Habit #15: Knit Happens

Just when I had taken up ancestor research as a way of not writing, a friend in England informed me that I needed to take up knitting. "It's rather addictive," she said, not knowing that my ancestor research had gotten to the point where I needed something to distract me from it.

I did my best to tell her that I was hopeless because not only can I not count, I have extremely limited manual dexterity. I explained that I had spent years trying to learn to play the piano only to realize that no amount of practicing Czerny and Hanon exercises would make my fingers work properly. Jocelyn was undeterred. "Nonsense," she said. "You don't need manual dexterity in order to knit."

Rather than argue, I did as instructed and purchased a ball of wool and a pair of rather ungainly wooden knitting needles. Jocelyn got me started right away. Well actually, Jocelyn got started right away. She had done two rows of twenty stitches before I reminded her that she was supposed to be teaching me to do it. "Right," she said and pulled the needles out and rewound the yarn so I could start from the beginning.

I knotted loop around one of the needles. Jocelyn showed me how to "cast on" stitches. Since my needles were long, I decided to cast on enough stitches to cover two thirds of the needle. Starting with the full needle in the left hand, you stick the empty needle in your right hand up and behind the first stitch of the full needle, loop the yarn from the ball around the back of the empty needle and then pull the new loop down and liberate the stitch from the full needle. Repeat till the needle in your left hand is empty. Jocelyn made it look so easy. When I tried it, I discovered that I have two left hands and a neurological disorder. After an agonizing hour, I had completed a single knit row. Then it was time to learn the purl stitch. Purling is knitting backwards, sort of. I switched the full needle to my left hand, back side facing me and stuck the empty needle down and in front of the first stitch. It took a while for me to figure out that I could hold the looping yarn with the thumb and index finger of my left hand while purling. This was fun!

I decided then and there that I was a knitting convert and began fantasizing about all the lovely sweaters and wraps I would create while I was not researching my ancestors and not writing my novel. And then I looked down and noticed that I had made numerous mistakes where I had dropped stitches and created holes where neat stitches should have been.

For the next three days, I attempted to get the first five rows off to a good start but I kept "creating button holes" without realizing it and back to the beginning I would have to go. After restarting my project for the tenth time, Jocelyn began calling me Penelope. I was not amused.

Jocelyn's friend Felicity, a master of the craft, suggested that I knit a stitch at the end of each purl row. This sounded like good advice, so I promptly forgot it.

My flight back to the US, the next day, was delayed by three hours and I occupied myself by starting and and restarting my project six or seven times, to the amusement of several bored children in the gate area. Once on board, we were informed that our pilot was stuck in traffic on the motorway and would get to the plane as soon as he could. This gave me two additional hours to start and restart my knitting project. By the time we took off, I had ten fairly decent-looking rows. And then I remembered Felicity's advice to end each purl row with a knit stitch. After another ten or so rows, I noticed that the top of my project was wider than the bottom. Merde!

Rather than rewind the considerable length of yarn I had now invested in my project, I decided to push on. My husband was not impressed by my knitting. "What is it?" he asked. "Practice," I answered defensively while trying in vain to uncurl the sides and make the thing resemble a rectangle. Eventually, I reached the end of the ball of yarn but had no clue how to take the knitting needle off the last row of stitches, so there it sits. It isn't pretty, but I'm proud of it with it's many "features" and "design elements".

Meanwhile, I have gone back to ancestor research and pretending to write. What I liked about knitting was creating something out of connected loops of yarn. It also made me sad, in a way, because of how easily the work is undone. Sometimes life is like that. I wonder if I will ever finish anything?

Habit #14 -- AncesTree Dot Com

The blogger's paternal grandfather circa 1940

Whoever is behind Ancestry.com, is raking it in. I resisted the ads for years. I even resisted invitations to fill in blanks on family members' trees until I received a notice from an attorney in Iowa. One of my mother's first cousins who had never married or produced any children had died without leaving a will. He has a sizable estate which will be distributed to the surviving children or grandchildren of his numerous siblings. There are at least 200 hundred of us, so I don't expect to receive more than ten or twenty dollars. But still. An inheritance from a long-lost relative.

Out of curiosity, I took out a temporary "free" membership in Ancestry.com. Who was this man who never married, had children, or made a will? The first person I entered was my maternal grandfather. I didn't have any specific information about him other than his name, but that was not a problem. Ancestry lets you give approximations, so I said he was born around 1900 give or take 10 years and, voila! Ancestry.com supplied a chain of "hints" which included his World War I and II draft registration cards as well as U.S. Census reports from several decades up to the 1940s. With each hint I verified, more hints popped up and suddenly, my family tree looked more like a forest.

A basic Ancestry membership costs $19.99 per month. This gives you access to a vast trove of public information including birth and death records, telephone directory pages, and family trees developed by other Ancestry members who are somehow related. I got lost in my family forest and began filling in data on second and third cousins twice and thrice removed. After a couple of days, I realized that I had fallen into a labyrinth that teased me into moving forward rather than trying to find my way out. I simply couldn't stop myself.

$19.99 per month is a lot of money, $240 on an annualized basis. But there are many incentives to pay $34.99 per month because at some point, your ancestors lived on another continent and the only way to find out if you are descended from royalty is to check overseas archives. I keep telling myself, I can quit any time and I will only pay the monthly membership fee while I am researching, but what happens to my research if I stop paying? Will Ancestry.com hold it hostage?

I am afraid to find out and so I am praying there is a way to download everything otherwise I may spend my retirement funds keeping my ancestors alive.