Knitting Duh-rama!

The name of Knit in Public Day has, I think, an unfortunate tendency to imply that knitting is something shameful—a hobby best indulged behind closed doors, in private, and away from the scrutiny of polite gentlefolk. It somehow manages simultaneously to equate yarn work with both self abuse and the act of scarfing down cake frosting directly from the can with one’s fingers. But my monthly mostly men’s knitting group had participated in the June Knit in Public Day last year, and had enjoyed themselves immensely, so I agreed to join them and make an afternoon of it, my reputation as a genteel indoors private knitter be damned.

The event took place on the upper terrace of Bryant Park, right in the rear shadow of the main building of the New York Public Library. During the summers the terrace is shady and cool and dappled with both the waving branches of the London planetrees and the reflected surfaces of hundreds of windows along 42nd and 40th Streets. My knitting group arrived early so that we could congregate in roughly the same area and share the food we’d agreed to bring. We managed to grab a number of tables and chairs beneath the terrace umbrellas and stake our claim shortly before another hundred and fifty or more knitters from across the city filled in around us.

It was a gorgeous day. The temperature hovered in the lower seventies. The sun was brilliant and warm, the sky sapphire. It was just one of those perfect late spring afternoons that never seems to end, on which time ambles at its own leisurely pace, dilly-dallying in the sunshine and lingering on in the memory like a good dream. On the tables lay food enough to feed a small battalion, and all around them, in irregular clusters, sat good people unabashedly knitting. In public, no less. I’d never seen a more peaceful and unspoiled scene.

Until the Canadians invaded, that is. It was, as my knitting friend Kody later noted, “They infiltrated and took over before anyone knew what had happened! They’re like, aliens! Canadians are like, fucking body snatchers, man!”

What happened was this.

Kody and his puggle, Charlie, were sitting to my right; Kody and I were taking turns watering the dog and making sure he was happily supplied with veggie bacon-covered dried bananas treats. (I was tempted to snack on them myself.) Someone had been sitting in the two chairs to my left, but had abandoned them to join friends elsewhere. Almost the minute they’d been vacated, a young woman in her twenties sidled up. “I don’t have any friends here,” she said. “Would it be okay if I sat next to you guys?”

“Of course!” said Kody.

“We’ll be your friends,” I told her warmly.

I asked a few friendly questions as she set down her knitting bag and purse. She was from Canada—Alberta. “The boring part of Canada.” She was working in New York City for a four-year term, and had only been living there eight months of that. I asked how long she’d been knitting. “Oh, only four or five months,” she said.

Immediately I felt protective of this poor Canadian fledgling. I got her one of the bottles of water that Kody had provided for the group; I got her a paper plate with a sandwich and carrot sticks and one of my Hello Dolly bars. When she asked if we minded if her non-knitting sister joined us, I found another chair and made sure she had room and refreshment. I was determined, on such a beautiful afternoon and in such a serene urban setting, that no one was going to feel left out of Knit in Public Day. Especially two wholesome and innocent Canadian girls.

I thought it was odd, a few minutes later, though, when the non-knitting sister pulled out some kind of audio recording device and started to conduct an interview with the knitter—who had finally pulled out the project she was working on, which was quite a large and complex sweater worked at an exceedingly fine gauge. All I could do was look at the sweater sleeve I was halfway up, which in comparison looked like it had been knitted out of fisherman’s rope by two restaurant chopsticks . . . in the dark, by someone cross-eyed . . . and think to myself, Holy crap, and she’s only been knitting for four months??

Kody and I both watched with interest while the knitting sister made a rambling monologue about how there she was in Bryant Park at Knit in Public Day. Once they’d shut off the recording device, Kody asked, “What was all that about?”

“Are you with the CBC?” I wanted to know.

The girl laughed and said no, she and her sister had a knitting podcast. Opinions about yarn and patterns, and some knitting-related variety acts thrown in. I was simultaneously trying to think of what knitting variety acts could be (tap-dancing while knitting? Walking a tightrope of Vanna White-brand yarn?) while thinking to myself, Gee, a podcast is awfully ambitious for someone who’s only been knitting for four months, when she pulled out a professionally-printed card with her name, her podcast’s name, and her website’s address on it, and handed to me. I blinked, and Kody’s eyes narrowed, when with artful slight of hand she pulled from nowhere an entire stack of identical business cards a couple of inches thick, gave half to her sister, kept the other half for herself, and then asked us to watch her things while they both blended into the knitting crowd, passing them out to everyone.

The organizer of the event, the Asian owner of a yarn store named Knitty City, passed by while they were making their rounds. She spotted the Canadian girl’s sweater-in-progress lying on her chair. “How exquisite,” she commented. “The stitches are amazingly even. Is it yours?”

I told her that no, it wasn’t. “The woman it belongs to has only been knitting for four or five months.”

The Knitty City owner laughed as if I’d told her a delicious witticism, dabbed at my shoulder to suggest I not pull her leg any longer, and moved on.

Kody shook his head at me. “You don’t still believe that blatant lie, do you?”, he asked.

“But she said. . . .”

“Sweetie,” he said, patting my leg with mixed pity and condescension. “Mark my words. Those women are not what they seem.”

He was right on that count. The pair of them took a very, very long time to return to the seats we were saving. A few minutes later, the next thing I knew, the knitting sister was standing up on a chair in the middle of the upper terrace and making an impromptu speech thanking the owner of Knitty City for pulling the event together, and then announcing that the non-singing sister, who happened to be a cabaret artist, would be singing a few selections from her cabaret act. Songs about knitting, specifically. And oh, if anyone liked what they heard, they could buy the CD for only ten dollars. Then with a pleasant voice she launched into the Glenn Miller song called “Knit One, Purl Two.”

I looked at Kody. His jaw had dropped. Beside him, Charlie was panting, but his tail wasn’t wagging. “I told you,” Kody said. “See? Those bitches have hijacked this event.”

“Now, now,” I said.

“They came in all, Oh, we have no friends here! We don’t know anyone! And now look at them. They have hijacked the whole event, Vance.”

“I don’t think. . . .”

“Oh, we don’t know how to knit! Bullshit.”

“Well,” I said, trying not to concede the point entirely—though I was tempted to agree. “To see an opportunity and take advantage of it takes. . . .”

“Cunning, guile, and a criminal degree of anti-social behavior?” Kody suggested.

“. . . chutzpah?” is what I lamely finished with.

“Hmfph,” is how Kody replied, as he flounced back into his seat and started purling furiously at his scarf.

A dozen songs and several sold CDs later, the sisters returned. Kody glared at them. “Nice singing,” I said to the non-knitting sister. “Really good job.”

“Your hat has a hole in it,” said the knitting sister to Kody, apropos of nothing. Kody was wearing a knit cap from which, he told me later, Charlie had taken a substantial bite at the crown.

“Yais,” he said, more starchy than Queen Elizabeth watching Fergie turn somersaults. “I am aware.”

“Did you make it yourself?” she asked. I couldn’t tell whether she’d picked up on his coldness and was trying to warm him up, or what.

“In-deed ’tis,” he replied in flinty syllables.

“You did not,” she said. “It has a seam.”

Kody took off the hat, turned it inside out, and icily intoned, “Yes, it does. It is a seamed pattern. It was the first hat I ever made and my mother seamed it for me. Would you like for me to give you her phone number in Utah so that you can call her and CHECK UP ON ME?” His voice rose a little. “Any other questions? Oh yes, I have questions. Who are you people, for one? You come in here all innocence and hijack the event, and then you dare to question whether I knitted my own cap? Why yes, I knitted my own cap. So who are you people? ARE YOU EVEN CANADIAN?”

Well. The sisters gathered their things and fled, basically.

“And you!” Kody said to me, in their wake. “You’re too trusting! Too nice!”

“That’s possible,” I allowed.

“Don’t you know that Canadians are the enemy? They sent us Jason Priestly!”

“And Celine Dion,” I conceded.

“And Celine Dion!” he repeated, nailing home the point. He shook his head at me as he spread out Charlie’s blanket on the sidewalk. He threw himself down on it and began knitting furiously on his back, while his shirt rode up. He started grumbling to himself, sounding more like a dissatisfied dog than Charlie. “. . . Canadian terrorists,” he mumbled. “Blending in, taking over.”

“I just didn’t know knitting in public could lead to such drama,” I said to him.

He waved his needles at me sternly. “Just promise me you’ll beware the Canadians,” he ordered. “They’re never up to any good.”