I Grow Old

I am turning 60 today. For the last week a line from a poem has been going through my head:

“I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”

Not sure exactly what that means, but I like it. I take it as permission to stop worrying about conventions and how others might think I should think or dress or act. 

But today I’m thinking more serious thoughts too. Quite frankly, I don’t want to be 60. I didn’t like turning 50 and I dealt with that by not thinking about it much.  Today I really don’t like turning 60 and I’m making myself think about it.  It’s not really fear of death; I believe God will take care of me when I die. But it is a fear of becoming old and sick. It’s a fear of becoming useless and helpless.  Even more than that, it's regret about how much of my life has gone past and how many things there are that I would like to go back and change.  We don't get do-overs.

I often have music running through my head. Sometimes it’s random but sometimes it’s there to tell me something. Today it’s a song we sang in the church in Pittsburgh where David and I were married. I don’t remember all of it, but I remember these three lines:

     “For our life together we celebrate”

     “For the joy and for the pain we celebrate”

     “Celebrate the whole of it”

There is certainly a lot to celebrate about my life so far. I have not experienced the kind of pain and poverty that so many people in the world suffer from. I had good, supportive parents who made sure I got the good education which led to my career.  My husband and I will be celebrating our 35^th wedding anniversary in January. We have three interesting, creative children. And as of just yesterday we have an empty nest!   We belong to a wonderful church community and we have some wonderful friends.  I have done some worthwhile things – teaching, music, and at least some aspects of my parenting.

Still, like every single person in the world my life has included its share of pain. I am experiencing chronic physical pain at the moment and there has been pain in relationships and in my career.  Some of that pain has been of the "shit happens" variety, but  I am also very aware of ways in which I have caused or contributed to some of my own pain and given pain to others.   There is so much I would like to go back and fix. I can celebrate the joy but I don’t feel able to celebrate the pain and my first response is to rebel against this stupid “earworm”.

So I’m focusing on the third line of that song: “Celebrate the whole of it”. It is difficult to see my life so far as a whole instead of a tangle of details, let alone to celebrate it that way.  My decision for today is to take a leap of faith into that line and believe that my life so far, while imperfect, has overall been worth living and worth celebrating.   Instead of mentally replaying all of my failures I’m going to try remember that everyone (not just me) is imperfect and probably trying their best. I’m going to try to remember all of the good things in my life and the fact that God loves me no matter what.  

To celebrate this birthday (and perhaps to rebel against it just a little) I'm going out with my husband and one of my kids to see "Mary Poppins Returns".  Nobody is too old for Mary Poppins!  I loved her when I saw the first movie at the age of 5 and I loved her when I read the books and I can't wait to see this new chapter.  

When I was just about to finish this I got a wonderful text message from my wonderful sister:

                   "Happy Birthday!!! Can't believe one of us is 60!  Thank God it's you!"

I am very thankful for a sister who can make me laugh.  Nothing is as scary or horrible when you find a way to laugh at it.

Another Spritz Cookie Fail!

My mother was a great cook.  When I was a kid she let my sister and me help her, but she never wanted to give up complete control.  She wanted to be near the kitchen to hover and make sure we were doing everything just right.  One thing she made that I really loved was chocolate spritz cookies -- a soft cookie dough pressed through a cookie press to make little shapes.  She made these every year without fail at Christmas time and I loved helping her with them.

Today I remembered something I haven't thought about for decades: an occasion when Mom let me make spritz cookie dough without her help.  I must have been 10 or 11.  It was my turn the next day to bring a snack to a Camp Fire Girl meeting and I convinced her that I could make spritz cookie dough all by myself while she was working and then we could shape and bake the cookies later.  I proudly melted the chocolate and mixed up the dough on my own and set it aside to bake with her that evening.  I felt very proud of myself.

However, when it was time to shape the cookies after dinner we ran into some trouble; the dough wouldn't go smoothly through the cookie press.  Turns out I hadn't melted the chocolate squares quite carefully enough and there were little bits of unmelted chocolate in the dough -- pretty tiny chunks, but not big enough to fit through the little holes in the cookie press disks.  We ended up just shaping the dough by hand into little circles instead and the world went on turning, but in my memory she really gave me a hard time for that mistake.  The first time she trusted me to do a baking chore by myself and I had blown it!  I hadn't thought about that day in decades until today.

I am now quite a few years older than my mother was on the occasion of my memorable Spritz cookie fail.  I am also on some fairly strong pain pills while waiting for a back problem to be fixed.  They work, but they also make me kind of sleepy and absent-minded and lead to silly mistakes.  Still, Christmas isn't Christmas without cookies and today I decided it was the perfect days to make chocolate Spritz cookies.  I mixed up the dough and put it into the cookie press, thinking how nice it was to use the old favorite cookie recipes I remembered from childhood.  And then something else happened that I remembered from childhood: the dough had trouble fitting through the cookie press disks -- tiny little chunks of unmelted chocolate exactly like all those years ago!  I had forgotten to stir the chocolate carefully to make sure it was completely melted before I mixed it into the dough.  I was really mad at myself but started to see the funny side to it too.  Just when we think we're finally grown up we find ourselves regressing to childhood mistakes.  Nobody really grows up; we just like to think we do....

I managed to get a lot of the dough through the press, but many of the cookies are kind of "freckled" or misshapen.  Some bits of the dough wouldn't go through at all and I had to fish those bits out and make little circles by hand.   And you know what?  They aren't beautiful but they still taste good.  Life goes on and we'll have some nice cookies for Christmas.  I guess that's a double lesson from Mom -- strive for the best, but learn from your mistakes and improvise when you have to!

Here's wishing everyone a happy holiday free from cookie disasters, but also a sense of humor to get through the little things that sometimes go wrong.

A BSJ for Baby G

I am all done making the big scarves, mittens and hats for the Seafarers (using big fat yarn and big fat needles).  It was fun and felt rewarding, but after that I felt ready for a smaller project with smaller needles and yarn.

And what better than a baby sweater? This sweater is for Baby G, the daughter of a family friend.  I used the "Baby Surprise Jacket" pattern, by the famous and clever knitting designer Elizabeth Zimmermann.  I have made several of these and it's a pattern I always enjoy coming back to.  The sweaters are fun to make and the finished products are cute.

The "surprise" referred to in the title of this pattern is the fact that the pattern works even though it seems to make no sense at all while you're knitting it.  It's an exercise in faith.  You knit back and forth for 96 rows, making increases and decreases as directed, and it looks like a bunchy old rag.  Then you follow the directions and make a few folds and add a couple of little seams and -- surprise! -- you have a a baby sweater.  It never ceases to amaze me.

Since Baby G's mother is a physicist, I thought she would enjoy an illustration of how this sweater came together.  I have knitted this sweater with variegated yarn many times, but I thought this time I'd make it with four colors of yarn in stripes to make the construction a little clearer.  I like the way it came out.  (Thanks to my husband for taking me yarn shopping and helping me pick out the colors.  I would have gravitated towards bright colors and I think the result would have been a bit garish.  He has a better color sense than I do.  So much for gender stereotypes....)

I changed colors every 8 rows, which means that those 96 rows produced 12 stripes.  I told myself I would take a picture after finishing every stripe and I managed to remember 11 out of 12 times, which is pretty good.   The pictures were taken on a pair of regular-sized placemats, to give you an idea of the scale.


Stripe 1:

Stripe 2:

Stripe 3:

Stripe 4:

Stripe 5:

Stripe 6:

Stripe 7:

Stripe 8: (multiple increases in this stripe are are making a little ruffle at the top so the work no longer sits flat)

Stripe 9: (the ruffles are more noticeable now that there is more fabric on top of the increases)

(forgot to take a picture after stripe 10...)

Stripe 11: (Stripe 10 involved some back-and-forth knitting on the back of the sweater to provide extra space for the diaper bulge.  And you can see that at this point it's really impossible to lay the work out flat.)

Stripe 12 (This is the finished sweater before seaming.)

At this point, my husband suggested that I had knitted a "thnead".  (If you don't know what a thnead is, you need to review your Doctor Seuss.)

But now comes the magical folding step, which needs a video to do it justice:

 

After that, all I had to do was sew up the shoulder seams and add the buttons and it was done!:

 And a view from the back:

Then there was leftover yarn and I couldn't just let that go to waste.  I thought a garter stitch hat with some of the same colors would be a good choice to go with the garter stitch sweater:

I like how it came out, but when it was done I wasn't sure how well it would fit.  Since I had plenty of yarn left, I added a good old stretchy ribbed hat, which is a pretty safe bet.  And I learned a new skill for that: how to change colors in ribbing without those ugly "purl bumps".  Here is a link to the web page where I found this clever trick.  Here's how it looks:

A little odd looking without a head in it, but it will stretch to fit a range of head sizes.

With the little bit  of yarn I still had left over I made striped tube socks, using the same rib+stripe trick: 

And then I added a second pair of tube socks with fingering-weight yarn as well:

I made some DK-weight tube socks for Baby G earlier (in between fingering and worsted weight) and her mom said they worked very well and requested more.  So now she will have a pair in each of three weights of yarn and she can tell me which weight she likes best and I can make a few more in that weight. 

Credit for the tube sock idea: "Genevieve's Tube Socks" from Ravelry, created by one of my favorite knitting podcasters.  The idea is that for a baby who is growing rapidly and not walking yet there's no real reason for shaping a heel into a sock and a simple tube is good enough.  They are also knit in ribbing, so they're really stretchy and won't fall off so easily and will fit the baby through a few growth spurts.  I wish I had heard about these when my kids were small!  They could kick off socks in the blink of an eye.  The design made the socks 11" long and I couldn't quite picture shoving a baby's foot into a sock that long, so I made them a bit shorter (7-8"). 

Finally, here is a picture of everything together:

I hope Baby G and her family enjoy these.  I certainly enjoyed knitting them.

For fellow knitters, I will soon have notes about these projects on Ravelry (marglamb).