Hostile T-shirts at Odds

I've been thinking about a family we saw at breakfast last week in our Minneapolis hotel. I noticed a skinny blond boy about 13 years old bouncing around in the breakfast bar, deciding what to put on his plate. I smiled, thinking about the energy some boys seem to radiate and how they just can't help it. Then I noticed the t-shirt he was wearing, pictured on top to the right, and my good feeling about him was gone. Why wear something with a hostile message like that? I watched him sit down with at the table I assumed was his family.

There was another younger boy, maybe ten or 11 years old, with a striped rugby shirt on, spooning up cereal. Across from him sat their mom, her gaze unfocused, wearing a plain black shirt and black leggings, with longish blond hair that could use a wash, an empty plate in front of her. To her right was the dad, finishing a mound of eggs, potatoes, toast and sausage. He was wearing the t-shirt on the left.

Nobody was talking. The dad looked like maybe life had been pretty disappointing and he didn't know what to do about it. He couldn't have been more than 40, but his face and body were puffy, skin mottled, and he was dealing with going bald with a comb over configuration. I figured my husband and I looked like the enemy to him, meaning the label "liberal elites:" retired, healthy, and, if our technical clothing gave away that we were there to cross country ski (Minneapolis has an amazing park system in case you don't know), his suspicions would be confirmed. I'm sure I had my judgey face all over him, if he had cared to look.

Those t-shirts have been bothering me ever since, mostly trying to understand why that father and son wore them, but there was something else nagging at me. This morning I finally figured it out. I could have said to the dad, "I guess your feelings would be hurt if I stomped on the flag, but I have a right to do that."

Then I thought of another thing I could have asked instead: "Are you a veteran?" Because that adds a layer I don't pretend to understand.

Handywoman

Handywoman by Kate Davies
Book Review

I like to knit, mostly sweaters. It's fun to find knitwear designers who have a look or style that pull me in over and over as I discover and research their creations. When that happens, I not only track down whatever I can find on the internet that they've made, I like to discover more about their lives. Where do they live? How'd they get into knitting and designing?

Kate Davies is a knitting designer I recently discovered and admire. I would make just about any of her sweaters. I was further enchanted when I learned she lives in Scotland near the gorgeous West Highland Way, a 95 mile hiking trail my husband and I backpacked in 2012, and that it inspires many of her designs.

I also learned she became a professional knitwear designer after having a debilitating stroke several years ago while she was in her thirties. She's written a memoir, Handywoman, an account of who she was before the brain injury, how she dealt with it, and how her life was changed afterwards. It's also an intelligent, thoughtful, methodical exploration of all facets of being in the physical world, and in communities. Davies was a maker and knitter before her brain injury, but an academic by profession. She turned her intellect to understanding precisely how her changed self interacted with the environment. Along the way she determined she would start a new profession: knitwear designer.

The tone of the book is serious and thorough. For example, Davies' chapter "Raised" takes us through her experience and epiphany being assisted with the Etac turner, a non-motorized piece of equipment for transferring someone that leverages the weight of each person. She does so in explicit detail: its construction; each choreographed movement as the technician secures a brake, stabilizes the turner; each of Davies' own movements in response; and her elation at the realization her own body participates in the entire process, never surrendering to the complete trust of another person's physical effort.

She dissects why that is, and begins to look at designed objects with new eyes. She says, "I now think of the habit of attentiveness I began to develop during the time I spent on the neurology ward as a form of material engagement. Material engagement is both reflective and participatory. . . After my stroke, I came to understand that, in the processes of their making and their potential for creative accomplishment, tools and objects possessed a wisdom that was far greater than my individual mind and body."

But Handywoman is not all about the physical and social experience of brain injury. There are plenty of fascinating stories about her interactions with textile making communities. My favorite was her journey to the Shetland Islands and developing a deep connection and relationship with the woman and culture of knitting there.

I'll probably read this one again because her thoughtfulness about the dailyness of life is inspiring. Meanwhile, I've decided which of Kate Davies' designs is on my project list: the Carbeth Cardigan. Davies is well known and beloved: over 1,800 people on Ravelry have made, or want to make, this sweater, too.

The Lager Queen of Minnesota

The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal
Book Review

Edith and Helen are sisters who grew up on a farm in north central Minnesota in the 1940s to the early sixties. They become estranged when their father leaves the farm to Helen, the younger, at his death some time in the 1960s.

Before that, Edith and her new husband, Stanley, leave their roles as caretaker and hired hand to move to the small city where's he's been offered a job. Stanley's no farmer and Edith's dad is not well, but this decision surprises Helen because Edith is loyal, hard-working, and lives to help people.

Helen hasn't paid attention to what's happening at the farm since she left for college three years ago, much less to Edith, but she sees how to turn this event to her advantage. Helen fell obsessively in love with the taste of beer and the process of brewing it when she was 15, and has been spending her college years learning everything she can about it. Her fiance, Orval, is from a beer-making family whose brewery has failed. Helen and Orval are trying to revive the business, but they need money.

Helen persuades her father, who is clearly not going to last much longer, to leave the farm to her. She promises she will give Edith her share when the brewery is making money. She and Edith never speak after Helen breaks the news, and the sharing plan falls aside.

Edith is not the kind of person to dwell on financial misfortune; she's much more sad to have no parents and an estranged sister. Edith and Stanley never have much money, and neither does anyone else they know. Edith resolutely, sometimes even cheerfully, shrugs off never owning a home, having no savings, and working well past the age she is when the book starts. (She's 63 and working in the kitchen of a nursing home.) Helen is ambitious, driven, and lonely (though she has Orval) but she doesn't care. Success is what she wants at all costs.

Edith's granddaughter Diana becomes the third major character in the story. A mixture of Edith's Minnesotan unpretentiousness and morality, and Helen's shrewd assessment of how to profit from all she encounters, she's the catalyst for Edith and Helen to find the end of their stories.

We know the setting of a book often works as a character in its own right. In The Lager Queen, it's not quite so much the rural landscape of north central Minnesota as it is the sturdy, unassuming civility of Edith and her friends. They judge people who don't play by their rules: don't swear, don't ask personal questions, be friendly and honest--but they keep it to themselves. Emotions are sublimated. But once in a while they'll make a subtle, insider joke about someone with people they trust.

My dad grew up just like that in the same area, and I recognize my cousins' way of talking in this book. Stradal, who's from Minnesota, has captured the personality of the region in a laugh-out-loud, entertaining, yet respectful, way. He also must love beer. I don't drink it, but this book is saturated with detailed descriptions of hops, brewing facilities, types of beer and their taste. I started to want a cold bottle.

The Ice Cream Pails Have to Go

Thankfully I'm not buying this much ice cream anymore.

It seems everyone is decluttering these days, no matter what their age. I babysat yesterday for my daughter and her husband so they could sort through their storage room without one-year-old Nolan insisting on being involved. I've been working on paring down my own considerable amount of stuff, and see echoes of my sentimentality in my daughter's reluctance to let go of old dance costumes and art projects (thank goodness those managed to find their way to her house, not mine!).

In the past months since I've retired, my husband and I have sent bags and boxes and piles of unwanted or broken things to Goodwill or the landfill. Some of it was easy to get rid of, but a lot of it felt like throwing important parts of my own life away.

I don't want to forget past lives and experiences, yet I understand there's a cloying, heavy atmosphere pressing down when you surround yourself with your history instead of what's happening and important now. My husband and I often remind each other that we don't want to live in a museum. We've found we can let go of things that are sitting around out of sight, yet represent cornerstones to our identities, if we give ourselves time to get used to the idea. Terry, a former newspaper editor, finally gave away his lifetime collection of important newspaper headlines.

"Do you think my kids are actually going to pick this up someday to read about Barack Obama's election in 2008?" he asked, holding up a copy of the Wisconsin State Journal. Wordlessly, we both shook our heads, and he flipped it back on top of the stack.

I have given away hundreds of my books over the past years, first the disintegrating paperbacks, then the outdated nonfiction, then the novels I didn't enjoy that much, and finally all that I don't plan to read again, or fail to admire with a five star rating. It was hard, and I could do it only by not thinking about it too much (the "spark joy" Marie Kondo talks about, perhaps?), but it is stimulating to see only the books that matter most when I look at my shelves (there are still plenty, and now I'm trying to be a lot more discerning in purchasing ebooks).

Our basement laundry room is also a storage room, and every day I see what's on those shelves, which have been culled several times over the years, without noticing any particular items. But today my gaze fell on three gallon size ice cream pails taking up prime space on a shelf within easy reach. They're perfect for picking raspberries, strawberries, or children playing with water, or any other number of things. They're substantial, handy buckets with their handles and lids.

But we no longer grow raspberries or strawberries, and if the grandchildren want to play with water, there are many other options. We haven't found a use for them for two years, and I carried those pails to the recycling bin with a feeling of accomplishment.

After I did that, I remembered I should take out the trash, so I removed it from the kitchen. I went through the storage room with my plastic bag where, perhaps predictably, the large plastic bags we were issued one of the last times we skied the American Birkebeiner race caught my attention (while you ski for hours, your belongings are transported to the finish line so you can change into dry, warm clothes). Completing that race several times in my mid and late fifties is one of the most important things I've ever done in terms of meeting a challenge I set for myself. How could I simply throw those bags away? Or use them for trash? They are badges of honor! It's energizing to remember skiing all those kilometers through the Chequamegon Forest, not an oppressive weight!

I'm sure some other items on these shelves will show up in future posts.

Like the ice cream pails, no pressing or worthy use for the bags had turned up in the past four years. But they are, in the end, ugly, nondegradable plastic bags that the Birkie people don't even use anymore.

I moved them upstairs to live with the roll of kitchen trash bags, awaiting their turn to hold our garbage. Okay, I'll come clean: I will move them there after I finish this post. It just takes a little time and processing to say goodbye.