Knitting as life teacher
Life lessons: I spent the summer after eighth grade sightreading. I fancied myself a serious flutist, and though I'm a bit fuzzy on the circumstances--perhaps I lost my first chair or my band director realized I couldn't count worth a damn--I made it through that hot July subdividing musical phrases and running scales until I ached from boredom. My flute teacher, a petite blonde who would eventually leave her older husband for an oboe player, found my phrasing remarkable for someone so young, but insisted on my working the classical flute exercises to correct my technical deficits.
While I don't ascribe to the you've-got-to-walk-before-you-can-run way of educating--for God's sake, give the child a taste of Bach so they know what they're walking toward--there comes a time to step back and do the hard technical work, leaving the great concerti for another day. This is where I stand with knitting.
"You just go off hell bent for leather," my mother says, and I would have to agree, although I wonder about the origins of that phrase. But it's true. I would rather dive into the deep end and dog paddle than concern myself with the quality of my breast stroke.
The strength of my creative endeavors has always rested on the creative side not the technical. When I first started writing professionally, my editor and one of the other reporters at the paper conducted what could only be described as an intervention, the gist of which concerned my complete inability to organize a story. The two of them sat me down and sentence by sentence showed me where I had gone awry. I suspect I cried later, but I improved, though this particular technial shortcoming would dog me for years, until another editor in a fit of aggravation wrote me a vitriolic critique, including a terse reference to "read Zinsser" (On Writing Well), that left me scream crying in my living room. From Zinsser I learned to corral my flights of language into tighter, better constructed sentences, and from this editor, whose resume I would years later have the pleasure to toss into the trash, how to craft a sensible article.
Whether I'm writing or knitting, I am burdoned with ideas, which makes it hard to step back and learn all the different decreases, or how garments fit together, or if you keep good notes, you won't have a mystery to solve when it comes to knitting the other sock. It isn't in my nature to balance check books or count rows, but if I can learn to muddle my way through a syncopated phrase, surely I can learn to keep better knitting notes and run to a reference if I need it.
9:02:07 AM 
|
|
