happens all the time. I can handle it when people say it might be too fiddly for them. I point out that it’s child labor in much of the world and that if a kid can do it, so can they. I can handle it when they tell me that they don’t think they’re smart enough. I repeat the child labor thing and point out that it’s really only two stitches, knit and purl, and that if they’re smart enough to read and write, a system with twenty-six movements and pieces of code, they should be able to manage a system with only two. If all else fails and they still look at me with doubt, or imply that I, as a knitter, possess more general skills than they do, then I point out that there are whole societies where everyone knits, and this means that it can’t be a skill that only a few genius souls can do. Anyone can knit, I tell them. A few people show a lot of talent for it, and they’ll knit better, but really, knitting is far easier than being literate, and our cultural expectation is that almost everyone be able to read.

  Those thoughts I understand, and I can talk with people about them without feeling anything other than a profound sense of boredom at the repetition. People honestly don’t know anything about knitting; it looks way trickier than it is, and they don’t think about how many smart things they already do each day and what that likely means for their general ability to manage string with a couple of sticks. I can handle being a walking public service announcement right up until someone says, “I wish I had time to knit,” and then the purple creeping rage starts to seep in, usually because the person who has just said this to me is almost always doing what I’m doing. This lady and I were both sitting in the office waiting room for almost an hour. I was knitting, she was sitting there, and she says she wishes she had time to knit? It was all I could do not to scream, “Newsflash! You have time right now, just like me!” but I didn’t, mostly because I think it would have been awkward after that, and I didn’t know how much longer I’d be trapped with her. We fell into an uncomfortable silence, me slightly pissed off, her with no idea why. I knitted. She sat. I thought.

  I know the lady probably didn’t mean to be disrespectful, and certainly didn’t intend for me to spend as much time thinking about the words “I wish I had time to knit” as I am now, but really, what was she saying? All I could hear is that because I was knitting she perceived that I had more time than she did, even though we both appeared to have the same amount of time available to us. If I had told her that I knit for several hours a day (which I didn’t—I thought I was in deep enough already) I could perhaps have understood it, but really, for all this lady knew, I only knit in government waiting rooms. Had I told her that I knit for several hours a day, she probably would have been absolutely gobsmacked at the huge amounts of time that I must have available to me.

  This woman was—or at least knew—someone who spent a lot of time just sitting passively in front of a screen, riding the subway, waiting in line, or being put on hold. In fact, she was almost certainly going home to plunk herself down on the couch to watch back-to-back episodes of America’s Next Top Model. She must have understood the concept of waiting or sitting idly for hours on end, but having something productive to fill all that idle time? She couldn’t understand that. She was reduced to saying, “I wish I had time to knit.” How did doing something productive become a symbol of having idle time, while being idle is seen as having no time? What’s driving that perception, and am I the only one who is confused by it?

  A couple of months ago I was knitting on the bus, and a lady (who was, by the way, just sitting there, without even a book or anything—it boggles the mind) did the whole knitting quiz thing with me. She asked what I was doing, what I was making, and, after I told her it was knitting and I was making socks, she asked how long it took to knit a pair of socks. I said it depended on a lot of things, but it took me about sixteen hours for a pair. Her eyes bugged out of her head, and then she shook her head at me like becoming a knitter was now completely out of the question. If it was going to take actual time to knit things—you know, time
that she could use to sit on the bus doing absolutely nothing—then she couldn’t relate to it at all. She shrugged her shoulders, looked at me like I was the biggest wingnut she’d ever come upon on a public transit system (which I’m totally not, I assure you), and said, “Well. It must be nice to have that kind of time.”

  Nice to have that kind of time? What kind of time are we talking about here? She was talking as if we had different sorts of time, but near as I could tell, I was on the bus and she was on the bus. I was knitting and churning out a sock, while she was sitting there doing an impression of a rock, and somehow I was the one who had a bucket of free time? That wasn’t the only thing: That lady had a tone, and it was a tone I hear all the time. It was the tone that says that if you have enough time to knit a sock, then you must be heading to a joyless, empty home, devoid of all interest and companionship and comforted only by cats. (For the record, I do have a cat, but I bet that woman does, too.)

  It is mind boggling to me that, in a culture where the average person spends four hours a day watching TV, knitting is perceived as doing less than nothing. Knitting is obviously productive. It’s making something, like woodworking or cooking. You can prove it by waving around a bunch of sweaters and half a hat you whacked out in one morning while converting useless time into clothing, and still for some insane reason, that actual production, which is no different than building a bookcase, is seen as an indicator that you have time, or sometimes even that you are wasting time. Bizarrely, this happens even though knitting has lots in common with other activities that we don’t think of as wasteful—and it is even more productive than lots of other things that are normalized entirely, like watching television while you sit as inert as dirt. I think about this all the time. How did the world around us develop this attitude?

  I’ve wondered if it’s because of how far removed most people are from the clothes they need. Not so long ago, at least relative to human history, knitting was seen as work. If you needed a pair of mittens, you either had to knit them or had to pay someone to knit them for you, but either way someone sitting and knitting certainly wasn’t seen as wasting time. They were either producing an item that they needed for their family or contributing to their family’s economy. Enter the Industrial Revolution, and mitten making started being done by machines. In no time at all, we’ve managed to become such a consumeristic, product-driven society that people have stopped thinking that it’s a waste to buy something you could make yourself and started thinking that it’s wasteful to make something you could be buying. All of our emphasis shifted to the exchange of cash for products, and maybe mitten making now isn’t worth the time. Is it because there’s a perception that the mittens we’re getting aren’t really made? That they just spring into being and so knitting mittens seems bonkers when you can simply buy the ones that grow on trees? I try to break it down, but it’s just such a crazy argument: “I don’t want to waste time making mittens; I want to spend time buying them.”

  Sometimes I wonder whether knitting, despite being really productive, doesn’t look productive to nonknitters. Knitting looks relaxing (at least once you’re past the initial sweating, staring, and swearing phase). It looks peaceful, restful, pleasant, and calming, and you know what? It is all of those things. A whole lot of knitters (myself included) knit because it makes us better people. Way better people. Without my knitting, I have a lot of trouble even being polite to great swathes of humanity, never mind being relaxed about it. When we sit there, knitting away, we’re having a grand time, and while we know it’s an intricate activity that’s great for our brains, to the uninitiated it may not look like we’re doing much. Well, not much except, at its best, a complex, repetitive, visual, spatial task that develops hand–eye coordination, enhances neural connectivity, and uses both hemispheres of the brain at once. That’s all, but people can’t see that, and maybe because we look like we’re relaxing they think we have all this time on our hands. No, wait. It can’t be that, or popping a DVD in the player and lying on the couch wouldn’t be considered a better way to spend time by so many people.

  Perhaps it’s simple defensiveness. Perhaps the people who say “I don’t have the time” are trying to justify their own slacker ways. Maybe, just maybe, when they see me using my time to churn something out while they’re just sitting there, some little voice in the back of their head is judging them. Perhaps, there is the briefest flash of insight, as my hands move and theirs don’t, as I make something and they don’t, as my time is spent and theirs is wasted, and they have a creeping little feeling deep down inside—a feeling that they don’t quite know how to identify, a feeling that’s super complex. Out of nowhere, out of the depths of their very souls, perhaps a little resonant voice says, “Well, look at that. That looks more interesting than just sitting here; we should knit too. Wouldn’t it be nice to be productive? Isn’t there something wrong with a life that has this much idleness in it? Aren’t we colossally bored by it all?” When that happens, I think the regular part of their brain panics, because it’s starting to look like the status quo is getting questioned, and that part of the personality in question—that part that likes things the way they are and loves stereotypes and embraces consumerism and sees no joy in work—picks up a metaphoric big stick and says the only thing that it can say in the face of an uprising. It says, “No, we can’t knit. We’re not smart enough, we don’t know how, learning something new is scary… and besides… we, um… we don’t have time! We’re too busy. Yeah, that’s it. With that, the idleness of a modern life is sanctified, most people slip back into compliant waiting and watching, saving time by buying what they need, confident that it would be a waste of time to make it, understanding that only grandmothers and terrifically boring people knit, and that if they knit like I did, sitting here in a government office, watching each other’s hair grow, it would be curtains for any sort of social life that they may have hoped for themselves.

  It has to be that, I tell myself, as I fill empty time with action. It has to be, because the alternative is that a whole lot of people have started thinking sideways, and that we live in a culture suddenly chock full of people who think that this simple, productive work that I’m doing is a sign that I don’t have enough real work to fill my hours, that the way I’ve chosen to fill idle moments is a sign that I am, indeed, more idle than they are, and that, for the record, watching TV with a bag of chips in your hand would be a lot more valid, a lot easier to understand, than choosing not to just sit here.

  That has to be it. I’m sure of it.

  JANUARY

  t is January. January means, here in Ontario, Canada, that things are cold. Not the sort of cold that’s an interesting footnote to the way that Mother Nature does things, but cold in the way that can kill people if they aren’t careful. It is cold that freezes the hairs in your nose the minute you take a breath, cold that makes your hands hurt and your feet ache. Cold that can cancel school, even without a snow day, because it isn’t safe to be outside long enough to walk there or even to wait for the bus. It is crazy, stupid cold that makes the snow squeak and the air sparkle, and it isn’t even “really cold” compared to other places in Canada. On this night, it is about –20º C / –4º F, and to go to the store I’m wearing my store-bought parka but have added handknit socks, a vest, a sweater, a hat, leg warmers, wristers, a scarf, and two pairs of mittens. Clad as I am, in handknits from head to toe, I trudge through the snow and cold, and I imagine that other people are looking at me and wishing that they could be me. I feel sure that they too wish that they were a knitter with the intelligence and skill to fortify themselves against the Canadian winter. They had to cop out and go to the store for their mittens, but look at me! Clearly, in any honest war against winter, I would be heralded as the winner. This is what I imagine they are thinking when they see me. In reality, they’re probably wondering why that crazy lady looks so proud to be wearing so much mismatched clothing… but they’re missing the point.

  This cold is
hard to explain to knitters who live in other places. It’s something that I struggle to explain to many of my friends in the United States. Almost all of your country, I remind them, is south of here. I know it gets cold in a great many places there. I have compared notes with knitters in Wisconsin and been satisfied that they know the kind of cold I’m talking about, but that’s just my point. That conversation only happens between one person who lives in the southernmost part of her country (me) and a knitter who lives in the northernmost part of theirs. Move a little bit in either direction and we have little to discuss. What gets lost, once you move out of that really narrow geographic point of comparison, is that this is the sort of cold that doesn’t suffer any fools. This sort of cold means that it matters if your car breaks down on a back road or if you lose your house keys. Here, it matters if you are wearing your mittens.

  A few years ago, when I was on a book deadline, a friend let me stay at their cabin. It was north of here, and it was isolated. It was more than a kilometer to the deserted road, and that kilometer wasn’t plowed, so the way in and out was by hiking, with snowshoes and a sled to pull your things on if you were lucky, and an exhausting trudge through the snow if you weren’t. (If you live in one of those aforementioned southern places, you might not have ever experienced a sincere desire for snowshoes. Walking through deep snow is exhausting—like walking through water. It adds resistance at best, and obstruction at worst. As in water, one cannot run in deep snow. Snowshoes mean that you walk on snow, rather than through it. They are a miracle.) This place was so far out in the middle of nowhere, and the Canadian winter so cold, that I was advised that if something went wrong, I should not hike out for help. It was around –30º C / –22º F when I got there, and that means that exposed skin can freeze (read: frostbite) in less than twenty minutes. In that sort of cold, no matter how quickly I walked, the cold would get me before I got to people. Being the sort of person who plans for emergencies, I asked what I should do if I were in trouble—if I couldn’t go for help, and I was there alone, what exactly was to be my plan? The gentleman I asked cocked his head and laughed. “Be smart,” he said. “Don’t get into trouble.”