Knitting can lead you into the weirdest connections. Just in the past few days I’ve come across recommendations for international money transfers (forum on Ravelry) and a general annoyance with people who spew snark from ivory towers at people whose problems they don’t understand (community on LiveJournal).
On an otherwise unrelated topic but speaking of people who don’t understand problems, this is from a short story of Edna Ferber’s. (It’s a desk clerk speaking to a hotel maid, in the days when the latter’s job included hooking female guests into their gowns.)
“Julia, girl,” said Sadie Corn, “ever since the world began there’s been hookers and hooked. And there always will be. I was born a hooker. So were you. Time was when I used to cry out against it too. But shucks! I know better now. I wouldn’t change places. Being a hooker gives you such an all-round experience like of mankind. The hooked only get a front view. They only see faces and arms and chests. But the hookers–they see the necks and shoulderblades of this world, as well as faces. It’s mighty broadening–being a hooker. It’s the hookers that keep this world together, Julia, and fastened up right. It wouldn’t amount to much if it had to depend on such as that!” She nodded her head in the direction the cerise figure had taken. “The height of her ambition is to get the cuticle of her nails trained back so perfectly that it won’t have to be cut; and she don’t feel decently dressed to be seen in public unless she’s wearing one of those breastplates of orchids. Envy her! Why, Julia, don’t you know that as you were standing here in your black dress as she passed she was envying you!”
“Envying me!” said Julia, and laughed a short laugh that had little of mirth in it. “You don’t understand, Sadie!”
Sadie Corn smiled a rather sad little smile.
“Oh, yes, I do understand. Don’t think because a woman’s homely, and always has been, that she doesn’t have the same heartaches that a pretty woman has. She’s built just the same inside.”
And later in the same story:
“He’ll forgive you,” said Sadie Corn; “but you’ll never forgive yourself. That’s as it should be. That, you know, is our punishment for what we say in thoughtlessness and anger.”
Not always cheery stuff (ironically, the title of the story collection is “Cheerful – By Request” but definitely worth reading, and with more of a heart than her lunch partner Dorothy Parker.
I like Edna, preachy and kind at the same time. ~LA