Merry Christmas

From Bella the Sumo Kitty

and the Entire Staff

of the Knitting Asylum

















"Sorry, but I have absolutley no idea what happened to the little white pom-pom on top. Now, may I please remove this ridiculous headdress?"

Happy Dump-mas!

This is the season of rollercoaster weather here in the southeastern part of the United States. While other people are having "fall," and people in Hawaii are having "tropical," we are having a thing called Winterfallspringwinterfallfallwinterspringfall.

You can tell you're in Louisiana if you have icicles on the camellias one day ...























and fog like this at dusk two days later ...



















...and you should have seen it the next morning. It was like trying to see through a milkshake, just looking out the kitchen window. I suspect that this is the "brooding Southern beauty" that Jo of Celtic Memory Yarns is so fond of.

Winterfallspringwinterfallfallwinterspringfall is confusing for creatures of a botanical inclination. The fall blooming flowers bloom, and then they get iced on. Since it is still summer at the end of September, the trees don't remember to start changing color till Halloween, and then, lazy things that they are, they wait until the first real freeze to realize that their leaves are supposed to come down, and because Winterspringfallwinterfallfallwinterspringfall is really a bit of a mouthful, this is when we have a season called

"Dump"

which lasts exactly 72 hours.

Now I have been up North during "fall."

"Fall" is when the air gets crisp and windy, and the trees turn bright colors, and, a little at a time, in nice leafy flurries, they shed their garb over a period of several weeks in a modest botanical burlesque.

"Dump" is kind of like "fall" in that the leaves do fall off the trees, but it's just that the weather down here provides the poor trees with no real clue as to which season it actually is from one day to the next, until one day, one of the trees (it's usually a sycamore) wakes up and hollers out to the rest of them,

"HOLY CRAP IT'S THE MIDDLE OF DECEMBER AND WE STILL HAVE LEAVES!!!!"

Unlike the slow and sultry feather-dance of Northern trees, Southern trees rip their clothes off all at once, like a couple of profoundly drunk college students after a kegger, and they dump all of their garb in one big, whooshy pile all over your roof and driveway, usually at about three o'clock in the morning.

"Whump."

It wakes you up.

"Dump" always happens right after you have cut your grass and cleaned your yard, and the next morning your driveway looks like this:




















Over the next 71 hours, the wind will divest the trees of the very few tenacious leaves who were afraid to jump, and Dump will be over, as fast as it began.

Which allows us to have "winter," or what passes for it down here.

And speaking of which, today is the Solstice, when people the world over celebrate the return of the sun. It is a day when our most ancient instincts call out to us, regardless of the faith we were raised in. At very least we will note that the calendar says it is the first day of winter.

But most people will find themselves outdoors a bit today, without even knowing why. Christians, Jews and persons of all denominational flavors, knowingingly or unknowingly, will today find themselves answering some primal call, in some small way, a response to a tiny cry from the collective subconscious.

It may manifest in an urge to take a brisk walk around the neighborhood and breathe deeply of the crisp air, or a sudden desire to build a fire and meditate in its soft light. You may light a candle for no particular reason, and reach spontaneously for a refreshing adult beverage, even if you're normally not inclined to tipple. You may find yourself tracking a bird in flight and, just for one moment, imagine yourself in the bird's place, soaring over the winter landscape. Or perhaps you will find yourself in your yard or the nearby woods, with a sharp knife in hand, gathering evergeen branches to grace your home for the holidays.

A Happy Solstice to all.

--Mambocat

Do not stop here.
Go directly to Yarn Harlot.

Today is not about the Knitting Asylum.

Today is about being part of a much bigger thing:




















Author Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, better known as the Yarn Harlot, has raised a challenge for all knitters.

To date, she has raised $120,000 for Doctors Without Borders through her blog. Her holiday challenge this year is to double that amount.

I will add my own challenge to go just a little further, and help her top the quarter-million-dollar mark.

Click directly here to connect to Yarn Harlot and read her December 15 post, "The Return of the Light."

Read the entire post, and follow the donation instructions.

Come back to the Knitting Asylum tomorrow, and I will tell you more about Dave's sweater, Mom's Einstein, and the glorious fact that my car is home for Christmas.

--Mambocat

Winn-Dixie Check-Out Truthiness

Today we have a quickie blog post because it was a long, weird, day involving yet another driver running into my vehicle du jour, this time while I was not even in it.

This time it was a hit-and-run driver, which is almost as good as an uninsured stripper (see my November 21 post).

But more on the car later. I just can't talk about cars right now without stammering and drooling and looking for things to break.

Good thing I already put away Mom's china.

Today I went to Winn-Dixie, among other things.

You know how sometimes you are standing in line in the grocery, and the total stranger in front of you, who is flipping through a magazine, suddenly turns around and requests your opinion on something amazing in People, Time, or Cosmo?

That person is usually me -- except I am the one who is knitting out of my purse and waving a sharp needle at the cover of the magazine to be sure your attention is correctly focused.

But today I got the tables turned on me. The lady in front of me spun around and thrust in my face a tabloid with a big ole honkin' picture of Britney Spears on the cover, and these were her exact words:

Magazine Lady: "Hey, ya see this headline?" The Magazine Lady is pointing to the cover and reading it out loud: "Britney's Parents Plead With Her To Stop Partying With Paris Hilton Before She Loses Custody of Kids!"

Me: "I'd love to hear that conversation..."

Magazine Lady: "What do her parents expect her to do, go home to Kentwood** and act like she was brought up right? Honey, she didn't learn how to act like trash in California, that's how she got there!"

--Mambocat

** I feel obliged to add an explanatory note for readers not hailing from Louisiana. If Britney had not become famous, she would, at this exact point in the space-time continuum, be hearing something eerily similar from her mother: "Britney, if you don't quit working at that strip club and stop partying all night with that girl 'Destiny,' the courts are gonna take away your kids!"

Same conversation. Less money.

Wooly Things and
Tinkly Things

Have a look at the start of the corrugated-rib sleeve of Dave 's sweater in LaLana's Forever Random. I am using two closely related colorways: one is mostly sandstone colors with a sprinkling of spruce and sage green. The other is mostly sage and spruce, with a bit of sandstone.


















I am cranking away madly at this, because it is a Christmas gift. When I say "cranking away madly," I mean that I am knitting on Dave's sweater every single minute that I am not working, cooking, doing the rest of Christmas, brushing my teeth, finishing the work on Mom's house, driving, feeding cats, paying bills, knitting Mom's Einstein, going to the store, taking a shower, or sleeping, which I really need to do soon, because it is midnight already. But first I have to run the pipes, because it is still phrasin.'

I love this yarn. Love. It.

It is soft and dyed with natural plant dyes. It retains lanolin from the sheep which provided the fleece. It makes me feel peaceful as it flows through my fingers. The colors are wonderful. I tried a photo against a light background first, but the colors looked funny, so I placed the sleeve on a maple chair and the photo came out fairly true to color. I love the way it looks like the colors of the woods in autumn.

I even hauled the sweater down to Mom's house so I could work on it for awhile when I took a break from helping her get re-settled in her house, now that nearly all of the repair work is done.

Now that we are moving things back into Mom's freshly-repaired kitchen, one of the matters that needs to be addressed is what to do about the dishes. Because of the tree falling on the house, what was left of the kitchen got rained into, and what didn't get broken, got mildewed and molded on, and then it got packed away until now.

New Orleanians are calling this dried-on gunk "Katrina Crud." The natives spend a lot of time swapping tips for removing it. The big winners are:

1. Dawn dishwashing liquid, sinkfuls and bathtubs full of warm water, and a good long soak therein, for anything too delicate to put in the dishwasher.
2. Cascade 2-in-1 Action Packs for anything that conceivably can be put in the dishwasher, followed by a bleach cycle.
3. Oxyclean for anything of the fabric persuasion
4. Bleach. Rivers of bleach.
5. Nail brushes, old toothbrushes and baby bottle brushes.

In addition to all this, in my own personal regimen, everything gets a final soak in veterinary sanitizer, and then a good rinse, before it goes back on the shelves. I firmly believe in veterinary sanitizer. I know what it does to scary microbes out there that most people don't know about.

Even if you live in the un-flooded slice of New Orleans, you still had a fair representation of creeping mold on just about everything in your house, if you got any water intrusion from broken windows or a damaged roof. So anything you might possibly eat or drink out of -- like Granny's china in the dining room cabinets -- needs The Treatment, and all the furniture and carpet needs to be cleaned and freshened as well.

China is scary. I am flat-out terrified of china and crystal, and always have been.

Being in charge of cleaning all the Katrina Crud off my mother's dainty, breaky, tinkly things makes me more than just a little bit nervous. For the first decade or so of my life, I was forbidden to go anywhere near it.

For my readers in Oz, I thought I'd celebrate cleaning this stuff without breaking it, by having a nice glass of South Australian Shiraz.

A lot of this stuff used to reside in the parlor belonging to my father's mother. On 363 days of the year, Grandma Margaret permitted children to do precisely one thing in her parlor: walk directly through it.

On Christmas, you went in there to open your presents and on Easter you went in there while you still had your church clothes on, to have punch and cookies from the Italian bakery.

Under no circumstances were you to touch anything that was on a shelf, in a cabinet, or on a side table.

This is the same stuff.

I know what you're thinking: "Don't be silly. You're all grown up now, with grey hair and reading glasses and everything. It's different. You'll be fine."

Before you continue on that path of kindly thoughts, I should tell you that, right this very minute, am nursing a couple of bruised ribs on my starboard side, that I sustained in a dumpster-related incident.

You see, I needed boxes for some of my office stuff. So I went to the dumpster at the LWS (local wine shop) because they always are inundated with nice, clean, empty boxes, which you can just pick off the top of the pile. However, on this occasion, the dumpster-dumping service apparently had arrived earlier in the day, so the dumpster was not quite as full as usual, and then, so I could be taller, I stacked up some of those red plastic crates the Coca-Cola people deliver 2-liter bottles in, and ... let's just say that this is not an OSHA-approved use for red plastic Coke crates, and that red plastic Coke crates are especially not designed to make you taller unless you weigh a little less than I do. But don't worry -- it's only a bruise, and I didn't need to do anything even more embarrassing, like go to the doctor and try to explain it.

So, remembering those dumpster-related bruises, if you want to get a really good idea of what it's like to put me in charge of delicate vases and crystal glasses and Grandma's eggshell-thin china, try to imagine putting Steve Irwin in charge of a tea party.

In the field.

With crocodiles.

Ordinarily, the only remotely dainty thing I do is knitting lace, and I do not even do this in a dainty manner, unless swearing and throwing it across the room counts as "dainty."

There is another critical consideration in lace-making:

I cannot break it.

I can drop it, squish it, frog it, cuss at it, stretch it, sit on it, stain it, abuse it, screw it up, rip it out, steek it, felt it, spill things on it, and possibly even tear it if I tried hard enough.

But I cannot break lace just by breathing on it.

The same is not true of Mom's tinkly things.

I look at this stuff and try to imagine a time when people actually used this stuff on anything but the highest occasions. Did people ever actually slow down enough to pour water into a delicate glass pitcher, and from that into delicate stemware, which was lifted ever so carefully to the lips? Was there ever a time when people could keep cups and saucers in the same place, without carrying them all over the house to set upon countertops and desks, to slurp at their coffee while they did something else?

Did people ever actually do one thing at a time?

Washing these things forces me to do one thing at a time, and I suspect that my blood oxygen level drops considerably from holding my breath while doing so.

Somehow, I got through boxes and boxes of plates and glasses and suchlike almost uneventfully.

Except for one item.

I put one of a pair of Granny's white porcelain flower vases into a sinkful of lukewarm water. By itself, with a rubber pad on the bottom of the sink. Very gently. Didn't bounce it. I let it soak for awhile and then I came back with a nail brush.

The other vase had come out just fine.

But when I picked this one up, a piece fell off.

I panicked for a second, and then I studied the miscreant piece of porcelain

There was a trace of brown substance around the edges.

I stared at it incomprehensibly, and then the light bulb went on. Long ago, someone had broken it, and glued it back on with the kind of glue you make from boiled horses or something like that. Ugh. The glue had dissolved in the warm water, and thusly the piece fell off.

Whoever did this long-ago repair job did it well, because I had never noticed the repair before. When I showed it to Mom, she didn't remember noticing it either.

So I washed the component parts and allowed them to dry thoroughly.

Superglue to the rescue.

At home today, I had a cursory look at our own dishes.

Dave and I have some nice, white, textured china, passed down from Dave's Mom when we got married, which is thick enough to not be frightened of, and which can be placed in the dishwasher, but we hardly ever use that because it is too nice. We had an exceedingly informal wedding, so we didn't register for crystal and all kinds of stuff like that.

We also have some of Dave's Granny's china, which is waywayway too delicate for me to put red beans and rice in. That stuff stays in the china closet, along with the matching teacups.

Our own wineglasses came from the restaurant supply store. There is good reason for this.

Otherwise, most of our dishes look like this:
























Me-proof.

--Mambocat

Phrasin.'

For folks in the Northern part of the United States and in other countries, "freezing" is the point where water becomes solid. This happens at 32 degrees Fahrenheit or 0 degrees Celsius, depending on your national or scientific affiliations.

In the American South, you have "freezing" and you have "phrasin.'" "Freezing" is what you do with the catfish after you clean them.

"Phrasin'" is a measure of weather. "Phrasin'" does not only mean that the temperature is below the ice-making point. "Phrasin'" means that the wind is blowing, and/or that there is some sort of precipitation, and the house is drafty, and the kids are running around outside without their coats on and will catch their deaths, because it is phrasin.'

This means that it is definitely cold enough for a coat and sweater, and possibly long underwear as well. For example, "Russell, put your coat and sweater on , it is phrasin' outside!"

Phrasin' is always uttered in bold paranthesis, with an exclamation point after the sentence in which it is used. If it's phrasin' and the wind is blowing and it is also sleeting, it becomes a three-syllable word: "Laurie, don't you dare go outta this house without a hat on, it is fuh-raisin' outside!"

This is the time of year when I wonder:

Just exactly at what point do you folks up North think it is phrasin' enough to wear wool?

How deeply cold does it have to be?

I see y'all carrying on about this on the KnitList and KnitU all the time, just fretting away like a mockingbird who's discovered the rubber snake you put in the pear tree:

"Dear fellow knitters, I hope you can help me. I have a friend who lives in Mississippi and she wants a sweater for Christmas but I don't know what kind of yarn to use because you just can't ever wear wool down there because it never gets cold. I have no idea what to knit for her, whatever shall I do? Thanks so much, Judy in North Dakota"

Dear Judy in North Dakota: I am in Baton Rouge, about 45 minutes south of the Mississippi border. Right this very minute, we have a stiff wind from the North and ice crystals are forming in the water dish we keep outside near the food for the feral cats we manage. It is phrasin.'! So you go right ahead and knit your Mississippi friend a wool sweater, and in a few minutes, I will put on a sweater so I can begin a Southern ritual called:

Running The Pipes

If you're not from here, "Running The Pipes" might sound vaguely familiar. I'm imagining one of my readers up in Wisconsin calling out down the hall: "Honey ... running the pipes ... isn't that something they do at Celt-Fest after they have the sheep-herding exhibitions and serve the Haggas? Is it like hurling?"

Agreed, "Running the Pipes" does sound like something involving horses, bagpipes, whiskey and men in kilts.

But it's not nearly that interesting. "Running the pipes" means running around your house trickling every single faucet so that a steady stream runs all night, and leaving your lawn sprinkler on all night, too, so that the continuous flow of water through your pipes will keep them all from exploding from the expansion of the gradually freezing liquid carried within, and prevent you from having to take out a second mortgage on your house so the plumber can crawl under your house and fix the daggum pipes.

And if it gets really, really, fuh-raisin', like in the teens, we have to drain the pipes entriely -- shut them right off and empty them, and not turn them on again until it rises above the freezing point the next day.

So my question is, to all you folks up there who wonder when us Southern types get to wear wool: just exactly when do you think it's cold enough to put on a sweater? My vote is, if ice is forming on anything, that justifies digging out a nice, cuddly merino sweater. And a scarf and a hat and socks and my fingerless mitts, too.

I'm really curious about this because I see a fair number of Northerners at Green Bay Packers games wearing nothing but tightie-whities, body paint and a Cheeshead foam hat in December. Now I understand that most of our body heat is lost through the head, so I see where the hat comes in handy, and maybe that body paint was developed by NASA and has a super-high R-factor, in which case I would like to buy enough to paint our house, and if you could send me enough of those Cheesehead hats to fill our attic, I'd like that as well. You see, when I watch a Packers game and I see snow falling -- lots and lots of snow, snow falling the way it rains down here -- and I see those guys in the body paint and the Cheesehead hats, I think:

"They must be fuh-raisin!"

Now I'm pretty sure they have a certain amount of Captain in them as well, which has good antifreeze properties.

But still.

Isn't it cold enough for a sweater?

Anyway, that's all for tonight. I gotta go run the pipes.

--Mambocat

Nothing is wrong with my camera.

This is a photo of a copy of a photo.

This is a photo of a copy of a photo of two of the best people I have ever known:






















The photo is blurry because, like the memory of the two men in it, it has been reconstructed many times. But neither the photo nor their memory will ever be so distorted that I won't recognize them.

This is my favorite picture of these two guys. I don't mind that it's a little fuzzy around the edges. So were they.

The best people always are.

Their names are Simon Jennings and David Collins.

They are dead.

They have been dead for over a decade. They are not the only people I knew who died from AIDS, but they are the two whose absence hurts the most.

I could go on for days about Simon and David. I could tell you that David was a brilliant wit and a stunning architectural interiors designer. I could tell you that Simon was an amazing graphic artist, a computer programmer, and that he built a harpsichord from scratch.

I could carry on about their shared (and skilled) passion for cooking and costume design, our long-ago scheme to start a costume company, and all sorts of things about renovating houses.

I could regale you with tales of barbecues, lucky socks, Elrod the alley cat, college restaurant jobs, The Great Indoor Beach Party, Halloween, movable feasts, the Doctor Who scarf, book deadlines, Himalayan cats, candlemaking, Mardi Gras parades, honeybees, scuba diving, green tennis shoes, banana trees, doilies, the Star Trek pledge, geckoes, The Incredible Disappearing Wine, ghost stories, tomato-basil soup, Mesa Verde, the never-ending sweater, Christmas caroling, rum punch, Mrs. Werdna Zwerdling, and a magical Golden Retriever named Jake.

I could also tell you about gathering with friends and family to make Simon and David's panel for the AIDS Quilt.

But all of these tales would be out of context, and, while variously touching, serious and amusing, they could not fully convey the incredile human warmth emanating from both of these guys.

After they passed on, their friends received the ongoing gift of friendship from Simon's parents, David's sister Sharon, and Simon's brother Rob. Simon's dad, Louis, still wears a scarf I made for Simon, featuring a cable motif of Barbabra Walker's interwtwined trees.

Simon and David were cremated, and their remains waited around for a few years until they were joined by Jake, their deliriously loving four-legged kid. Simon and David got Jake as a puppy when they first moved in together.

Jake outlived their relationship by three years. He was almost seventeen when he died. Everyone agreed that Jake should be cremated, too.

The ashes of Simon, David and Jake were taken to their favorite diving spot, and scattered to the currents of the ocean.

Today is World AIDS Day.

I started to make a post this morning, but I had a problem.

You see, a funny thing happened on the way to the condoms.

My friend Naomi Dagen Bloom of Cityworm (yes, Naomi of the knitted compost worms) and A Little Red Hen was kind enough to personally make an amulet bag for me to wear today on World AIDS Day, to remember those who have died and to educate those who are still here. It is a wonderful, sequined and buttoned bag in the spirit of Mardi Gras -- a defiantly cheerful and eye-catching pouch.

I promised Naomi that I would both wear it today, and take a picture of it, and blog about it.

So when it arrived in the mail, I admired it, and put it in a safe place near my picture of Simon and David, so they would know about it, and so it would be handy today for blogging.

And there it sat until this morning.

When I awoke, it was gone. And it wasn't in a place where the cats could have gotten to it.

I searched high and low. Far and wide. Port and starboard.

I blamed cats. I looked in places I was certain it was not -- the sock drawer, the refrigerator, in the sack of books going back to the library, in my WIP bag, in my toolbox where I went for a screwdriver this morning. I blamed the stripper who ran into my car (everything bad in the past few weeks has become her fault -- it's very convenient).

The condom-bag amulet was missing all day. I couldn't put off the day forever because of my blog post, so gave up the search and I did work-hours things. I went to the bank and ran a few errands and wrote a proposal for a client. I decided I would have to post tonight without a picture of the bag, and that I would apologize to Naomi.

So after dinner and laundry and dishes were done, and the garbage and recycling and litterbox contents were put out at the curb, I sat down at the computer to write this post, and tell you about Simon and David, and I looked up.

And there it was:

























On top of the printer, right where I most definitely, not under any circumstances, did not put it.

I know Simon and David had something to do with this.

Naomi, I think the guys liked your amulet. In fact, I think they borrowed it for awhile. They do things like that sometimes.

It is their way of saying hello.

Back at ya, guys. We still miss you.

Let's pause a moment tonight, before we tuck into bed or before we check into work if we have a night shift, to remember those who have died.

Let's also pause a moment to do this for those with HIV/AIDS who still live: Please go to this site and light a virtual candle. Bristol-Myers will donate one dollar for AIDS research for each person who clicks on this site and lights a candle.

And finally, let's remember that no one is immune. We all want to believe that if we've been lucky so far, if we are in a stable realtionship, that it won't happen to us.

But life brings change. Relationships come and go. As we get older, people divorce and become sexually active with new partners. People of all ages can have partners who are unfaithful -- and who sometimes are unfaithful both secretly and in dangerous ways.

It can happen to anyone.

Y'all be careful out there. And think about those who are gone.

--Mambocat

Evel Knievel and the
Knittting Needles
Of Doom

Saturday morning, I was at the LYS when a younger woman came in with a little girl in tow. The child, about nine years of age, had a face like a porcelain doll, with straight, shining hair the color of melted chocolate. She wore unsullied jeans and an immaculate hand-knit cabled sweater the exact same shade of pink as a white rabbit's ear. As her mother prowled around the shop, this demure little girl petted various skeins of yarn as gently as if they were newborn kittens.

When the mother had collected up her yarn and was ready to check out, the little girl approached her, held up a skein of fluffy magenta wool, and said, "Mom, will you teach me how to knit?"

Everyone within earshot did what every knitter anywhere does when we hear these words. We all turned to the child, like the Priestesses of the Lady of the Lake smiling upon the prepubescent Morgaine as she set foot on the shores of Avalon for the first time. We were thinking, "Welcome, child. Welcome to the sisterhood."

The mother looks worried. "I don't know," she said. "You can hurt yourself with knitting needles. You have to be really careful. You might fall down, or something. Maybe when you're a little older?"

The child's lower lip grows to the size of a portabello mushroom and disappointment fills her big green eyes.

"Pleeeeeaaase?"

We of the Sisterhood hold our collective breath, in awe of this earnest young acolyte. We glance at each other, trying to comprehend this mother's lunatic reluctance to teach her child to knit.

The mother crumples her eyebrows, looks at the LYS owner and asks, as though it is a perfectly normal thing, like she's asking the guy at the deli counter for a half-pound of salami:

"Do you have any safety needles for children?"

I am a child of the Sixties, when we applied clamp-on roller skates to our sneakers without adult supervision, sailed down steep levee access roads on skateboards, jumped on pogo sitcks, and rode bicycles ... all without helmets, kneepads, elbow pads and pinky-finger pads. We rode other kids on the handlebars and climbed pecan trees and built treehouses waaaaaay up there, out of scrap lumber and odd nails we found.

It's not that our parents didn't care. They cared a lot. In fact, they were damned strict, but they firmly believed that nearly all childhood doom could be kept at bay by cod-liver oil, Flintstones vitamins, booster shots, not running with scissors, staying out of the street, avoiding unfamiliar dogs, not talking to strangers, keeping a dime in your shoe in case you need to use a pay phone, lighting firecrackers on the sidewalk (not in your hand), and coming home the exact instant the streetlights came on.

That was it. Along with the all-purpose, "be careful," those were all the safety rules.

The problem is, they had no idea of the things we could think up while they had their backs turned washing the dishes.

They also did not know that kids could play Evel Knievel without talking to strangers, playing in the street, running with scissors or sticking a hairpin into an electric socket.

Let's get in the Wayback Machine and go to a crowded New Orleans neighborhood sometime in the spring of 1972. I am the world's tommiest tomboy. The only remotely girly thing I do is knitting, but I do not knit girly things. Knitting is cool because you can make hippie stuff out of Red Heart "Mexicali" yarn. I have also taught all of my guy pals how to make I-cord with a knitting spool, which makes far-out, psychedelic streamers to hang from your bike handlebars, especially if you put macrame beads on the ends.

It is a fine, cool, Saturday morning. I am hanging out with my guy friends -- Jack, Sean and Shelley (not that we had any Irish Catholics in our neighborhood or anything like that).

Scooby-Doo, the Monkees, and Johnny Quest are off the air for the morning, and we have all been urged by various mothers to Get Out of The House and Get Some Sunshine.

Without sunscreen.

The four of us considered ourselves to be exceedingly "boss," which meant that we were cool indeed. We had seen Billy Jack at the movies. We had Beatles records and had discovered Led Zeppelin. We had slit fluorescent-colored drinking straws lengthwise, and slipped them onto our bicycle spokes, where they made a satisfying rattling noise. We had baseball cards and glow-in-the-dark Frisbees. We had snuck into the hippies' backyard on the other side of our block, and had seen their marijuana plants with our very own eyes.

Now, dear reader, think back on the young mother in the LYS. What do you think the odds are that the following little drama would happen today, at her house?


What Happens When You Play Evel Knievel
New Orleans Children's Film Studio
Copyright (C) 1972, all rights reserved:

Opening scene: Four kids (three rangy boys and a black-haired, pony-tailed girl in a Notre Dame sweatshirt and jeans), all about age twelve, in their play clothes, sitting on a small front porch, looking bored. The girl has an idea, and pops her head up.

Dez: "Let's play Evel Knievel!"
Jack: "That sounds boss! How do we make a ramp?"
Shelley: "Let's prop some plywood up on your Mom's garbage cans!"

Director's note: the O'Briens, being a large family, had big metal garbage cans from Sears.

Jack: "Neat! Where are we gonna get the plywood?"
Sean: "Grandpa has some plywood in the alley between our house and Shelley's."

A small parade of children snakes through the cluttered O'Brien family alley to appropriate a large sheet of warped, three-quarter-inch plywood.

Grandpa, alerted by the sound of his plywood bumping and scraping against the brick-paved alley, sticks his Brylcreemed head out the open kitchen window and hollers after the children without losing control of the Keep Moving cigar stub clamped in the corner of his mouth.

Grandpa: "Where y'all goin' with my plywood?"
Sean: "We're just gonna borrow it to play Evel Knievel, Grandpa..."
Grandpa: "Is he that fool with the motorcycle?"
Sean: "Uh-huh."
Grandpa: "Okay, you just put it back where you got it, and watch out you don't get splinters!"
Sean: "Okay, Grandpa!"

Out on the sidewalk, the children prop up one end of the plywood on two metal garbage cans, which immediately tump over.

Jack: "The garbage cans aren't heavy enough."
Dez: "We need to put something heavy in them."
Shelley: "My Dad has a whole bunch of bricks and stuff under our house."
Sean: "Let's get 'em!"

The parade of purposeful children resumes, each child in turn hunkering down under Shelley's house to retrieve a couple of bricks, then crawling back out bearing a pattern of mud not unlike a soldier who's just elbow-walked his rifle through a swamp in Vietnam.

Like ancient Chinese peasants building the Great Wall, the brick-laden children scurry back and forth, depositing bricks into the garbage cans and returning to the gloomy recesses beneath Shelley's house.

While this is going on, a few passing adults walk around the strange construction project -- which is completely blocking the narrow sidewalk -- or call out from their porches while wiping their hands on dish towels. Each conversation goes something like this:

Adult: "What are y'all doin'?"
Child: "Playing Evel Knievel."
Adult: "Is he that crazy guy with the motorcycle?"
Child: "Uh-huh."
Adult: "Be careful, now..."

Once the garbage cans contain about a dozen bricks each, the plywood-and-can ramp stays up.

Now the children need things to jump over.

A rusty push-mower, a battered lawn chair and a barbeque grill are obtained from various neighbors' yards and storage sheds. All of these things are bristling with rusty appendages upon which the children could impale themselves, or, worse, put an eye out.

Again:

Adult: "Where y'all going with that?"
Child: "We're just borrowin' it to play Evel Knievel."
Adult: "You mean that guy with the motorcycle on Wide World of Sports?"
Child: "Uh-huh."
Adult: "Okay, just be careful, and put it back when you're done."

We insert a reminder that the adults in question do care a great deal about the fate of the children, and would forbid the children to do this on the spot, if only they could see the entire array of dangerous objects, and comprehend their intended use.

If only they were thinking like twelve-year-olds, and realized that the lawn chair was really a Cadillac, and that it would not be sat in.

It would be jumped over by a girl on a bicycle.

At last, the sidewalk proudly displays a jump-ramp, barbeque grill, push-mower and rickety lawn chair, all laid out in a tidy row. To any adult looking out from a living room window, this does not look like a glamorous and dangerous motorcycle stunt. It looks like the O'Briens are having a yard sale, or maybe, finally, cleaning out their alley. It would not occur to any of these adults that someone would try to jump over this still life of alley junk.

A tortoiseshell cat on a nearby porch stops licking her rump long enough to regard this spectacle with suspicion and disdain.

Director's note to camera operator: the camera angle, lighting, and cat's expression should all foreshadow a sense of Impending Doom. We want the audience to see the cat thinking, "Man, that looks dangerous. I'm staying right here on the porch."

Sean: "You think that's enough stuff to jump over?"
Dez: "Let's just pretend they're real big cars, like Cadillacs."
Jack: "Okay. I think that's enough to start with. If we can jump over that, we can find some more stuff."

Of course, knowing nothing of engineering terms like "rise-to-run-ratio" or "live load," when the children put the bricks in the garbage cans, they are thinking only of holding the plywood up. They are not thinking of holding up plywood and a ninety-pound child on a forty-pound bicycle charging down the sidewalk at the glorious speed of 14 miles per hour. Nor do they consider anything except the obvious fact that pretending your bike is a motorcycle is sufficient to arrive at enough speed to launch both one's self and one's bike over the obstacles in question.

Jack: "Who wants to go first?"
Sean: "Not me."
Dez: "I'll do it."
Shelley: "Bet you can't."
Dez: "Bet I can."
Jack: "Nuh-uh."
Dez: "Yeah-huh."

Director's note to camera operators and special effects: Zoom in on child as she climbs onto bicycle. Using 1960s fog-filter, fade in transformation of narrow, double-parked New Orleans street into motorcycle arena in California desert. Cue tinkly harp music, and transform purple bike with purple sparkle-vinyl banana seat and ape-hanger handlebars (with purple streamers) into purple metal-flake Harley-Davidson. Transform jeans, sneakers and sweatshirt into purple leather jumpsuit and matching helmet. Insert cheering crowd as child first does an Evel-style practice run around the jump ramp. Crowd becomes silent as steely-eyed child returns to starting point and assesses ramp.

Cue Howard Cosell.

Director: "Action!"

Child pedals furiously, reaches ramp, hits plywood, pedals upupupupupupup.....

Director's note to camera operator: cut to extreme slow motion:

Garbage cans collapse. Bricks tumble to either side as bike hits barbeque grill, which topples onto push-mower and spills both child and bike onto lawn chair and sidewalk. Child goes elbows-over-teakettle. Bike lands on child, who realizes that her wrist is broken and she needs stitches on her knee because a brick shard is sticking out of it, but who fears howling out in pain due to fear of reprisal from grownups.

Camera: Close-up of "OH CRAP" look on child's face.

Cut to parents bundling child into Pontiac and racing to hospital emergency room, where mother hovers over bed while father stands silently, making his Chief Thundercloud face.

The following conversation takes place:

Child: "But I was careful!"
Mother: "I can't believe you want to copy that horrible man who says sacriligeous things about the Virgin Mary! What will people think?"
Child: "What!?"
Mother: "You could have killed yourself!"
Child: "But I didn't!"
Mother: "Here comes the nurse with a tetanus shot."
Child: "But that's gonna hurt!"
Mother: "Well, remember that next time you get an idea like that in your head!"

Fade to bruised, bandaged, and exceedingly grounded girl, tucked into bed with plaid coverlet, upon which is curled the tortoiseshell cat from the earlier scene. A worried-looking border collie, sitting on the floor next to the bed, licks the cast on the child's right arm.

The anxious child can hear her mother in the next room, phoning the mothers of the other children involved in the debacle. From what the child can hear, they are all grounded, too, and their respective mothers have no idea how they got this Evel Knievel idea in their heads.

It appears that Grandpa O'Brien is in some sort of disfavor as well, having allowed the use of the plywood. Apparently, a certain amount of beer was involved in his decision-making process.

Cut to scene of Grandpa talking into O'Brien kitchen wall phone (with rotary dial):

Grandpa: "How the hell was I supposed to know they were gonna jump over anything? I thought they had toy motorcycles they were gonna roll around on the damn plywood, or something like that. Besides, I was listenin' to the radio -- I had five bucks on 'Mama's Boy' in the first race."

This is all the girl's fault. Closeup of anxious child. Fade to black.

Cut to schoolyard scene on Monday morning, where grounded friends assure girl that it wasn't her fault that they are grounded, and that grownups are just plain mean.

Camera: Fade to closeup of arm-cast being autographed by classmates with multicolored Flair markers, while a stern-faced nun frowns in the background.

THE END.


Grownups have no idea how cool a broken arm is in seventh grade. It is so cool, it is worth being grounded for. Especially if you broke it playing Evel Knievel.

So I ask you, Worried Knitting Mommy: having read this -- exactly why don't you want your un-scarred, un-scraped, girly little girl not to handle knitting needles at the tender age of nine? It's self-evident that she doesn't do much running at all, much less with scissors or knitting needles.

Listen here. Just pick up those blunt-tipped plastic Red-Heart needles with the kittycat faces on the ends, buy the magenta yarn and do exactly what the nice LYS owner says.

You have no idea what that child might think up if you don't.

--Mambocat

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the United States of America, a day set aside to give thanks for the fact that the original people of this continent took pity on the badly equipped and woefully inexperienced white settlers, and shared enough of their food and farming methods so the new people could survive their first few winters here, and, eventually, show their gratitutde by importing smallpox, measles, cowboys, and 300 million of their friends.




















Most Amercians will celebrate this day of thanks by eating far more than we should, watching American football, and sampling various beverages that the original Puritan settlers would frown upon mightily.

Cheers.

Before I get too busy today, I want to mention a few things for which I am grateful:

I am thankful to have my health, to still be here, and that my husband is doing better with his health. I am thankful that we have been able to repair my mother's house after Hurricane Katrina. I am grateful for our pets. I am thankful for our friends and relatives, and I am grateful that I can have such luxuries as a computer and Internet service in a world where most people don't even have enough to eat and can't be sure if their little mud-brick house will be bombed out from under them today, or not.

As a knitter, I'm glad that I live in a place where I have an abundance of knitterly supplies to choose from, moreso even than some other first world countries, like Ireland, where most of my ancestors came from, two blinks back in history.

I'm quite grateful for my readers here, who brighten my day with their comments and just by being around to read my offerings, something every writer craves.

I'm also grateful to the original people of the nation I live in.

If you are an American, look at your Thanksgiving table: turkey, potatoes, corn, pumpkin, tomatoes, squash ...

that's all Indian food. An astounding percentage of the food Americans rely on was the original food of the original people.

So take a moment today to thank them in some knitterly way.

If you have one, spin some yarn on a Navajo spindle.

Cast on for a hat or pair of socks for the Adopt-A-Native-Elder program:

http://www.anelder.org

If you live near one, go to an Indian casino after dinner, have a drink and spend some money.

Call it, "rent."

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone ... enjoy the day, the feast and your family.

--Mambocat

Rear Ends and Loose Ends

Before I get started about what happened to the rear end of my car and some thoughts on tying up loose ends for the holidays, I'm going to show you a nice and exceedingly soft cat. Her name is Annie, and you can pretend she is sitting on your lap and purring in a comforting manner, which might turn out to be helpful as you read along.

I suppose I have kept y'all in the dark long enough regarding the matter of my car, what with the election and getting some things done on Mom's house and trying to get some of my own work done as well.

It's kind of pathetic when one of the cats has to guest-blog just so my readers won't think I've fallen off the planet entirely and gone spinning off into space like Major Tom.

Actually, I was lucky that I didn't go spinning at high speed across the median and into the oncoming Interstate lanes, but this is what happened to the rear end of the scary metal thing that takes Shamu and his comrades to the vet:

I was driving down the Interstate one rainy fall morning a couple of weeks ago, and, like any sensible adult who wants to arrive in one piece at her destination, I was staying below the speed limit in the right lane and several car lengths behind the 18-wheeler in front of me, when I looked in my mirror and saw a black object increasing in size behind me, with no sign that any sort of slowing-down activity was in progress.

This black object became recognizable as a car, and, as things turned out upon later investigation, it was getting closer in way too big of a hurry because the driver was arguing with her boyfriend, smoking a cigarette and drinking a diet cola, all at the same time.

Now to my way of thinking, this leaves her at a four-hand deficit for driving, because you need one hand to smoke with, and the other hand to hold your drink, and at least two hands to wave around while you argue with your boyfriend. Not having enough free hands to safely have an argument on the couch is no position to be in while sailing down the Interstate above the speed limit in a slamming rain.

She also did not have insurance.

Anyway, like a sensible middle-aged adult who wants to arrive at her destination in one piece, I considered my options real fast. Hopping over to the other lane was out of the question because cars were in it. Going off on the shoulder was risky because I knew the road would narrow any second now for a bridge over a bayou, and besides, the rain was coming down as hard as a carwash, and cautious drivers sometimes pull over to the shoulder to wait for the rain to break when it's like this, and I couldn't see what might be on the shoulder up ahead due to the 18-wheeler being in the way.

The black car had grown quite large by this time, so I did what any sensible middle-aged adult would do.

I sped up as much as I could manage to reduce the black car's closing speed, and got as close to the 18-wheeler as I dared, and yelped at the top of my lungs, which was right about the exact same second when the black car tucked its nose under my car's behind and there was no choice except to go off the road.

We came to a stop and disengaged with no further automotive trauma. I wasn't hurt. My airbag didn't even go off. My knitting bag was intact. So I got out and checked on the other driver, who turned out not to be hurt and who had that expression on her face like Wile E. Coyote when he runs off a cliff, and who was still holding her diet cola and her cigarette.

And her car looked a lot worse than mine. VW Golfs may be small, but they are built like Munchkin Army tanks.

I won't bore you with all the muddy details of calling the cops and assessing each other's damage in the rain, but I will admit that I entertained some unkind thoughts about the young woman's possible occupation being that of Emergency-Back-Up Stripper at an airport service-road bar, and her boyfriend's apparent rejection from Central Casting for looking too sleazy to be a pimp.

And I will also spare you the exceedingly foul language of the young woman in question, not to mention the boyfriend -- who sported a cleverly slicked-back mullet, I might add.

But I will not spare you the amazing fact that while she did not have any insurance at the moment of impact, she apparently got on her cell phone and bought some insurance while we were waiting for the police, and thought she could get away with it.

It gets better. Over the past couple of weeks, my sensible, grown-up insurance company has decided to cover my repairs without raising my rates because the accident wasn't my fault, and they also launched an investigation into the other driver, who, in fact, turned out to be an actual stripper, as I learned today from the insurance company she called after the accident, when their representative called me to get another statement from me and to explain the chain of fraudulent events the young woman in question apparently tried to set into motion.

Anyway, I thought y'all deserved some sort of an update. I'm feeling bad for my poor little Golf all by itself in the cold, dark car hospital, mainly because in all the time I've had it -- up until I got rear-ended, that is -- I only had two small dents on the driver's side that were caused by road hazards, which I had been too cheap to fix . Junk falling off lawn trailers is a common road hazard here in the South, and since there's never two without three of anything, I figured that I'd be tempting Fate for Dent Number Three if I got those two little dents fixed.

Besides, when forced to choose between buying yarn and paying for minor cosmetic repairs to the car ... well ... you know. But I digress.

So now that it looks as though everything, including the rental car, will be paid for by someone other than myself, my gut has untangled itself from latticework cables to plain old garter stitch, and I can start thinking, and carrying on, about knitting again.

This is the time of year when people who knit can been seen with a work in progress at hand everywhere we go, so we can make use of those 17 minutes waiting in line at Home Depot to get in a dozen rows on Uncle Earl's Christmas scarf.

It's usually relatively easy to think of things to knit for people we love and know well, and many of us ("many" being knitters not involved with this blog) get an early start on holiday knitting every year with the Perfect Thing in mind for spouses, brothers, kids, sisters and parents.

But how to fill in the loose ends in the gift department? What do we do about those people for whom we do not knit?

Problems arise with what to do for those curious individuals who simply do not welcome knitted gifts. You know the type -- you could discreetly inquire as to color preference, choice of fiber, style of garment, exact fit, and every other conceivable detail, and still have your offering greeted with an ice-cold reception, because it is "homemade" or "not a designer item."

There's no pleasing such people.

You really can't be annoyed at those who are honest and vocal about their disdain for crafts -- I always feel glad to be warned in advance about people who despise handmade items, before I waste any valuable knitting time or good yarn.

So, what to do with such people -- who may come in the form of relatives, spouses of relatives, co-workers, or neighbors -- with whom the annual exchange of gifts is expected?

Re-Gift.

I do not believe that Miss Manners approves of this, but I think re-gifting is a great way to recycle something you really don't know what to do with, or can't use. Especially -- and this is important -- if you put a sticky note on the package so you know who you got it from.

It's really not rude, cheap or thoughtless. Miss Manners finds it perfectly acceptable for me to exclaim profuse thanks over a gift that does not fit or suit me, and then either landfill it in a closet, give it to charity or exchange it for something I like better.

Now I agree wholeheartedly with the important part -- exclaim your thanks, by all means.

Even if my great-aunt's idea of what sort of handbag suits me is drastically different from my own, I will purr over it because she thought enough of me to buy me a nice gift, even if it's a gift that would really be nice for someone else.

I try to warn people, too: "aw, Aunt Tillie, you don't need to ask what I want. I'd love anything you give me, you know that. But whatever you pick out, just try to imagine it with muddy paw prints all over it."

I think it's insulting to the giver to allow a gift to linger unused in a closet, when it could please someone else. And I don't see how recycling a gift is any ruder than exchanging it.

My own rules for gift recycling are pretty simple:

First, I think it is only polite to recycle a gift to someone with whom gift-swapping will be expected, but who you don't know well enough, or see often enough, either to knit for or to shop for a unique item. Everybody has to deal with at least three people like this at Christmas, and it's usually a mid-level supervisor at work, your cousin's third husband, and Great-Aunt Tillie's best friend from church, who always brings everyone "a little something."

Second, the recycled gift must come from an entirely different group-source than the person to whom it is given. While I sincerely appreciate the fact that Co-Worker X thought enough of me to give me a gift two Christmases ago, I only have room in our house for a certain number of candlesticks before people start to think we've gone Goth. Therefore, I will recycle the candlestick in question, but not to someone else at work. Instead, I will give the candlestick to Aunt Tillie's best friend from church.

I think it's okay to recycle nice gifts you cannot use to Aunt Tillie's best friend from church, your mid-level supervisor or your cousin's third husband, if they haven't been used and are still in the box, of course. Weird gifts you can't use should only be recycled to extra-persnickety people who are crabby, belligerent, snobbish and impossible to shop for. Everybody has someone like that in their family, too -- maybe your oldest brother's impressively implanted 25-year-old second wife, who only buys from Saks, frowns on popular fiction and popular wines, and who thinks the fact that you knit is "quaint."

So give that nice little Japanese ceramic floral vase to your mid-level supervisor, and recycle those musical penguin salt-and-pepper shakers to the second wife.

Such persons are also a good target for fruitcakes.

I subscribe to the theory that there is really only one fruitcake in each family, and that it just gets passed along to a different relative each year. In fact, that's how you know the family finally thinks you're a real grown-up: the first time you get the fruitcake.

Don't tell me you've never done this: dust off last year's fruitcake, open the tin, pour more rum on it, slap a new gift tag on it, and give it to whichever relative you're at odds with this holiday season.

If someone ever actually ate a piece of the fruitcake, they would probably die of alcohol poisoning from the 37 years' worth of concentrated rum in the damn thing.

Hmmm. Maybe I should send a fruitcake to the woman who rear ended me.

--Mambocat

The Kitchen Looks Funny
Without A Tree In It, And
The Living Room Just
Doesn't Look Right
Without The Refrigerator


I know I'm scandalously overdue for a blog update, but this is what I have been doing with my free time since my last post:
























No, the knobs aren't on the cabinets, and the new door needs a frame, and the cover plates aren't on the electric switches yet, and the wood trim isn't painted ... but the kitchen at Mom's house in New Orleans is painted, tiled, grouted, plugged in, hooked up and can be used. All the little things should be done by Thanksgiving -- electric cover plates first. Meanwhile, everything works, and Mom can cook dinner on her gas stove for the first time in more than a year.

And there are the refrigerator and the microwave, back in the kitchen where they belong. I'm really grateful for how well the repairs have come along on a shoestring, so far. This business of making a house in New Orleans livable again is tiresome, folks. And Mom was one of the lucky ones, with relatively minor damages.

Seeing things starting to go back into place after fourteen months makes me think of growing up during the Cold War. Among the few things we were allowed to learn about the people of the USSR was that they spent about half their lives waiting in various lines for bread, milk and basic supplies ... and that they displayed their appliances in their living rooms by way of bragging rights, because they were so hard to come by.

The people of New Orleans are doing exactly that right now. If you want Sheetrock, you'd better be in line at Home Depot whent he sun comes up.

I'm just glad Mom has a kitchen she can use.

You may have noticed that in my exuberance I am posting a photo of the kitchen before it's quite done, just as I often blog photos of completed knitted items prior to blocking.

I am nothing if not consistent.

We shall return to our normal knitting content presently.

--Mambocat

Did Y'all Go and Vote?

We are in the South, so we "go and vote." a

Usually, I bring some knitting along, for standing in line. Of course, I bring knitting almost everywhere, but that's not germane to my point. It's especially nice to have a sock in progress tucked in your bag on a fine fall day while you wait your turn to cast your vote. Something feels right about that.

Here's what I had in my walking bag on Election Day -- clockwise, from left: sock in progress, completed sock as reference for second sock, apple in case I got hungry, calming aromatherapy spritzer (in case I was beseiged by overly enthusiastic campaign workers en route).

Of course the ID is tucked in there too.

On Tuesday we went at an odd time, and few people were there, so I didn't even get to crank out the usual three or seven rounds on a sock while we waited.

But we went and voted, and that's what's important.

All Southerners double-verb sometimes, regardless of accent or educational level. But it's especially important to double-verb on election day.

If you're from Atlanta, you put on your best Scarlett O'Hara voice and you say, "ah gotta go an' vote, honey." If you're from New Orleans, you say it in a Brooklynese voice: "Hey boss .. I'm goin' out fer a toikey samwitch at lunchtime, and I need to go an' vote while I'm out dere."

But either way, you go and vote.

Even Southerners with PhDs from Hahvahd, who have divested themselves of every other double-verb or triple-negative, go and vote.

It somehow sounds more deliberate and purposeful than just "voting."

But it's okay if you live in a place where you just "vote" -- as long as you hollered out Tuesday night before the polls closed, "Honey, it's getting late, get in the car, we have to vote."

If you don't like the outcome, and you didn't vote, don't bitch at me (or anybody else).

We went to the polls and we thought about a lot of things when we voted, especially the ongoing aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and this miserable war that too many young people are dying for and nobody fully understands.

One thing I thought about with a great deal of sorrow is how many of my fellow Louisianians still can't walk down the street to their familiar neighborhood school to go and vote. Most people who have returned to New Orleans had to cast their vote in a different location in town, because their neighborhood polling place remains unrepaired. Last week, there were billboards all over the city reading, "Need To Know Where To Vote?" and a number to call.

Many New Orleanians are still far away, and wish their polling place was across town instead of across the country.

Some are gone forever, and will never go and vote in New Orleans again.

It is painful to imagine how I might feel on Election Day if I were displaced from my home, with important things going on here that needed my input. Things going on in my state, my city, my school district, my neighborhood.

I would be paralyzed with depression if I lived in an apartment in Houston or Denver and I couldn't be home, to go and vote at the American Legion hall, and say "hi" to Mrs. LeBlanc and Mrs. Washington, who have been checking off names and re-setting the voting machines since God had baby teeth.

Don't get me wrong, all you other 49 states. Y'all are nice and all that. In fact, you've been terriffic. Most people around the country have taken in our displaced neighbors with open arms and incredible generosity, and we're grateful.

But it's still not home.

It's hard to re-birth your culture someplace else. The food isn't the same, the music is different, and the way people interact with each other feels a little bit off. It's different when you can find only a few families in your new community who share your culture, when you're accustomed to sharing it with half a million people. We have our own rhythmn in this corner of the world, our own way of letting our hair down at night and getting up in the morning.

It makes me think of that old reggae song ... I think the Melodians wrote it originally, but Peter Tosh popularized it...

"...by the rivers of Babylon,
where we sat down,
and where we wept
as we remembered Zion...

...they carried us away to captivity,
required of us a song,
but how can we sing the Lord's song
in a strange land?"

On Tuesday night, I imagined the people I grew up with, scattered all over this sprawling country of ours, watching the election results come in. They've been in their strange new towns for over a year now. They have found new jobs, made new friends, and enrolled their kids in new schools. Most have never lived anywhere else but New Orleans, and are voting in an unfamiliar place for the first time, pushing the electronic button for candidates with last names like "Walinsky" or "Martinez," instead of "Broussard" or "Jackson."

Each time the news anchor said, "and in Louisiana ..." there was a collective intake of breath, and they felt that curious little skip-crunch underneath the solar plexus. In apartments all over Houston and Raleigh and Los Angeles, kids were shushed and adult heads swiveled to see who went and voted for who, back at home.

"Home" is still in a shambles.

But, as always, the local politics are interesting.

Particularly important for New Orleanians is a state amendment to have just one tax assessor for the City. Right now there are seven of them, and they each make $90,000 a year. This is an astonishingly ancient and screwed-up way of doing things, and it needs to change. I'm glad most other people agreed.

A remarkable state amendment passed -- to exempt art on consignment from property tax. The current tax structure is way more Byzantine than I care to go into (I do want to keep what readers I have), but right now the short version is that the owner of art that hasn't previously been sold is responsible for property tax on it, so this amendment is a good thing for the arts community, including knitters. Can you imagine having to pay tax on your consigned work if it didn't sell? It may seem like a tiny thing in a big election, but art happens here in a way that is very different from most parts of America that I've seen. New Orleans is a city where art belongs to the people. Art is not something that happens mostly to high-end gallery owners and the people who can afford pricey, edgy art. New Orleans has artists and street musicians like Maine has lobsters and Chicago O'Hare has airplanes. Sure, there are painters here who gallery their work for the price of a house, but the city is mostly populated with artists who rely on storefront galleries, coffeehouses and taverns, and these are the people who can least afford to pay tax on their unsold work.

A couple of other good amendments passed, giving veterans a break on property tax, and removing taxes on leased hospital medical equipment for rural non-profit hospitals.

Like most people in this country, our polling place is in the gymnasium at our neighborhood grammar school. People lined up and signed in, and chatted with the familiar election day workers. We learned some things about people around the neighborhood who we don't see often: who moved, who died, who is remodeling their house.

Then we went into the booths, to push the electronic buttons that still feel strange to me. I miss the satisfaction of flipping the levers, and I miss the "ka-chunk!" when you pulled the lever to cast your vote and the mechanically operated curtains parted dramatically.

It made you feel like something real had happened.

Now you have to push your way in and out of the booth through a plastic shower curtain, and the machine beeps when you're done.

Not the same.

After we went and voted, we came home and ate some beans and rice.

If anybody reading this is from Louisiana or the Mississippi Gulf Coast and you're living someplace else now, I hope you get to come home soon.

--Mambocat


p.s. -- Shamu has reminded me that y'all are worried about my well being. I am uninjured and the car is not severely damaged. Details later, and thanks for your concern.