I didn’t know that you could buy yarn that hadn’t been knitted into something before you used it. My mother and grandmother, who had lived through war and the Great Depression, not to mention a grandfather who was less than enthusiastic about supporting the family, found many ways to cannibalize yarns that had already been made into sweaters and such.
A favorite source for my mother was the Army and Navy store where she could purchase deep, almost black, blue sweaters made for Navy personnel. She would bring them home and unravel each, starting at the bottom, carefully winding the yarn into a ball. From this she would craft sweaters for her four children. When this source was scarce, she would head for the Good Will on Third Avenue and find sweaters there. Not all of the wool from these garments was useful, but she would scavenge what she could, creating more colorful balls of wavy yarn. I learned to knit with these crinkled balls of yarn.
I was in college when I noticed that you could buy unused yarn, soft, luxuriously straight and easy to manipulate.
A useful skill for my mother and grandmother, knitting had become what today one might categorize as a viral passion among coeds at SU. There was store on Salina Street, somewhere near the Economy Bookstore, called the Knit Nook where female collegians such as myself were inveigled to purchase lovely yarns and needles packaged up in rectangular red and white striped carrying cases.
I am remembering this because I found one such box in the attic last week. It brought back my first earnest attempts at making an adult garment. I can clearly see my friends sitting in the living room of our residence, all quietly knitting. And that reminded me that times do change.
We existed with so much less than our children do, than our children expect. There was a small television in our house, but no outside antenna. We jury rigged an inside antenna assist by connecting it to a metal wastebasket with aluminum foil. We did this so that we could watch Rocky Squirrel, Natasha and Boris and such.
We had curfews and proctors who sat at a desk to make sure that you were in on time. To fail that meant to be penalized.
We wore skirts, blouses and sweaters to class, took voluminous notes by hand and studied, sometimes well into the night. A big spend for us would be a honey bun and coffee at one of the restaurants on Marshall Street. We expected that unacceptable work would be identified by our teachers so that we could learn from it.
There was, how can I capture this, a sense of civility in our relationships with others, with friends, with colleagues with our educators. The latter were honored for their knowledge and for the rigor they demanded.
It wasn’t that there weren’t bumps, difficulties, all the weaknesses that human interactions can generate, it is simply that we had more civilized ways of dealing with such things. When as a child I scrawled the word etiquette on the top of my elementary school page, it didn’t dawn on me that I was learning to work with crinkly as well as smooth yarn, to knit a life with what had been given in time honored respectful ways.
While I hated those dark blue bullet proof sweater my Mom knitted, I do love the lesson that came with them.
