I'm no longer a hospital virgin, having undergone my first real procedure in a hospital since i was born.  I did have two stitches to close a cut on my forehead that i sustained from diving head first into a metal bed frame when i was two years old (back in the days when bed springs meant something).  i walked into the OR, a bit disappointed because everyone else in the prep area had been wheeled in.  "Have I missed the Party?", was the best I could come up with.  Just a bunch of bright eyed hospital gowned guys and gals hanging around a very cold room.   a couple of introductions.  i was trying to be as hip at this cocktail at this party as i could be, striking a nice balance between interested, not too gushy, one of them, please don't hurt my feelings or my body.  I hopped up on the table, to some hoo-hawing fanfare that they have to help everyone else up.  I guess any show of enthusiasm for their work is lauded.  They wrapped me with a warm blanket.  i said something about "better than a spa".  This mistress of potions and her resident helper who was way too handsome to be an Igor, smacked my hand for a vein to pop, and put an IV in, an oxygen mask over my face.  I told Dr Yudin to not fuck it up, chortle chortle, my knees went weak like the best drink in the world, wait for the burning, here comes all the burning down my vein highways like i'm strung up for lethal injection, oh fuck,

an annoying fly of a woman keeps coming in and out on me.  is she talking to me.  shutup.  oh i feel sick.  i'm slurring my words.  my eyes won't open.  i'm going to puke.  oh i'm really sick.  she's going to throw up, quick, she's going to throw up. blech.  what did i have in my stomach?  yudin talking. moving, being wheeled.  look over, there's clive, warm and golden brown and plump full of life in this gaudy hard light.  ice chips. i forgot they were there. dressing my body, slow and thick.  more wheeling.  clive driving with a fan blowing hot air.  open the window. get a breeze.  looking over at me, and racing up to stopped vehicles the words can't get out of me fast enough so i hit him. brake.

i'm going to throw up. home.  edgar big and strong, moving around too fast for me to catch him. i take his place on the couch.  nina comes, bringing food.  one forkful and i lie back. still can't keep my eyes open.  water.  i'm going to be sick.  phone ringing.  bed. go to bed.  edgar follows, lies close.  gone, dreaming about about highly painted cruise ships speeding through rice paddies at night.

and then i woke up.

A coyote ran down the centre of the street yesterday at noon. It loped quickly, streaking fawn brown gray past the three oblivious sets of fannies bent over flower beds across the street from me. There is a ravine on the curve of my crescent, a deep dark green wet and steep buffer to the trestle for the commuter trains blasting through to the eastern suburbs. That is where a pair of coyotes live, in a den burrowed into the hill under a deck jutting out into the high cover of tall trees. Small cats go missing around here all the time. The Neville coyote down by the beach has been known to hop a fence, and jump back just as quickly, mouth stuffed with a squealing miniature dog. Scat. What mourning pet owners go looking for in the ravines, when Percy or Tims doesn't come back the next morning or the next week. Poking pooh with sticks. Clive used to take hector, our big bad black cat, to the ravine where he could be a panther, slick shiny black and stealthy through the ferns. I stopped walking Edgar through the ravine when we came upon the body of a newly dead raccoon, not begun to fall back to rot with fluttering crawlies. Just asleep on a bed of fall leaves. I didn't want to see him disintegrate. This morning when we were walking back to the car, up a wide avenue running from the beach flanked with taupe arts&crafts verandas, a posse of three dogs raced up the street. A vaguely coyote-Akita mix chased two Australian sheep dogs in sweeping curves over lawns sidewalk and street all the way to queen street. Follow the mummies and daddies cooing their precocious charges back to their leashes.

It's a long holiday weekend.  Edgar and I are installed on the front veranda in the shade, dozing to the sounds of industrious neighbours madly scrambling away at dirt and plants in hot sun.  Obviously to the (NDG) manor born, I'm more suited to a long cool drink, crushed white linen, a snoring dog at my feet.  My street has a sound of whooping kids and chatting neighbours like the street I lived my first eleven years on, in Notre-Dame-de-Grace in Montreal, stacked with the Lambert duplexes which were built at the same time as these east end semi-detached two storey houses were.  Same trim, floors and doors, same narrow little rooms, same burnt wood and paper smell when the doors and windows have been opened on the first hot day.  Plus ca change....  I don't remember neighbours like me, single women with big pooches.  Everyone was in some stage of family evolution or devolution, breeding, raising, booting from the nest or baby-sitting grandchildren.  We had no backyards, so we played on the street, swang off pipe balustrades like gymnasts, called off hide and seek, and tag, bounced balls  against brick walls between the houses in narrow little driveways to the back alley that were paved, and roamed the in-between green between Vendome and Marlowe where a grove of weedy trees could hide forts that we built without Dads or adults of any kind.  Public play was on the street, private play was under the balconies and verandas, and in the back gravel alley that ran the length of the block.  At night on my way home from a hard day's play, I could hear the neighbours at their kitchen tables eating their dinner, the noise of plates and pots, small conversation, scrapping and washing up.  I'm comfortable with this moderate cheek to jowl existence, hearing my neighbours, seeing parents run after their kids, Edgar's friends partaking of the yellow fire hydrant on our front lawn, cocktail hour two houses down.  For the most part I'd rather be sitting on the front stoop or porch, than insulated behind the high walls of my back yard.  On a long weekend, with my boy, knitting, drinking tall glasses of fuzzy water, exhaling.

I was the pale cream moon legs poking out from the deep shade of the thatched beach umbrella.  Knitting in humid heat that was only relieved by sea breeeze.  So humid that the chart paper flopped over, and that the Hebridean yarn which was born in North Sea cold and raw, flushed and plumped in dripping tropical heat.

Edgar ate my knitting needles

Edgar was advised in no uncertain terms when he came to live here that to touch the knitting was to make his mumma unhappy. We know if mumma isn't happy, no one's happy.  The day came when I came home after work, doing my post work home inspection of what mischief (i don't know, is eating kitchen cabinetry mischief?) a galloping 140lb year old bullmastiff can get up to when he's left a lone for a couple of hours.  He has been a master shredder of assorted papers, but he had never touched a textile.  Until the day I came home and found my knitting had been disturbed.  Deep intake of breath.  Gingerly picking up the remains.  The knitting, of a gray boring brioche note, was untouched.  The lovely additurbo needles however were crunched.  Good boy.  This boy likes sharp implements.  One night recently when we were getting ready for bed, he bounded up onto the covers with an ahoy matey tilt to his head and a flash of silver in his mouth.  Ack.  I had been finding bits of blue plastic around the house, but now I found the source of the plastic, a wonderful henkel paring knife.

I think I like him better when he shreds

Evolution

In the fall of 2010 I danced my little heart out, performing in Shagara Moon's THE RED SCARF.  I rehearsed and sewed and ferried people and bits about for a couple of months between paying gigs as a television production manager.  It culminated in four performances over one weekend, at a University of Toronto theatre.  A total high.  A total relief to have done.  A total awareness that I am an introvert, and performing for anymore than three people is a stressor.
A couple of other things happened too.  I expended my physical resources, which made me really sick in 2011.  Girl issues, iron deficiencies, nothing drastic.  I just couldn't walk a block without stopping three times to catch my breath.  Only in 2012 am I finally regaining stamina, but after not dancing for what is now close to eighteen months, parts of my body have almost rusted stiff and away from non-use.  Originally because I was home on modified puppy maternity leave I had been able to give my attention to this endeavour.  It's been a long slog to move from enthusiasm for a fabulous career and being well compensated for lending my skills, to hoarding my best energies for me.  My resulting boredom in negotiating kit rentals and lunch receipts for entitled film technicians and walking a tightrope of controlled chaos  reached its zenith in the spring of 2012.  So i quit.  Not really quit quit walk out the door, but I called uncle.  This disturbed the well established order of my working relationships, in particular with the producer I had worked for for over 20 years.
I had to face the loss of a good working relationship and a good job, by taking a peon job across the hall as an accounting clerk.  Another quasi police show being produced by an American network with money.   In the eyes of my old colleagues they probably think I slutted out to the evil empire.  But  the experiences has been good.  I've  mostly laughed my pants off so hard everyday I peed.   That felt good.   I've refocused what I can give and what I would like to do, and what I want to be paid for it.  And it only took five months to figure it out.
So now, waiting on my next job,  I'm back in the basement, the basement I so desperately tried to avoid 14 years ago.  I'm with large dog, knitting needles, fabrics and sewing machines, and a handsome apple iMac.  I follow my selection of lifestyle porn blogs, now emboldened to share my own visual aesthetic.  I've thought of starting a "journal" blog, a food blog, a quilt blog,  a bullmastiff blog, but I think I'll stay with bellydance knitter.  There is something disturbing to me where one's life and interests are compartmentalized.  Where knitting Turkish stockings leaves off, collecting Persian rugs begins, and where sitting on a rug ends with a meal adapted from Paula Wolfert's writing, discussing Edith Wharton and where the Arab Spring meets Occupy Toronto, and my family's well trod path through alcoholism and addiction to wellness and healing, and wholeness.  Not wanting to be too scary here, but the blog is a package deal I think, what I would share with a stranger in a coffee shop, or co-workers by the monitor.  Maybe I'm too open a book, too shallow, too concerned with pretty colours and nice flavours, too messy, too much rage, too much dog hair.  et bien.

So writing on the bellydance knitter blog continues.

Seven Year Cycle. Repeat.
THEN:
Almost fourteen years ago I was in the basement watching COPS reruns with my now ex-husband. I wasn't very happy (mind you, my nature is irritable restless and discontented). I was mulling over a possible opportunity to push through to the next dimension in my career. My textile aspirations at the time were humble, daily offerings of stitches knat, and I had only begun to crave the large scale of colour, movement and pattern satisfaction that quilting offered. So I weighed the prospect of staying in the basement, with the now ex-husband and toodling away at my craft, or going big at work. I chose the little red sports car, big budgets, men and machines, and staying out all night. For a very long time my new chosen life was a lot of fun. Along the way, I divorced the husband, found mid-life love for eastern textiles and belly-dancing after I thought I'd never love again, and continued to nurture my passion for yarn and fabric. In that time, I found the like-minded in knitting cafes like THE PURPLE PURL, and online communities like Ravelry. After a seventy hour week, knitting with my friends was my social life. I stopped debating the guilt of stash acquistion, craft or art, and indulged every textile whim I had. Five hundred knitting books, three rooms of wool and fabric, seven bins of belly-dance costuming bling, two new sewing machines and one serger, two hundred and fifty rugs later...I sold the miata, quit the big job, and live with a big bullmastiff boy puppy named Edgar and date my ex-husband. Honey, I'm home!

NOW:



























NOW:

Shagara Moon performed at Riverdale Park on July 1st. The stage was this painted black plywood contraption, which was burning the feet of the dancers in the first number. Blistered and limping, the remaining dances were done on the grass in front of the stage, which was better on the feet and a more intimate performance I think. The khaleegy dancers were like coloured bejeweled butterflies floating on the steep green hill falling down to the Don Valley. So beautiful.

More of this please.

Bellydancing is a fact of my life. It is not a fad, not to be put aside like some of my other pursuits; beach glass mosaics, speed-walking or calligraphy. I can turn my head away for a little while, but somewhere a string of music or a rhythm always catches me. The dance troupe that I've ingratiated myself with is real. As much as I try to fade to the back of the room to observe the pretty young women with bendy bodies, I cannot ignore that I'm taking up space in this room. My body moves, not like a seventeen year old, but it moves. It wants to dance too, heavy and swollen, but with hips that remember. I can summon the zills heavy rhythms in silence. My hips pop, my arms swim, my chest drops. We rehearsed khaleegy yesterday, and I didn't even have to think about how I would drop to my knees. My brain didn't think creaky knees, it just went down. My hair swirled. I'm not here by mistake. Every flaw my body carries is part of my dancing. I am a dancer.

I went away to a cottage this weekend for two days of summer and swimming. We pretended as best we could that it was warm, but here is a picture of me wearing fleece warmups while drinking my morning coffee and knitting. The ghost of Daddy was close by when I did the "e-e-e-e-ah-ah-ah" cry before submerging in still northern lake waters. When we used to sail with my Dad on Lake Champlain in Vermont, he always had us off the boat in the water before the first cup of coffee, no matter the weather or wind conditions or the temperature. When I woke up Saturday morning on Mink Lake, before a thought bubble had formed over my head, I tripped into a wet bathing suit and stumbled to the lake edge. e-ee-e-eee-e-e-eahhhha -ach. Into still waters I slipped, warming with every stroke, pushing through the top layer cooled by night and finding yesterday afternoon's tepid slick. It was just enough exertion and cold water to wake up, and spur me onto the reward of fleece pants and the first cup of coffee.
We committed the cardinal sin on this trip. Between the two of us, neither of us brought socks. It was cold at night. It was cold after the morning swim. We needed socks.
And I knit socks, continually, religously, obsessively. Thick, thin, working, art-y, plain, cabled, bright, dim. My friends have been giving me gifts of store socks for years. When my mother started to knit again, she gave me socks, of the thick acrylic blend of faux Christmas sock slipper variety. When I go to the ONE OF A KIND show every December in Toronto, I buy the Quebecois mohair bed socks, and of course I buy every other bit of mohair product they have, including short tall mens' womens' black blue natural mauve single double mohair socks and mittens. I give these bed-socks away, and I've kept enough pairs for personal usage that I've managed to stash a pair in all my suitcases and travel packs for "visiting" emergencies. There is nothing worse than sleeping away from home, and being woken by cold feet. There was no precious little knob of mohair bed socks tucked into my bag this weekend. Whimper and wail, no socks.
The ultimate irony was that this was a sockknitting weekend, and between us we had five pairs of unfinished socks. Never again. Je me souviens. Je me souviendra. I'm putting an emergency sock stash everywhere this week.

sorry Miko...need I say more...the book is going to get it....

xx

am

.....last post in March 2008....yes, in five months there has been knitting, dancing and rugs....again, with the punctuation.....again, with the half-thoughts....

I purchased a rug, while showing a co-worker how to bid on ebay. Ali was turning forty, and she appeared to like the rug, so when it was delivered I gave it to her as a birthday gift. The rug that we had spread out in the office and dug our toes in, lived with us for only a week. Here, it lives virtually and for as long as there are bits and bites and electricity. It has the most unusual deep cherry red, a colour I crave, yet never manage to hold onto for long. Like all shiraz rugs, it's filled with little emblems, flowers, medallions, signs from G*d, animals and aliens. One day I'll study one of my rugs, and read it for a couple of months, checking for cast-off symbols, reckless camels or deliberation of design.

Those Scandinavian socks sure got around. Christening Sarah in Hudson Quebec in January 1987, wearing only pantyhose with a skirt was folly...

My Mom's pair of scandinavian socks are modelled by moi, at the base of Sterling Mountain, Smuggler's Notch, Vermont, January 1967. I look at this picture and I feel cold. I remember that thin little jacket, when we regularly skiied at zero farenheit and lower temperatures. I think my wool fixation comes of having been so cold as a kid. Now I'm outfitted with hats, mufflers, scarves, gloves, mittens, thrum mittens, wristies, sweaters thin and heavy, down vests, down jackets, hand-knit socks up the whowho, silk long-johns, cotton long-john underthings, cotton and wool turtlenecks and even electric socks. Those long cold days of eastern skiing ice and rock, frost bite on my face and toes have left with one me with one notable driving force in life; knitting in the chalet at the base with a nice cup of hot chocolate in front of a fire.

...missed last night's belly-dance drill class...cling.shwish.ding.bling....too much snow, too much winter, too dark, wearing winter socks and hiding under a blanket....dulled noises from industrious neighbours shovelling outside...back under the blanket....complete sentences to come....

The Scandinavian ski socks as they were originally worn in 1970 (see January 18th for a 1989 modelling).

Knitting Stash circa 1988...working my way to two closets, five baskets, and an outside storage facility....

I did a wool inventory; 20+ WIPs, seventy lots of yarn sufficient for a large sweater each and 10,000g of sock yarn. after i gave away three boxes and a garbage bag full.... i don't know if I'll be able to finish this in a lifetime, but i'll try ;)

Forgive me blog for I have knit more socks. It's been many months since my last confession of sock completions.... I finished khaki green ribbed socks for Clive, same version different colour (burnt orange/brown) for Lisa, kiddie primary blue/red/green on a white twist for Lynn, hideous white/orange/fushia for me (because they're not going anywhere) . WIP include pink lace from Nancy Bush, briggs&little work socks, and plain socks with selfpatterning mauve,fushia,orange,tan and browns.....