Knitting on the 49th continued

Minty and Rory


What transpired after this was that his wife Minty and I started an online friendship where we chat daily about:

Our kids (she has an adorable baby who makes sucking sounds and 3 year old who says “Beaucoups owies” sweetly whereas I have a opinionated 14 year old and imperious 9 year old who yell “Mum!” rather rudely);

Our work day, she’s a legal aid lawyer who represents abused women and their children in family court and I was, until recently a women’s advocate, who worked with abused women and their children while they were in family court, (“Why doesn’t anyone get that violence against women affects their children too?”)

Our husbands’ foibles du jour (“He did what?”);

And our perspectives on being American/Canadian (“I thought 34C was your bra size not the temperature in Toronto!”/“Why would U.S. homeland security want to read our emails about kid barf?”)

Our most interesting exchanges however, centre on knitting. The subject lines of our emails include:

“Why do politicians in your country tell each other to stick to their knitting?”
“Do you have an easy poncho pattern?”
“Have you heard of Tricoteuse Sans Frontiers (Knitters without Borders)?”
“What do you do with a crinkly bottom?”
“It has a hole!”
“I have pattern confusion”

“How do I chain stitch button holes?”

Jack and Lawrence

Six months after we started we started our online exchanges we actually got to meet in person. I was in Long Beach for the National Needlework Association’s trade show. On my last day there Minty, Lawrence and their son Jack drove all the way down from their home near Culver City to supposedly take me for brunch on the beach but really for Minty to see the stash I was taking home from the show.

Over brunch Minty modeled a garter stitch asymmetrical poncho she made while Jack smushed pineapple all over the table and I worked on a pink chenille caplet. Somewhere between all the knit-speak and Jacksperanto (a newly discovered language only spoken by Jack Siu-Kootnikoff), Lawrence and I, aided by copious amounts of (what was probably unfairly traded, environmentally unfriendly and peasant exploiting) coffee, managed to catch up on the last 20 odd years of each others’ lives.

He hadn’t really changed much. He still had his quirks (“Gas may be more expensive in Canada but the taxes pay for things like medicare.”) and seemed even more normal than I remembered (“We’ll take you to the airport, no we insist.”). I could see how I was once in love (or was that in lust?) with him but I wasn’t any longer. Not for the obvious reasons like two decades had passed, we had partners and we had absolutely nothing in common but because Minty revealed to me at the end of our visit that Lawrence thought her knitting habit was “weird.”

My online friendship with Minty continues. We recently had our first online tiff after she found errors in a pattern I posted online. It involved lots of capitals and many exclamation points but was resolved it when I corrected the pattern for her and re-posted it.

Caplet made from Corrected and Reposted Pattern