November 2022: There’s Something About Knitting
During a layover at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, I grabbed myself a bite to eat before walking to my gate to wait for my flight to board. I was in one of those concourses where the gate areas are smaller because the flights are regional, and by the time I arrived, my flight-mates had taken up most of the seats, so I found a spot on the floor, opposite the waiting area, where I could eat my lunch.
One thing I don’t mind about flying is that I love people watching. I tell my students that when we put ourselves in a position to observe others it’s research for some future writing. I tell them to intentionally put themselves into places that give them the opportunity to people watch because by simply paying attention to the world around us, we discover story fodder, make interesting connections and begin to knit together characters in our imaginations that possess the power to lead us to discoveries about ourselves and others. In other words, instead of being part of the crowd, go to the crowd and take notes.
In this instance, I hadn’t been on the floor for very long when I noticed a young man occupying a seat that faced the concourse directly across from me. I had a full view of him as a steady stream of travelers passed between us. In this way, I was able to regard him without seeming too obvious, or creepy, for that matter. He was thin in a wiry way, wearing a sock cap, average in many ways and largely unremarkable. He was also a different race than I, but that was neither here nor there to me because he was, above all, human. Still, our generational, cultural and geographic origins and differences were pretty obvious. Here I was, a middle-aged white woman from rural middle America, and he looked like a twenty-something, worldly, urban male, our differences as visible as the physical space between us.
But here’s the real reason I noticed him: he was knitting. Holding a needle in each hand, he deftly worked at casting on and binding off a pile of yarn that filled his lap, ordering a pattern of stitches that were beginning to look to me like a scarf. I marveled at the way he paid attention to his handiwork while periodically looking up to take in the world around him, all without missing a beat, his hands operating by some force of muscle memory that must have taken years to master. I imagined a mother or aunt or granny sitting him down as a child, teaching him how to imitate what he observed her doing. I imagined her hands covering his, showing him how to make it work. I think of her patience and his curiosity and the ways they must have bonded over it. I also marveled at his complete lack of self-consciousness. Who cared that the image looked incongruent? People occupy themselves in a million ways while waiting; his just happened to be by knitting.
Then I noticed something else. As he tended to his stitches and purls, passersby took notice of what he was doing and stopped. One aging woman, pushing a walker, paused to comment. I couldn’t hear their conversation but he stopped what he was doing to give her his full attention. They laughed during their exchange. He held up his handiwork for her to study a bit more closely, and then she shuffled on. Another, a middle-aged woman, not a lot unlike me, took up the seat next him, struck up conversation and leaned in to get a better look at what he was making. They too shared a few laughs. Their give and take looked very much like a mother and son or happy familiars.
I found the whole scene remarkable for the way the young man’s knitting instantly broke down every perceivable barrier. Suddenly, he wasn’t young and male, of his own race, and the passersby weren’t old and female, of their different races. The differences engrained in us from birth to separate us, to keep us in our own corners, to condition us to not trust, utterly dissolved because of a pair of knitting needles and a pile of yarn.
That day I observed some kind of secret to loving humanity and honoring our differences while not allowing those differences to dictate our behaviors or to isolate us in lonely ways. I’m not saying I know the secret, only that I observed it at work, and I think it has something to do with knitting needles and taking our eyes off of what we look like to instead place them on what we’re doing. Judge by what we do, not by how we appear. I think there might be something to it.