Knitting, Allende and Twelve Year Old Boys

Katherine here.

I feel like I'm living in triangles upon triangles. There's a job triangle that puts together 21 teachers, 17 school cultures and a driving and scheduling puzzle that would take a Zen master to do with lightness and efficiency. There is a home triangle composed of my friend Jim, my colleague Jim, and my lover Jim. There's a health triangle of doctors, and vitamins, and ghost boobs. Another health triangle is put together with running, bathing in the woods, and playing tennis. Lots of triangles.

There are numbers of triangles that live in my head when I wake up early in the morning. Sometimes the moon makes nifty shadows on the wall at 3:00 in the morning. There's kind of a Plato-in-the-cave effect caused by the railings of our bed that adds to my thoughtfulness at times as well.

Of late, the middle-of-the-night triangle marks a battle between my right and left brain. On the side of the triangle that keeps my right brain rattling are my recent knitting struggles and breakthroughs which go round and round in a daily vicious circle. They make me agonize over lace patterns in sleeves knit on the bias where each round has a different pattern. They may be too short.

There are similar problems with the lower body of the sweater. I've become a really fine knitter, I think. It's just really hard to make things fit. I thought losing the boobs after the last round of cancer would help make everything fit me. Hasn't worked that way.

The thought of un-doing and re-doing the sleeves is unbearable. The thought of losing the Lambspun turquoise yarn is unbearable. Stopping is unbearable. I'm only sane because I'm knitting a basic seed stitch scarf as a Christmas present for a friend.

The other two sides of the current nightly triangle are book-based and very left brained. I'm reading The Infinite Plan by Isabel Allende and The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen. Both are wonderful. Both have done a good job of making my brain whirl over what I am and what I am not.

I love Allende fiction. The men are almost always lovable monsters and the women who love them put up with so much and then the men finally learn mercy of some kind by the end of the book. She writes sexy stuff too.

Last night, while debating which knitting approach to take (to undo or not), I measured my life against Allende heroines. It's a hard thing to do when I only feel physically complete when Jim is holding me.

When I'm tired of playing ping pong with Allende and knitting, it's the book about T.S. Spivet that keeps me awake. T.S. is a gifted 12 year old who draws maps of everything in his life. He wins a Smithsonian Award and ends up hopping a freight train back east and then hitching a ride to DC to accept the award. It's a beautiful book. It could only be about a twelve year old boy. Stand By Me would never have worked if three girls went looking for a body. There is something magical about being a twelve year old boy.

I don't lay awake at night trying to be a twelve year old boy, but I try to figure out what the perfect, quintessential age is for a girl. I have gone through the stages of my life over and over and no memory triggers an emotion that is as pure as what the boys in Stand By Me feel or as pure as what T.S. Spivet sees. If I figure it out, I'll let you know.

Mostly, I like my triangles.