Painful Lives of Knitters

So, I've been taking this knitting class for about eight months. Each week, we gather, knit together carefully, and sloppily woven projects, try them on, ooh ahh at each other's craftiness, take out some stitches, put in others, and overall, truth be told, it's a blast. I love knitting, always have. It's cheaper to knit than to go to a therapist, and you can learn a lot about yourself when you're knitting, and while in the company of other knitters.

Two gatherings ago, my wallet disappeared. It was inside my purse, which was unattended during a knitting circle break. The purse was resting on a couch by its lonesome, in a room of approx. eight knitters, half of which are unemployed, or underemployed. Due to its therapeutic powers, knitting attracts people in tough situations, both emotionally, and financially. People that need to knit...

It's possible I randomly dropped my wallet en route from a store where I purchased water at shortly before the circle began, or I somehow dropped it while pulling out my camera to take a picture of an exotic looking bird near the bus stop on the way home from the knitting circle. That is what I hope happened, and what I have convinced myself happened. I'd rather have lost a wallet via space cadet powers than harbor a seed of doubt toward fellow knitters.

So, I'd flushed the events of last month out of my mind. I'd canceled my single credit card, lost the lame, laughable single dollar bill that was in my wallet, and the bus card. A trip to the DMV to get a new license went surprisingly well. In terms of loss, I didn't lose much except the trust I had in my fellow knitters, and that is what I am mourning far more than the loss itself.

Yesterday I went to the knitting circle with a new attitude. Peace! Love! Forget about it! Unlike the final circle of the last term, where a few of the knitters had been absent, I smiled at them, back in gear, knitting needles ready for action. Frankly, it was good to see them, and all the other knitters, too. Like I said, I love knitting, and knitters.

The assignment was to knit about turning points in your life when you knew you would never be the same, and then to make a quilt out of them. As we went around the room sharing our turning points, most rooted in deep pain as turning points often are, without going into any further details a few of the knitters had had arrests in their pasts, some of the felony sort. A drunken altercation with a federal marshal on a plane, a drug arrest from being framed by the girlfriend of a friend, a marriage brokered to keep a lover, and an immigrant here in the country, a lawsuit from a dogsitting accident, and a bunch of other stuff that resurrected that seed of doubt I had buried, determined to not think about ever again.

I am looking forward to the blankets that these knitters will create based on their turning points, as I'm sure they will be outstanding, and powerful. Tough life experiences have a way of creating beautiful works of art, I'm convinced of that. Knitters are very talented, yet perhaps very tortured, too. Now that I've knitted about this experience, I am actually feeling better, and can finally put it to rest. The seed of doubt is dead.