The Group

Out of a perverse desire to meet some new people, I found myself stuffing a ball of yarn and my needles into my man-bag, last month, and taking a train into the city to attend a men’s knitting group.

This is usually the point of the story at which people start to laugh. So STOP THAT.

I took up knitting last winter because, as I tell people in all absolute seriousness, it was easier to learn to knit than it was to look through the boxes that comprise the eighty percent of our household that’s still in storage, in order to find the hats and scarves I’d packed away when we moved. I needed something crafty to do with my hands in the evenings when time moves slowly and I feel guilty about sitting on my rump watching TV, motionless. In my old home I had a basement studio devoted solely to my glass work, where I could putter to my heart’s content as I made lamps and windows and fused glass decorations. Here, I don’t have that room.

Knitting lets me work with color. It keeps my mind slightly occupied and my fingers dancing. It gives me an excuse to work my way through cheesetastic series television like Merlin and Primeval, all while I whip out all the winter accessories that I can stand to wear. So on the whole, it’s been a worthwhile hobby.

And it’s not as if I’ve found it a particularly shameful hobby, either. I’m not one of those men who grumbles about wimmin’s wurk as he hauls in the harvest, nor do I think proximity to a pair of knitting needles is automatically going to prompt people to think I’m a great big girly-man. If they do, I don’t really give a damn. I take knitting over to the church front desk when I’m down for a long shift. I’ve taken it to the coffee shop, when I want to get out of the house. So if I want to sit around with other men knitting, I say I’m entitled, thank you. Entitled!

The group takes place at a gay and lesbian center in Manhattan. There’s less than a half-dozen of us. For an hour and a half we sit around a table with our knitting projects. Then we pack up and go. I’m kind of entranced by the group, though, because of the personalities of the men who show up for it. I’m a little hesitant to write about them because it almost seems as if they’re characters for a one-act play I could write about a knitting group at a gay and lesbian center in Manhattan. At the same time, that’s pretty much exactly why I’m writing about them.

The Leader

The fact that the group has a leader might seem puzzling. But someone needs to send out the reminders, to reserve the room, to maintain the group’s listserv and its forums, and to collect the money to pay for the room’s rental at the end of every session. Our leader is a lean, tall, and lanky fellow from across the Atlantic; his lair is long and limp. He wears spectacles that give him a constant air of studiousness.

The Leader also has an air of mournful seriousness that’s only highlighted by his thick accent—a brogue that’s so pronounced and romantic that it makes every casual comment sound like a somber declaration made by a major character in a big-budget BBC production. Actually, with his big eyes and sober demeanor, the leader seems perpetually poised on the edge of breaking out into a song of howling anguish and rage, like Glen Hansard in Once.

“Has anyone ever worked with a cotton/acrylic blend wool?” someone will ask, for example.

“I did. One time.” The Leader will speak his words quietly, as if mulling over a memory so unspeakable and singular that it would make other human atrocities—Hiroshima, Tiananmen Square, the Holocaust—seem like trivialities. He’ll let loose his knitting needles, and fold his long, bony hands into his lap. Then he’ll brush the hair from his eyes and stare off into space. The rest of us will hush, rapt in the solemnity of the moment. “Just . . . one . . . time,” he’ll breathe.

The rest of us will move forward onto out chairs, afraid of breaking his silent reverie. What horrors is he seeing, in his mind’s eye? What terrible memories is he reliving? I can almost hear the cry of infants in the night, imagine the sounds of bombs and the terrifying wails of mothers.

Then he’ll sigh, and look around the table, meeting all of our glances, before sighing and uttering the words that have been torturing him for these last, long moments: “It was itchy.”

The Horny One

“Alex O’Loughlin,” says the Horny One. “On Hawaii Five-0. The new one, not the old one. Do you guys watch that? He’s hot.”

None of us watch the show, apparently. We all shake our heads in blank unrecognition.

“Oh my god, you got to watch that show. He’s hot!” The Horny One is a stout little Latin man who is busily crocheting a lap blanket, or an afghan or a placemat. I don’t know what. All crochet looks pretty much the same to me. “How about Jim Caviezel? Person of Interest?” Everyone shakes his head. We don’t know that one. “You guys! He’s hot! He’s hhhhhhot! I want him to bang me up one side of 13th and down the other! Day-um!”

The Horny One doesn’t so much participate in conversation as suddenly drop the names of guys he likes from obscure television shows into lulls in the conversation. Most of the references make me blink and think to myself, Is that show really still on?

“Jensen Ackles? Oh come on, guys. Supernatural? You just look at him and you know he can make a delivery better than UPS. Yee-ow!”

The Grandmother

“Back in the olden days, I never, ever knitted. Much as I wanted to! It wasn’t considered manly. When I grew up, if one was a male and one knitted, my dear. It meant that one was a homosexual.” The Grandmother sits at the table very primly, very properly, with his ankles neatly crossed and tucked beneath his chair. There’s something very fussy and prissy about him. He smells heavily of a cologne that is closer to lavender water than any man’s scent should be.

The Grandmother is wearing a garish pink beret that he’s crocheted himself. It’s hard as a rock. (I felt it.) The sweater he’s knitting is apparently designed for a small elephant. Piled on the table, it looks as if it would overload a high-capacity washing machine. “But so much has changed since then. Attitudes, my goodness, have changed. All the technology you young people use! And there’s so much talk about sex these days,” he’ll say, with a pointed look at the Horny One.

“Of course, some changes are for the better,” he’ll admit. “Look at the progress we’ve made. And of course, there’s not as much stigma about a man knitting as there once was. I’m not as young as I once was, but at least we have that.”

The Grandmother is roughly about the same age as I.

“So what hobby did you take up instead of knitting?” I ask, thinking in the back of my mind that I could at least share tales of the dark years in which I had to feign an interest in woodworking until my parents at last pulled me out of the Boy Scouts.

The Grandmother looks at me and shakes his head, as if I’m too young to understand. “It wasn’t until I came out that I was able at last to say, I don’t care how effeminate it looks, I want to knit. Before that, I was simply forced to take up crewel work and needlepoint!”

I bet his French knots were the hit of the football team.

The Know-It-All

“There’s a small sheep farm in the southwest of Kansas that makes a wool that would have been perfect for that sweater,” The Know-It-All declares from across the table. “But of course, they aren’t on the internet and they don’t sell by mail, and you really have to know how to find them, but of course, I’ve been friends with the owners for many years since we met at Rhinebeck. It helps to know people. I’m sure your sweater will look fine with that stuff you’re using,” he’ll tell The Leader, who will look at his knitting as if it was the boyfriend who betrayed his love, ruined his dreams, and caused him to lose sleep for a year. “Not everyone has the connections I do.”

The Know-It-All’s conversation is peppered with the most obscure references to techniques and knitting arcanities. I don’t so much listen to his lengthy speeches as set myself adrift in them and hope I’ll wash up ashore at some point. “. . . Based on a Civil War pattern that I researched when I was at the library in . . . Tunisian crochet . . . It’s certainly possible to dye the fabric while it’s on the warp and then to unweave it so that it produces an effect that’s . . . alum fixatives . . . and of course, they hired her to come in and completely revamp their colorways . . . of course they don’t allow just anyone to subscribe, but if you know the owner, as I do. . . .”

At the beginning of the meeting, he’ll show off all his projects he’s whipped up during the last month: a large crocheted afghan (Tunisian or not, I have no idea), a quartet of loom-woven tablecloths, a knitted blanket in an intricate design, a shawl of lace so intricate that Belgian nuns weep in fury, a sweater (made of Kansas wool?), and a photograph of a tapestry he’s working on ‘in his spare time’ when he’s not spinning his own wool from sheep he’s personally sheared. The project he’s working on at the table with the rest of us is a lap blanket made of crocheted granny squares. “I just needed something comforting to do after my bigger projects,” he says modestly. “I just started it a few nights ago.”

It’s roughly the size of the tarps they use to cover sailboats in winter.

The Crabby Old Man

“Yeah, there are other knitting groups for men around the city, but key-riiiiist,” says the Crabby Old Man to me. He’s a man in his seventies who speaks in the perpetually-annoyed tone of the much-aggrieved. “If it ain’t one thing with them, it’s another. Yap, yap, yap. You get a bunch of Nancys in the same god-damned room and what happens? They start yappin’ and yippin’ and everything goes all to hell. Key-riiiiist,” he’ll complain. “I tell ‘em, listen. Don’t Oh gurl me, son. I’m old enough to be your grandpappy and I could still whup your ass if I wanted!”

It bears mentioning that while he let loose with this diatribe, he was knitting an adorable baby jacket in pink wool.

The Crabby Old Man was the first of the group I met, when I walked into the appointed room for the first time. He stared at my outstretched hand as if I were offering him a palmful of ebola, and said, “Don’t bother telling me your name. I’m not gonna remember and I’m not even gonna try. Key-riiiist, at my age I’m lucky if I can remember whether I’m shittin’ in my diapers or peein’ in ‘em.”

It’s because of the Crabby Old Man and his hearing that the rest of us speak in raised voices, most of the time. Only the Know-It-All will persist in his monologue in soft, self-absorbed tones: “. . . really prefer double-pointed needles, and of course I use a set that was handmade from me from historic boxwood by a very tiny concern in the heart of Hampshire I was visiting during the summer of 2005. . . .”

“T. J. Thynes?” asks the Horny One. “Nobody? Seriously? Nobody? T. J. Thynes? He’s the hottest guy on Bones! I bet his bone. . . .”

“In my day, double-pointed needles were the only technique available for circular knitting,” sniffs the Grandmother. “We didn’t have these magic loops and double-circulars. . . .”

The Leader looks off into space with tormented eyes. “I use two circulars,” he announces. Everyone leans forward and waits for a verdict on them that should be accompanied by a haunting score from John Williams. It never comes.

The Crabby Old Man stares around the table at us like we’re all freaks. “What are you Nancys yappin’ about now? Yap, yap, yap. We’re men. We’re not supposed to be talkin’!” he announces, as he places a few deft purls into the absolutely darling powder-blue mittens he’s making for his grandson.

At the first meeting I attended, the Crabby Old Man told us about his experience with Hurricane Sandy. “Nah, I didn’t lose power. Are you kiddin’? Do I look like the kind who’d lose power?” he asked, as if the rest of us who did without for a week or more did so out of a lack of personal integrity, or some essential flaw that had nothing to do with the electrical companies. “And I had all kinds of god-damned people asking me if they could stay with me. Key-riiiiiist!”

“What did you tell them?” asked The Leader, looking as if he’d spent many a homeless cold night with only the sky for shelter.

“I told them no, goddamn it! Key-riiiiist, I’m not lettin’ people into my apartment just because they’ve got no power! I ain’t their god-damned granddaddy they can drop in on whenever they goddamned please! Oh, and that reminds me,” he told The Leader. “All those hats and scarves we made after Sandy, over at the senior center? I took them to the Red Cross and you know what they told me? They told me they were going to sell them! Sell them to the victims of Sandy!”

“That doesn’t sound right,” The Grandmother sniffed. “Are you sure?”

“Key-riiiiiist, I might be a hundred years old but I’m not deaf! I’m not senile!” The Crabby Old Man seems incensed that anyone would question him. “The Red Cross said they were gonna sell those god-damned hats and scarves instead of giving them to people who could use them. So you know what I did? I took all those god-damned hats and scarves and I walked out onto the street and I walked up to the first homeless asshole I saw. And then I threw them all at him and said, here, these are yours now! Selling them. Key-riiiiiist.”

It was roughly at this point that I looked at the Crabby Old Man and thought to myself, Key-riiiist. That’s me in another ten years.