WEAVING

She had a hat....

Martin Small, with whom I lived for 31 years until his death in 2011, was one of those people who told jokes. He was good at it…could reproduce accents well, for example…but nonetheless, like all such people, he had a tendency to tell and retell and retell his favorites. He told me his Scottish Medical School joke the first time we met and I later calculated that over the course of 31 years I probably heard the Scottish Medical Joke at least 60 times.*

Another of his favorites was the one about the Jewish grandmother whose little grandson is swept out to sea when they are at the beach together. A lifeguard leaps into the ocean and swims fifty yards through crashing surf out to rescue the child, brings him back and deposits him, gasping and choking, on the sand in front of his grandmother. She looks at him, then says to the lifeguard (use Jewish-grandmother-accent here): “He had a hat.”

I thought of that when I started to post this photograph. I have a hat. I actually bought this hat over the internet, from a company called (no idea why) Turtle Fur because this was to be my first winter in Maine in many years and it was clear that I would need a warm hat. Here it is:

and indeed it has been a great success. It does, in fact, keep my head warm. And..as well…it also give me something to do with my hands while I watch mindless TV in front of the fireplace on cold snowy evenings.

This (below) is the aforementioned TV, more recently)

and here is what I‘ve been doing with my hands.

Yes, knitting a scarf to match the hat. I went to my favorite local yarn shop….Grace Robinson’s, Freeport, Maine…

…and bought yarn as close to matching the hat as possible; I still have…well, not miles….but several feet to go before it’s done, so it will keep my hands busy through a few more snowstorms. But then…(I realize) …

…I will have to start the weaving-in. The tedious, boring, necessary task that almost always follows…or precedes… some creative, fun enterprise. Sort of like: of, Oh, yay, I got a puppy! Ooops: Whaddaya mean I have to train him?

At the same time that I have been yarn-absorbed, I have also been going through the copy-edited manuscript of my new book which will be published by Harper Collins in the fall. It is too soon for me to show the cover, which has been designed already, or tell the title, or even to drop tantalizing hints of the content. All of that will come at the appropriate time.

But I will say that in the process of creating a book, there comes a time…usually about ¾ of the way through…. when the writer (me, in this case) looks at it, rereads it, rethinks it, sighs, groans, clicks on NYT GAMES and plays a lot of old archived CONNECTIONS, decides to rearrange the canned goods in a kitchen cupboard, and watches 5 episodes of Law and Order: SUV. All because it is time, in the writing process, to weave things in. That little plot detail in chapter 3? Nobody will notice that it was never resolved, right? (Wrong) How about that bizarre character who appears for the first time on page 47? He has a reason for being in the book, right? If I could only remember what that reason was! Or: These two paragraphs are completely pointless and add nothing to the plot but wait a minute they contain that one phrase that I think is masterful so maybe I could just leave it all in and no one will notice that the surrounding sentences serve no purpose..?

So you sigh, pick up your (metaphor alert here) large-eyed needle, and squint through your bifocals in order to maneuver the dangling end of the yarn into place. After a while you fall into a kind of rhythm and instead of feeling tedious it begins to feel…productive. Things start to look less messy, less murky.

You’re still on your own, at that point. It’s later, during copyediting…the place where I now am…when strangers, absolute strangers who have never met you and therefore are totally unaware of what a good human being you are, feel compelled to point out that you frequently use that when you should have used which. (Or that you misspelled algorithm TWICE.)

Making those changes—even though you may mutter, even occasionally mutter minor profanity, while doing so—is part of the weaving-in process, and you end up in love with copy editors and grateful that they have tactfully and anonymously kept you from exhibiting your stupidity and ignorance in public.

If I were to close this now and click PRINT…or POST…or whatever Substack reminds you to do….I would be forgetting to weave one last thing in. My first paragraph concluded with an asterisk. So I will now thread that final needle and take a last stitch or two:

The punchline…or lines, actually… of the Scottish Medical School joke are:

“Miss MacDougal, ye hae a verrry dirrrrty mind. And ye are doooomed to a lifteime of bitterrrrr disappointment.”