The Man Who Knits

A few weeks ago I was sitting at the church reception desk for which I volunteer, when a woman walked in from the parking lot. Often on my regular shift there’s quite a bit to be done around the office—mailings to be sent out, postcards needing postage, bulletins that have to be folded and collated and placed in cunning bundles in one of the hundreds of wicker baskets that the women of the church have apparently been hoarding since the original Easter. That kind of thing.

On this particular day, though, I’d zipped through my tasks, I’d read a couple of chapters in my book of the moment, tended to my flowers in Animal Crossing, and had finally opened my knitting box and hauled out the piece on which I’d been working for a while. Even rolled up, it was quite a huge creation. Picture, if you will, a hood that stretches up and over the top and back of the head. To either side, add long individual scarves that hang down a yard and a half to the ankles. The entire thing is rendered in garter stitch that makes it resemble chain mail. Whenever I’d work on it at home, Craig would stare at it and say at every opportunity, “We are the Knights Who Say Ni!”

There I was with about five pounds of wool in my lap, patiently knitting away, when the outside doors opened and a woman walked in. She wasn’t a church member. But she had an appointment with the pastor, and after I undertook a short trip on foot to ensure he was in his office, I walked back to the office to show her in. “Oh,” she said, stopping at my desk. “Are you the man who knits?”

Now, often when I’m just talking to people in a casual manner, that is, without planned talking points or in a non-public-speaking kind of way, I have a tendency to take long pauses between words and phrases. I do so not because I’m unskilled with my native tongue or because I’m having a moment of aphasia. It happens because my imagination is always racing ahead. My slower cognitive processes, like moving my lips and producing sounds, are lagging behind. When this stranger asked that question—Are you the man who knits?—I had several simultaneous visions.

One was of Geraldo Rivera, wearing one of his pinstripe suits hewn out of shiny fabric, and weighed down by a massive white calf-length coat made out of artificial Alaskan Husky fur, standing on a mountainside in a blinding snowstorm. “Experts say he’s a legend,” says Rivera into the TV camera lens as flakes accumulate on his thick mustache. “Locals in this remote region, however, tell another story.” Then onto the screen he thrusts a grainy black-and-white photograph, enlarged, featuring a blurry boot half-visible behind a tree. “Has one brave scientist finally found evidence of. . . .” he intones, as the show’s frantic theme music plays, “. . . THE MAN WHO KNITS?”

Another was a cinematic sweep through a cheap seaside carny from the nineteen-thirties. We see a flame-eater. A corseted girl on a unicycle. A guy in striped pants juggling knives. We pass the funhouse, the cotton candy vendor, and zoom into the sideshow. There, on plain display beneath their lurid posters are the outcasts, the freaks, the sad dregs that the curious pay their dimes to see so they can titter and shiver and return home secure in the knowledge that they’re better off than these caged oddities. The Gorilla Woman. The Dog-Faced Boy. A pair of sad Siamese Twins. The Rubber Man. And most frightening of all and rarely seen: THE MAN WHO KNITS.

A third was set at a zoo, where parents are noticing that their children are ignoring the monkeys working so hard to be entertaining, and instead are crowding around a cage where they laugh and point. One girl is even crying. It is THE MAN WHO KNITS, sitting on a stool with one knee crossed over the other, licking his lips so he can moisten the end of a piece of yarn to put it through the eye of a tapestry needles. “Get away!” shout the panicked mothers and fathers. “You’ll get ideas! Come watch the monkeys flinging shit at each other instead!”

As I say, all that passed through my head in the space of a second and a half while I stood there and looked at the woman. What came out of my mouth, eventually, was “Beg pardon?”

“The man who knits,” she repeated. “I heard that The Man Who Knits goes to this church.”

Another cinematic flash: this time of the housewives of Greenwich thronging the aisles of Whole Foods Market, dressed in their lululemon and Talbot’s, blond bobs swinging beneath their velvet headbands as in turn they whisper in each others’ ears. “That’s the place with THE MAN WHO KNITS.”

“I have a reputation, then?” I asked in the mildest of tones. Then I led her into the office.

Men who knit aren’t uncommon, of course. We are legion. But either we aren’t as open about taking our hobby out into public as we could be, or else everyone’s gender priorities are still screwed up. The sight of me with an acre of garter stitched Monty Python hood in my lap doesn’t tend to elicit so much the question of “Oh hey, what’re you making?” as it does barely-veiled variations of queries that essentially boil down to, “You KNIT? How can you?! Doesn’t your PENIS GET IN THE WAY?”

I took up knitting only two years ago, after we moved to the New York suburbs. Suddenly I didn’t have the space to have the glass workshop I kept in Michigan, where I made stained glass panels and lamps and worked glass in my kiln. That was all packed away and in storage, and there was no telling when I’d be able to get back to it again. And I didn’t choose knitting because I’d always wanted to do it, or anything. I’ve learned over the years that I need some kind of constructive hobby to keep my hands busy and my brain calm. In my new circumstances, I needed a hobby that was going to be small and self-contained, and used supplies I could get fairly easily. Coincidentally I also needed winter hats and scarves and gloves, since all of mine were packed away in storage, god knew where.

Also—and this part is most important—I needed to find a hobby that would give me an excuse to watch hours of cheesy television. The theory being, of course, that a creative occupation would cancel out my bad television choices, much as a single brussels sprout redeems a weekend of binging on brownies.

Knitting fit the bill. I could fit most of the components into a box. I could wear the stuff I made. Yarn could be colorful, like glass. So I bought a pair of cheap needles and a skein of cheap yarn to see if I could actually do it. Several hours later, I had a knotty, sweaty little swatch that I could barely cast off the needles, I’d pulled the yarn so tight. I couldn’t purl. It was too difficult and it reduced me to actual tears. But I could knit, dammit. Here I am almost exactly two years later, with a number of scarves, countless hats, several mittens, a couple of sweaters, and one long Knights Who Say Ni hood trailing behind him.

One of the things I’ve done over these last couple of years is to try to learn new techniques and face new challenges with every new project. I graduated from a simple scarf to a scarf that alternated colors, and that used some stitches I hadn’t encountered the first time around. From there I learned how to knit in the round and how to increase and decrease, and then how one could pick up little details like thumbs for mittens. The sweaters were an undergraduate course in themselves, as I dealt with all kinds of concepts that were new to me.

More often than not, the difficulty level of the projects I’d spy and like was way over my head. The pattern instructions would make my eyes cross and glaze. “That’s too hard,” I’d say, as I’d regretfully put the patterns in a queue so I could review them when I had the skill level to understand. The Knights of Ni hood was one of those deferred pattern. I saw it the first month I started, and when I couldn’t make head nor tail out of all the talk of short rows or provisional cast-ons, so I set it aside until a time when I could. It’d come, sooner or later. I just didn’t know when.

This last week, I discovered that the time is apparently now. When I’d chugged through the hood project, I discovered that what was once intimidating and scary was actually a little bit boring for my present skill level; there were times, needling my way down those Rapunzel-like scarves on the sides, the pattern was so easy that I wondered if the simplicity of it might make me give up the project out of tedium. Then right before Christmas I cast on another project on my needles that I’d delayed for a year and a half because it was so incomprehensible. I finished it in two sittings.

After that, I pondered what to do next. Which of the scary, out-of-reach patterns would I attempt? I hadn’t learned cables. You know, cables. The raised patterns on sweaters that can be either intricate or gently sinuous. I knew the theory behind cables. I just didn’t like cables. Cables reminded me of Christmas, 1977, when I was in seventh grade.

That was the Christmas on which I received no less than four sweaters from varying relatives in shades of decaying avocado green, bruise-colored puce, jaundice yellow, and raging venereal disease red, all thickly crusted with cables. The sweaters were warm, I’m sure, but like most of the clothing adults would pick out for me in those days none of them were quite right. The shades were of a identifiable hue that today, if a Project Runway contestant used any one of them, Tim Gunn would look exasperated, put his hands on his hips, and say, “Heavens to Betsy! Are you trying to resurrect nineteen-seventy-seven?!” But though of their era, they still weren’t quite the colors the popular kids wore at school. And cables were so out. I endured a winter and spring beneath those four awful sweaters, and once I grew out of them, I never wore cabled wool again.

It was with a sigh that I got out some scrap yarn and assayed a swatch with cables. It was easy, as I thought they would be. I tried another. Easy again. I also made the felicitous discovery that while cables on store-bought men’s sweaters are still kind of sickening, the cables one makes oneself are awesome.

It was when I went back to look at the patterns I’d queued over the last couple of years that I made a discovery. The night after the cable experiment I was looking through the PDF files I store on my tablet, one by one, trying to figure out which to tackle next. That doesn’t look hard anymore, I’d say about a sweater that previously seemed as mysterious and arcane as an old alchemic formula. Before, I would read a pattern and start to get confused after the initial instructions of Collect your yarn from the closet. I’d see the charts and array of abbreviations think, I could NEVER do that!, and work on something more suitable for my grasp.

In what seemed like a sudden turnaround, though, I was looking at all these patterns—all of them—and I would see how they worked, and think to myself, Yeah, I could do that. Or, I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t be all that tough. Or, I get how this chart works, now. Or, Maybe I haven’t tried this exact technique yet, but how tough could it be? It was a pretty great moment. It was like learning the building blocks of a foreign language well enough so that when I stepped into the public square of a European city, the people talking around me weren’t making mere noise, or individual occasional words connected by gibberish. It was as if the babble receded, and entire conversations took their place.

It was my Miracle Worker moment, dammit. Let me have it.

I know I haven’t learned everything. There’s no point in a hobby when there’s nothing left to explore. But I’m no longer going to look at a photograph of a knitted object and say to myself, “Oooo, that looks impossible. Maybe some day!”

I’m going to be all, “Girl, hand me my leather needle case. Then stand back for a couple of weeks and watch me knock that sucker right out.”

That’s right. Fear me. For I am The Man Who Knits.