Back Down From the Ceiling

About a month ago I was in craft store (I know—strange, right?) and I found myself wandering over to the crochet hooks. I do not, as a general rule, crochet anything other than the rare edging but, like all good knitters, I do keep them on hand for the weaving in of those pesky ends (hey, I’m an optimist—it could happen). Still, I hadn’t been thinking that I needed any crochet hooks so it was a bit odd…..but I went with the flow and purchased a smallish hook. When I got home, however, I realized that I already had one in exactly that size. Wondering yet again about my feeble memory, I tucked it into my knitting bag for the inevitable moment when one was lost.

A few weeks later, I happened to be at Knit for Life and a woman came by who normally attends another of our groups. She had no time to hang around, but wanted advice on how to close the seams on her very first ever knitting project: several pairs of baby booties for her sister’s child. They were the type that has a seam running up the foot and the back of the ankle, so I suggested crocheting the seams closed, thus leaving a flat seam for comfort, and I showed her how. She caught on quickly and liked the idea; then, however, she frowned and said “But I have to leave now, and I don’t have one of these hooks.”

Now, call me weird (you won’t be the first, I assure you) but I knew in that moment that this was why I had purchased the extra hook in the first place: because someone was going to need one. And the point to all this? I do have one, I promise. It’s that I really do believe things happen for a reason, a fact which was brought home to me yesterday as I was, to use complicated medical jargon, “completely freaking out”. Mr. K came home and explained to me that he is, in fact, quite excited about upcoming opportunities. While it is highly—HIGHLY—unlikely that he will keep his job, he will receive generous severance along with excellent recommendations and will be in the perfect position to find a new job that feeds his soul far more than his current one does. In other words, the selling of his company is his extra crochet hook. And, to stretch a metaphor significantly farther than is decent, the person who needs it is just waiting to be found.

All of which goes to say that I am doing much better today and am, in fact, very proud of and excited for Mr. K who is going to be starting a new adventure. And I am not panicking one bit—I’m just waiting to see who will ask for a crochet hook. (I simply cannot be trusted with metaphors…..) So my thanks for your concerns. I feel compelled to point out, too, that the amount of concern suggests that I may have sounded crazier than funny….which was not my intent. Forgive me if I alarmed you. Sometimes I suffer from the delusion that I am significantly funnier than I in fact am.

Anyway, I stopped on the way home from school yesterday (perfect score on my A & P test—the crowd goes wild!) to pick up a funny card for my adventuring hubby, and noted in it that I was sorry I had been unable to find a “Congratulations on losing your job” card. This tickled him, and got me thinking that the card makers have missed quite a few good markets. For instance, we could have a whole line of knitting cards. Haven’t you experienced many situations where one of these would have been appropriate?

“Congratulations on finding that alpaca for 25% off!”
“With sympathy for the discovery of a mistake 20 rows back in your complicated lace pattern.”
“Merry Christmas knitting!” (also known as “the season of banging your head repeatedly against the wall to ease the pain of realizing that you have 14 hours left to do 200 hours worth of knitting”)
(In honor of Jo at Celtic Memory yarns) “So sorry to hear about the loss of your fine cashmere”
“Congratulations on the purchase of your 100th ball of sock yarn!” (Yeah, go ahead and look like you don’t know who could do such a thing—you know who you are)
“Hang in there—just because it was supposed to be a shawl doesn’t mean it has to be!”
“Congratulations on finishing all your UFO.s!!” Okay, so this one won’t exactly fly off the shelves……

I won’t even get INTO the possibilities beyond knitting—like mother’s and father’s day cards for dysfunctional families (“There’s never been a mother like you. Really. “), or cards that say what you’re really thinking instead of what you should say (“Heard about your new promotion. How did THAT happen?” and “Happy Bosses Day. You’re not quite as stupid as you look.” And “Get well soon…but don’t hurry back to work. We only just now managed to unf*ck everything up.”) and so on. There’s a whole undiscovered market here, People, I’m telling you.

In the “you know you knit too much when….” Department, I must offer this one:

I was driving to school this morning, listening to the news and heard the traffic guy talking about a “blocking accident”…..and had already considered numerous possibilities involving the skewering of fingers with blocking pins or the tearing of fragile lace by overzealous tugging before it dawned on me that he wasn’t talking about knitting.

I also found myself in Statistics class today considering the odds of finishing a shawl without a single mistake in the lace, and how those odds changed with each additional project, and…..yeah, it’s a sickness. It’s a bad sickness. Hey........ is there a card for that?