Odd moments in the day:
#1: Some some reason, during my (very short) drive to work this morning I was suddenly and for no good reason hit by a wave of nostalgia for the front steps of my youth. I live now in one of those subdivisions where you don’t really get to know your neighbor, but back when I was a kid growing up on a block of Philadelphia rowhouses, neighbors of all ages hung out together on summer nights. Kids from maybe kindgarten through the end of grade school, which was sixth grade then – that is, everyone who was of age not to be too young, too cool, or too tired for running games – played games. Doors and Manhunt were basically tag games, adapted for rowhouses (for instance, you had to go past a certain number of doors, then walk back backwards, before you could start running after everyone else). Red Light Green Light and Mother May I had one person being boss, and everyone else starting from a line and getting to that person, moving only when permitted by the rules of the games. Then there were step ball and wall ball games, though I never really knew the rules of those.
Once you were too old to want to play those, you’d sit on the steps and talk to the neighbors – sometimes to your own friends, but other times to neighbors of all ages. I miss playing with the neighbor babies and hearing the wisdom (and it sometimes was that) of the local patriarch – on our block, it was a guy named Ray, who was what passed for well-off in that neighborhood. Hell of a nice guy. Everybody liked him. He’d had a grocery store, built it into a small local chain, and sold it off to Safeway. He and his wife went to Florida for winters. Nice people. They had one son who had a couple of daughters who must be grown now; I hope they remember their grandparents as fondly as I do.
I worry about that memory thing – it’s a natural consequnce of being childless, and not having that much of a social life. There’s really no one after me to remember my uncle, for instance; my brother wasn’t as close to him as I was, so his son will hear the occasional mention but probably not enough to form a vivid impression. It’s also a drawback to late marriage: it always saddens me to think that of all the extended family and neighbors who were there to see me married, only a very few were still around to watch my brother take the same step sixteen years later. At least he’s got a strong community of friends and of relatives on his wife’s side, and has gotten to know a bunch of relatives on Dad’s side who started having reunions after I left home, so his son is growing up with even more family, by blood or choice, than we did.
Anyway.
Odd thing #2: Online enounter with a vampire. I’m doing this mystery knit-along (MKAL), as I’ve mentioned, and it seems to have attracted a lot of knitters who aren’t familiar with some skills I’d consider fairly basic, like simple lace or reading a chart. At first, I was surprised, but then I decided that was pretty cool: The designer’s beautiful designs and general accessability (she’s been answering lots of questions about the pattern), and the friendliness of people in the MKAL discussion threads, are getting a lot of less experienced knitters to step outside their comfort zones. So that’s why I wanted to be helpful when on a KAL thread asked for help. I answered her original questions, and then she they asked for more detail and more, and more… Finally in desperation I suggested consulting a basic knitting book like Stitch ‘n’ Bitch (for instructions on how to rip back your knitting which, come on, is fairly intuitively obvious in concept if not always easy to do) and she named the specific book she had, which I’ve never seen, and asked what term to use to look it up!
Not an internet troll: a vampire.
Later when I vented elsewhere, two separate people warned me that person has shown that kind of behavior time and again and has even been kicked out of one group for general uselessness and annoyingness. I don’t even think I’d have minded the cluelessness, but she never ever even once thanks me for the explanations I’d given, in an exchange of several posts. People are strange.
And I would say they’re not all that nice, but the counterexamples are numerous and shining: all those friendly helpful people who prompted me to join in the general kindness by answering a question where I could, plus the two who took time to warn me.