On Yarn and Hope

I don't want to go there.

I shouldn't go there.

I have to go there.

The address came as welcome as a mid-summer rain. A new local yarn shop on a side of town that I used to work. Eclectic, funky, lots of college students and medical resident types. Sidewalk eateries with names like One World Cafe and Eddies and Trinidad Joe's. The multi-billion dollar university right down the block -- the one with Michael Bloomberg's name plastered across its Biophysics Building that will Harry Belafonte and Afeni Shakur this fall -- an intellectual side of town, if you will.

So on a day like yesterday, full of sun and crisp air and trees that look like they've been brushed a brilliant golden red, I set out, with Spouse and the two little ones, to find this place and see what they have in store for me.

Now, we're not short on yarn shops around here. Each has a flavor of its own -- one is so far out in the countryside you'd better check your tires and gas hand before you get on the road; another in a quaint little country-ish kind of town that borders the city line, trying to establish itself as yuppie but filled solidly with the middle class; another on a solidly upper middle class side of town owned by a set of proprietors who peer over their glasses and look at you as if you have, in some misguided way, stumbled into their shop for directions or perhaps to use the bathroom (which you, of course can't do) because you couldn't possibly be in there to buy any of their yarn. May I help you? they ask with that voice that is laced with skepticism. So I was hopeful that this new shop would be suited for the kind like me -- the still learning, flip-flop and long skirt wearing, peace loving, don't-care-what-socially-contrived-class-you-think-you're-in type.

So as we drove along, in what quickly became hard and fast circles, I realized, with a soft and hopeless heart, that this new yarn shop was in fact, nowhere near Michael Bloomberg's name, nowhere near Harry or Afeni Shakur, but rather, across the line -- on the OTHER side of town. As I watched my husband's brows grow closer and closer until they themselves began knitting a sweater across his broad, troubled forehead, I knew something was wrong.

I'll sit here, he said, as he slid the gears into park.

The side of town I am talking about is filled with painful history. Ten years ago, in this same little side of town, a black family was burned completely out of their home, after refusing to succumb to the demands of the locals that they get their you-know-what's out of dodge. Everything they owned went up in smoke to the tune of the city and lots of kind hearted people with a little extra money giving them donations for clothing and food and enough to find a home elsewhere. This seemingly quaint little town was (and some say still is) filled with the bottle-throwing, tatoo-wearing type who would ensure that a lost black man's life ended in the same way that Emmett Till's life ended if he dared to come through there at night. I don't question it since, just yesterday, there were armed police on foot patrol in the middle of a paint-stroked clear Sunday afternoon. The street that runs through the town is filled with eclectic little art shops, a yoga studio, a bookstore dedicated to selling New Age literature and notions. The call it The Avenue.

Spouse said, maybe you should just order your stuff offline.

What I wonder is if Spouse is right....do some places just "never change?" Do some places become so filled with hate that it just glows from the streetlamps, dangles from the light poles, find its way into the cement and live generation after generation after generation? or is he wrong?

What I wonder is if yarn can save us? Can the love of yarn and knitting and the act of creation shared by women carry us into a new place? Can it break down just half of the border that keeps us all on the defense all of the time? Can yarn return us to that place where our mothers held us against their breasts and told us we were beautiful and wondrous and could do anything, be anything....and we believed it?

Can yarn bring back the magic?
Can yarn bring us to a place of peace?

When I stroll around the blogosphere, this place we call a community, I see the same continual threads of elitism and cliquishness. When I open up knit conference catalogues I hold my breath, hoping beyond all measure, to see just one instructor (and one in particular comes to mind) who looks like me, who will give me the encouragement I need to broaden my scope in this chosen art and more importantly, will give me the tools and confidence to go back into the communities where creativity and the joys of creating something by hand is needed most. To the communities where 3 in 5 girls are pregnant before they graduate high school. To the communities where young girls think that the only path to beauty is on a video screen, sliding up and down a pole. But then I open those catalogues and see none. I go to the classes and see just myself. And not that it dispels or discourages the community work I intend to do, but it bothers me, somewhere inside. Is there too much history between us? Too many knots, kinks, and broken weaves?

It makes me go there.

What I hope is that yarn WILL bridge us. Not the yarn in its physical form, obviously, but the use of yarn -- the sharing in acts of creative love. That through the use of yarn somehow we, particularly women, will begin to see our commonalities and frailties and amazing strength. I'm not saying this in some melting pot, polly-anna-ish kind of "we are all one" way. I reject the notion of homogoneous living. What I am hoping for is that yarn will help us to spin new thoughts, new ways of being. That yarn will at least give us the courage to begin thinking, at the very least, about the meaning of "being peace."

A.