Seed Stitch or Stockinette?

It was rough going for a while when knitting needles were banned from public transportation hubs. What if a bitch just wants to knit a baby blanket for her stupid little green-snotted milk-vomiting nephew? What if knitting clothes out of discounted dollar skeins of yarn found in the Everything-Must-Go crafts megastore is the only thing a hobo can do when her main source of income is scrounging for loose change under the fine Penn Station pastry shops? Sometimes Zaro's Bakery will only cough up a few dimes, while on a good day, there's a nice fat quarter in the mix.

This leads me to introduce a mentor who knows her way around the finest discounted yarns. In one of my notebooks, I drew a sketch of one of my co-workers, an elderly woman, with her mouth slack in the perfect pose of someone who is gently fighting sleep. Some days she walks around with sunglasses perched atop her head while wearing reading glasses, the rims usually a bright jewel color, and she rotates them according to what she is wearing. Like any self-respecting woman of a certain age, her favorite color is purple, and she is not afraid of mixing it with other like-minded colors.

She's the head of my Wednesday afternoon knitting circle.

My secret life involves long hours sitting with the drone of the tv or some music in the background. Sometimes, if you channel your inner Type A obsessive-compulsive freak just right, you don't need the meditative aid of white noise or old tv show reruns, the holy trinity of the WB's Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars, and Charmed, and before you know it, you'll have knitted yourself the world's longest scarf. This elderly woman is my mentor in my secret life as a wannabe professional knitter. Under her tutelage, I have completed three samples, a chevron-patterned afghan, and about thirty-seven granny squares, which I will stitch together and make into another afghan.

And my next project, since the winter is coming and it's hard to fight the elements in cotton, will be a black pencil skirt, and the correspondence between me and my mentor has flown swiftly with verve and passion. She may occasionally bitch me out for omitting a semicolon or not knowing a proofreading symbol (occasionally may mean three times a day, on average), but when she talks knitting, I am no longer an unsteady illiterate in need of a daily grammar lesson and a smackdown; we talk skeins and needle sizes and the virtues of worsted weight and luster sheen, and how cute it would be for her niece and doll to have matching fun fur jackets.

I was in high spirits yesterday, thinking of my great new enterprise as skirt knitter. Maybe, I chortled to Cass, we will become the next Missoni! Maybe we will be in such demand for our luster sheen lightweight home-knit pencil skirts that we will be able to pull ourselves, once and for all, out of the pit of near-destitution and be able to live dumpster- and public-facilities free.