I picked up crocheting first. It was something I could get results from while I struggled to learn to knit.

(Note to anyone reading this who’d like to learn to knit – if you’re not going to get someone who already knits to teach you (I didn’t, and I kinda wish I had), I would not recommend trying to learn from the Susan Bates Learn Knitting! book. At least not if your brain works anything like mine does. I would, however, highly recommend visiting Knitting Help, the knitting section at Dummies.com, and TECHKnitting(TM), all of which have excellent videos and/or diagrams to help you visualize what you should be doing.)

Anyway, my crochet instruction book (from an I Taught Myself to Crochet kit) had much clearer instructions (though I was so confused by being told that all I had to do to make an increase was make two stitches in a single stitch that I spent far too much time on Google trying to figure out exactly how that worked), including instructions on using the stitch markers included in the kit. They’re tiny split rings, and you thread them onto the yarn.

That’s worth repeating.

They’re threaded onto the yarn, and they stay there til you take them off.

Flash forward a few weeks, and I’m working on NovySan’s Doctor Who scarf, which does like to develop extra stitches. (Fewer and fewer as I get better at this, but still.) So, I’m counting stitches to make sure I still have 60, and Novy’s daughter (who started knitting long before I did) says, “Do you have any colored rubber bands? You can just put one every five or ten stitches and then you know exactly how many stitches you have.”

“Oh, I’ve got stitch markers,” I say. “But it’s such a pain to move them up when you add rows, and this thing’s so long, it’s just easier to do it this way.”

We were, I now know, talking at cross-purposes. Because when you knit with stitch markers, you keep them on the needles – you don’t hang them off the thread.

See, what I imagined she was suggesting is that I put the rubber bands on the needles, and knit through them, a bit like knitting two stitches together. Then, when I’d worked up a few more rows, I’d cut them out and set a new batch of markers. (Yeah, that doesn’t make much sense to me, either, now that I try to explain it to someone who doesn’t live inside my skull.) Probably not as big a pain as threading those tiny split-ring markers onto the thread, but it was still going to slow me down. And I don’t knit that fast to start with.

Today, though, I was thinking that if I could figure out an easier way to hang stitch markers off my knitting, I’d be more likely to use them. I have a bobby pin hanging off the “increase” end of this bias scarf I’m knitting, for instance, and that’s plenty easy to move. And I have a whole bunch of French hooks in my sewing box, which seemed like they’d be easy to make stitch markers out of. So I started Googling. And I found this awesome tutorial on making beaded stitch markers out of metal toggle clasps. Michael, who makes them, says he likes the clasps because they’re solid rings, so they don’t snag on anything, and they don’t come open.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “If they’re closed, and they’re made of metal, how do you get them out of the yarn when you’re done?”

So I went back to Google.

And I found an old thread from the Knitter’s Review Forum in which I learned that I’m not the only one who couldn’t figure out how closed stitch markers don’t wind up as a permanent part of your project.

I’m so relieved.

(The same forum thread, by the way, has a really cool tutorial on making scrap-yarn row counters. I’m definitely going to try that. Just as soon as I’ve put this new stitch-marker knowledge of mine into practice.)

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In this half-imaginary Eastern Europe I’d created, the Iron Curtain was a tangible object – not the harshly-lit barbed wire fence I only recently learned was a feature of the Czech countryside, but a tall, solid sheet of gleaming steel, undulating across the landscape. Later, I learned that the Curtain was metaphorical – and I assumed that the Berlin Wall must be, too. I’d seen the checkpoints in films, of course, but that didn’t translate, in my mind, to a great concrete barricade, covered in graffiti and subject to being, quite literally, torn down.

But then, on a no-doubt chilly November morning, Jan was late to class. Jan was a German exchange student, and Jan was never late. This morning, though, he was, and when he ran, breathless, into Mr. Augustin’s Mythology class, his English had all but abandoned him. Mr. Augustin listened to his broken attempts to communicate his excitement to the rest of us, then spoke to him in German. A moment later, he said, “The Berlin Wall has been torn down. Jan’s parents called to say they’re arranging to meet members of the family who were trapped on the other side the night it was built.”

No televised image, no classroom discussion, no Hollywood movie could have made the Wall real for me the way Jan’s flushed cheeks and gleaming eyes did. And if the Wall was real, then so were the people whose lives had been affected by it. And if they were real… Then so were all the other people I saw every night on the news. I don’t know if I’m articulating this well – I’ve never tried before tonight, and sometimes it’s still hard to wrap my head around it.

Jan, wherever you are, thanks for that. You opened up my world that day, though it took me years to realize it.

Photo by abhijeet.rane on Flickr. The painting reminds me of Pyramus and Thisbe, though I’ll hope this one had a happy ending.

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“Mr. Vaughn, what we are dealing with here is a perfect engine,
an eating machine. It’s really a miracle of evolution. All this machine
does is swim and eat and make little sharks, and that’s all. Now, why
don’t you take a long, close look at this sign.”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t go in the water with an open wound?” I asked. “Especially if I’m wearing my seal costume?”

“Egg-zackly!” he said.

It didn’t strike me as odd at the time that was quoting Jaws. I’d been doing a bit of research on Wood’s Hole, where I’ll be catching the ferry to the Vineyard, and I knew that it was home to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and the director of the Institute had reviewed Peter Benchley’s Shark Trouble as “intended more as an argument against the hype than more fuel for it. The author’s introduction,” she wrote, “emphasizes how much has been learned since he wrote Jaws in 1974 and that sharks, including the most fearsome ones, are in much more danger from humans than humans from sharks.”

It wasn’t until I told the story to NovySan and he asked, “What does Jaws have to do with Martha’s Vineyard?” that I realized…

“I don’t know. It was set in New Jersey, wasn’t it?”

“Was it?” his daughter asked. “I thought it was in Jamaica or something.”

“No, it was New Jersey,” I said. I was positive. But not so positive I didn’t look it up the next day. And as far as I can tell… Amity Island could be almost anywhere along the Eastern Seaboard, but might very well be off the coast of Massachusetts – you know, like Martha’s Vineyard. The first few pages of the book, which I skimmed through on Amazon, told me nothing except that Amity was a place that New Yorkers came for the summer. The Wikipedia entries for Martha’s Vineyard and Jaws told me the movie was filmed on the Vineyard. I was terribly confused. But then I found the link to New Jersey I was looking for – the one that explained why, all these years, I’ve thought that fictional white shark had terrorized the Jersey Shore.

In the Google Books preview of Paging New Jersey: A Literary Guide to the Garden State, I discovered that a series of shark attacks on the Jersey Shore in 1916 was one of Benchley’s inspirations for Jaws. The information was familiar enough that I know I’d read it before – probably around the same time I first read Jaws, which must have been in high school. (It’s on a dusty bookshelf in my mind, right next to The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby – and wouldn’t that be an awful mashup? Or brilliant, maybe.)

And so, once again, the Internet informs me that something I’ve known for years isn’t something I knew at all. At least I didn’t invent a disease this time.

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Milk fever, as I remember it, followed the birth of a stillborn child. The poor mother’s unexpressed milk hardened inside her breasts, resulting in pain, swelling, infection and then death. I categorized it as a subset of childbed fever – really, puerperal fever caused by poor hygiene. (When I tried to Google it today, all I could find was a description of certain “morbid symptoms” which might appear in the week after childbirth, but which don’t appear to be fatal, and several references to a hypocalcemic condition that may affect dairy cattle, goats and dogs, and which may well be fatal if not promptly treated.)

And then today, researching something else entirely, I learned that Nancy Lincoln died of milk sickness, which was caused by snakeroot poisoning. A common affliction in the early Midwest, it occurred when cattle ate the very toxic white snakeroot, and passed the poison through in their milk.

So what about that stillborn child, I thought? That younger brother or sister whose death robbed Lincoln’s mother of life? Never existed. There was a younger brother, who died in infancy, but five or six years before Abe’s mother died. There was, however, an older sister, Sarah, called Sally, who died in childbirth at the age of 20. Her baby died, as well.

Somewhere in my mind, then, Lincoln’s mother Nancy (who might well have had milk fever after the stillbirth of Lincoln’s younger brother) and his sister Sarah morphed into a single person, buried in a grave under the poplar trees, where irises bloom in the spring. Always assuming I didn’t make that part up, too.

*And that’s something else I learned today – Lincoln didn’t grow up in Illinois at all. Now I’m wondering how many other bits of history I’ve just got wrong!

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