First known knitting picture of moi, circa 1984. Taken in a very cold apartment in Parkdale, in which I slept in hand-knit sweaters from September 1st on to stay warm. The landlords were cheap, and one year the furnace conveniently broke and wasn't turned on until December (that was the month of sleeping in a sweater and a hat). I was knitting a pair of mittens in this picture, some burgundy silk/wool tweedy brit yarn, flecked with fushia. My boyfriend K took the picture. At the time the only sweaters I knew how to knit were some variation of a lopi icelandic sweater, body and sleeves on a circular, decreasing to neckline. I knit him a "like" sweater, with a coarse blue wool flecked with white (like little snowflakes). Our relationship was very on and off again, for many years. When I was reacquainted with him twenty years later, for another round of on/off, he told me had just lost the sweater in a divorce. Tossed in a box into the basement with all his other belongings after his leaving the family home, the sweater had likely been tossed by a pissed-off ex-wife or disappointed mother. But it lived for twenty years after we had been together. He held hands with his wife, walked his children in ravines, tossed the frisbee, raked leaves, skated outdoor rinks and smoked a joint in the backyard while he wore that sweater. Which is a question I and many others have posed to ourselves, where do all the other old boyfriend sweaters go to die?

Hand knit socks #3

Handknit socks#2 - a lesson in not wearing boy shoes. A tan might not be a bad idea either.

Always good for a wooly shot

My grandmère, Mémé, almost uniquely knit socks for my cousin François. She was among other things a stage actress, who was taught to knit by someone who worked with her at the theatre. To calm nerves, pass time. She also smoked Viscount cigarettes, and lit them with tiny elegant imported Italian matches that had slim waxed paper matchsticks. We fought over blowing out the match, and the boxes the matchsticks came in. Each of them had a different picture, formative classical art education I guess. I remember my grandmother only knitting once for my sister and I, these two sweaters. They fit us for one cold August, and were promptly unravelled and knit into socks. I came by the sock thing honestly.

Handknit socks#1

Lake Huron, August 2006

Cottage sock knitting memories from August. Leaving a Toronto heat wave for Lake Huron. The first thing I did when I got there was to put on my bathing suit, and get smashed by waves for a couple of hours. I was able to breath again. It felt like I stopped oozing and expanding into a heat where I couldn't tell where I stopped or started. I could feel my lines, my perimeter, my skin, my organs. My brain shifted back into focus. And then I came into the house, dishevelled, cool enough to wear a jacket, and I resumed sock knitting. what else?
Today is a sock day, cool, autumnal stirs, maybe rain. A summer of heatwave sock knitting, and I can finally enjoy the product. Yeah!

Done, done, done. Dancing in the recital was fun, looking at the pictures after was difficult. Fat and hypercritical, bad combination. This is a picture of me and the ensemble in the mumu gulf state rich fat chick dress with great hair and nails dance. I wish my intellect and self-image were meshed. Mouthing off middle-age defiance about youth culture, and shaking boobs and jelly bellies is a great release in the present tense. The evidence is wrenching, to me. "you're as young as you feel" makes me "feel" like I'm living an arthritis commercial. I feel seventeen, but I look like what I am. Big disconnect. So what was good about it... my friends came out on a school night and sat in uncomfortable chairs in a very warm room, hooted and whistled, and I loved them for doing that. I danced with some wonderful wonderful wonderful women. Who all looked beautiful and lush to me. Not an intellectual or aesthetic beauty, but a juicy life-giving and breathing sumptuousness. Seeing the age and body type spectrum of women all dancing together was happiness. I loved being hot and sweaty, and going outside onto the Danforth in my bare feet to cool down, occasionally catching the eye of some guy from the hood stunned by the vision of all these half-dressed women out on the pavement on a cool September evening. Forget what it looks like, it felt good to do it.

This weekend... the recital... I'm in three numbers, and I have yet to finish sewing one of my costumes. I finally came out, of my t-shirt that is, and exposed my bare belly in a class. I don't have the confidence to carry it off, whats more my shark white belly acts like a light bounce on adjacent dancers (or some weird beacon of fear) so I'm sewing some gauzing sequined thing that will make me feel better about sort of showing my belly. If in form only. Squirm. I'm far better prepared than I was for last years rehearsal, and hoping that I might enjoy looking the audience in the eye, whooping and taking up space. It isn't enough this year to "get throught it". I want to really get it, to feel the music and include the audience in my joy. Joy that I'm still moving, that I can shake it, and move my hips, that I have flesh and sweat and hair, that I'm still alive. Far from perfection, just trying. Now here
's some gauzey disguised belly for you...

We've been debating the value of blogs at work... who reads them, who has time to write them, if you write a blog don't you have anything better to do, and generally "who cares what you think". I'd love to keep up with a blog a day about knitting and bellydancing, and be eligible to joins one of those knit-rings. As it is, I'm jotting down life minutae, maudlin musings, and pictures that appeal to me. Nobody really knows I'm here, no-one can connect this blog to the real flesh and blood me that loves parts of my family, goes to work, has friends, and generally fumbles through it all. I think writing a blog is akin to emailing a friend, takes about the same amount of time. Blither to anyone who doesn't know you. So when the kid in Montreal shoots up Dawson CEGEP (my sister's alma mater), what is left of him but a blog with creepy pictures and less than an explanation for why you're so angry and disenfranchised that you'd shoot some innocent little girl dead (and not the "villified" jock). Maybe we would have all been better off if he'd shared his head and heart with a person in flesh, and not a fantasy community of pixels. yeah, yeah, debate media, inernet isolation, idle youth. Just look someone in the eye today. Like my dear departed good boy Mason. xxx