Mr. Garter and I zipped off to Boston over the weekend for the wedding of two good friends. Naturally, this entailed a lot of last-minute scurrying around, taking our wedding finery to the drycleaners and scheduling haircuts and lining up neighbors to feed the cat and printing driving directions and — most importantly — figuring out what to knit on the plane. Hence, the blog post I started to draft never quite got off the ground, and then I didn’t touch a computer for four whole days. This may be a record for the year, which alarms me just a little, but I’m happy to report I didn’t feel any symptoms of withdrawal. I did, however, feel guilty about not having fed the blog before I went away. Do forgive the hiatus.

So what was I knitting on the plane? I had started a little lace project earlier in the week. The wedding was to be “daytime formal”, and here at Blue Garter we don’t stock a lot of haute couture. My best dress is inherited from Mr. G’s Fashion-Plate Beverly Hills Grandmother, may she rest in peace. It’s lovely, but I feel certain that at one time it had some sort of belt or sash or something in the middle. It needs it. So naturally, I thought I’d knit one to match my shoes. I was in possession of a skein of Habu cashmere laceweight (nabbed on sale) in a complimentary shade. Why is it that it seems like such a brilliant idea to just whip up a little something in yarn the weight of spider silk on size 2 needles when you know the thing needs to be blocked and buttoned in five days’ time? I know I’ve had these impulses before, and I know I cursed myself for giving in to them, and yet it seems I haven’t learned a thing from the experience. At any rate, I pulled it off this time.

I’ll admit to getting certain kicks out of setting foot on a hallowed Ivy League campus. The brick, the lawns, the art museum… you can practically smell the bookish geekdom. Of course there was an entirely different scene kittycorner across the Yard. It was Octoberfest in Harvard Square.

This piratey stilt-clown guy snuck up on me. I totally didn’t know he was there in this picture, except that my camera man was grinning suspiciously.

That other plum-colored bit of knitting I’m wearing isn’t my own work. It’s the Shibui Lace Shrug, and it’s really lovely, and it matched my shoes perfectly.

The wedding (at Memorial Church; we didn’t get all dolled up and go to Harvard just to be quirky) was joyous, and it was a delight to catch up with friends I haven’t seen in five years. This is a crowd I know from the time I spent teaching school in the Bahamas, and they’re top-notch people. You know you’re among top-notch people when, during the wedding supper, everyone around you is suddenly wearing a ridiculous wig. At first it’s your goofy friends, and it’s just good nostalgic fun because the wigs (along with hula hoops) were a favorite party accessory for nights on the dock drinking Kalik beer. But pretty soon the wee flower girls are decked out as Elvis and Little Orphan Annie, and the bride’s father is cutting up the dance floor in a fluorescent pink bob. The wedding pictures are going to be tough to explain, I’m afraid. We had to leave the festivities all too early in order to snatch a few hours’ sleep before the morning flight home.

As it turned out, we missed our connection at Newark and were left with eight hours to wait until the next plane. I was in no mood to spend that much time in my second-least-favorite airport, even after the customer service counter attendant pointed out that there was a “meditation room” available. So we caught the train into the city and enjoyed a quick visit with my brother and his fiancée and a few other good friends. We could hardly keep our eyes open, but it was worth it.

And fortunately, I didn’t have to knit little scraps of lace on the way home. I’d brought my two sweaters to work on, and some lazy hours with my pal Mia and the fabulous entertainment of the Planet Earth DVDs gave me ample knitting time: there’s a veritable sea of blue ribbing in my tote bag just now. More on that next time. Just now I need to get some sleep. Mr. G caught a cold on the way home and I’ve no wish to contract it!

In which we interrupt our regular content to venture into sports journalism:

I experienced a new slice of Portland life last evening: attendance at a Portland Timbers FC match. It was the last home game of the season for our local minor-league footballers, and they drew a record-breaking crowd. The 15,000+ spectators (and several hundred additional fans, every bit as enthusiastic as the ticket-holders, lining the street that overlooks the park) don’t sound too impressive until you’ve been among them. Unbeknownst to most Portlanders, there are soccer-mad citizens among us who could do themselves proud in England, Italy, or Brazil. They call themselves the Timbers Army, and stadium management graciously allows them to bring in enormous flags on eight-foot poles, drums, trumpets, cowbells, inflatable dolphins, streamers, and green smoke bombs. They never sit down during the match, and neither do they shut up. For the 90 minutes of the game, plus the warm-up, half time, and a good fifteen minutes after the victory, they were in constant song, chant, and heckle. Their ditties range from the title of this post, accompanied by manic hand-clapping, to the merciless “There’s no pity in the Rose City!” for fallen opponents and the jingling of car keys and lusty chorus of “Go home, you bums, go home”, to the derisory “Helen Keller” chant (“I’m blind! I’m deaf! I wanna be a ref!”), to this downright bizarre adaptation of a popular Christmas song:

Gone away is the quiet
Over here is a riot
Just walkin’ along, singin’ our song,
Walkin’ in a Timbers wonderland.

The maestro of the whole performance is the team mascot. Timber Jim is not an overstuffed bobble-head cartoon lumberjack trotting about waving an inflatable ax, as you might expect. Timber Jim is a burly 60-year-old powerful enough to stomp around the edge of the pitch brandishing and revving an enormous chain saw over his head (Shindaiwa is one of the team’s sponsors) and to scale the 80′ tree trunk that flies the Timbers flag, but nimble enough to stick back-flips and rappel from the stadium ceiling with his saw and drum. When the team scores, Timber Jim buzzes off a 2″-thick slab of his gigantic log, which is trundled out on a wagon before each match, and presents it to the man with the golden foot. One fellow scored a hat trick earlier in the season and could barely stagger off the field with his three trophies. The Army harbors a fierce love and idolatry of Timber Jim: they wear scarves bearing his name and he has several of his own chants and songs, including a tender bellowing of “You Are My Sunshine” in memory of his teenage daughter who died in a car wreck. They are a clan, the Timbers fans, and Timber Jim is their patriarch.

Shouting and cheering in the midst of this raucous crew, I couldn’t help thinking back to my days as a student of anthropology. I read a very interesting book that came out of fieldwork among the “hooligan” soccer fans in England, but you have to get down among the sweaty, beer-drenched, exultant masses to appreciate what an outlet for camaraderie and devotion the stadium can be. It’s spoken of in baseball, particularly (in my experience) in Fenway Park, but I’ve rarely seen it sustained so electrically for so long. Soccer doesn’t offer the deliberate, structured pauses of baseball: everyone is in motion every minute of a well-played game, and a second or two of brilliant or lax play can change the tide at any point. And unlike many of the more popular American sports, it’s better viewed in person than on television with extensive commentating. There’s little need for instant replay; the ball is large and easy to see at all times; the fans can truly appreciate how hard the players are working as they sprint up and down that big field with no clock stoppages for 45 minutes. Stats don’t matter; fitness and vision and innovative connection with other players do. That’s what I like to see in all the sports I watch, so I may have to make Timbers games a regular part of my summer schedule next year. I can probably even employ my knitting skills to improve on those acrylic scarves. It shouldn’t be hard to work up an intarsia chart for NO PITY, right?

Sorry for the long silence. There was a week of extraordinary busy-ness, with two jobs, much report editing, a final exam paper, a final sewing class, a mad dash to the airport. Delays. Wailing babies. No sleep. Inter-terminal sprints (an Olympic event in the making, should the Games ever come to Newark, NJ), with pauses to be air-jetted in some really obnoxious new security machines. Boston, braving the Harvard commencement mayhem. The excellent Fogg Art Museum (my boy Inness, Whistler, David Smith, and many other favorites). The Worcester Art Museum (Hi, Mrs. Perez Morton! Hi! Hi, all you other old buddies from art history class – I didn’t know so many of you lived in Worcester!). And then, a wedding:

(Click for ginormous and not blurry)

This is my bestest four-year roommate, confidante, instructor in fashion and craftiness, and co-conspirator in all facets of college life, Mia. She wed her sweetheart Eric last Saturday and is pretty much the happiest woman on the planet. (At least I hope she still is. She is a newly minted doctor and started her internship on Wednesday. Pray for her, my friends.) And as you can see, I am very happy to see her so happy. I was also just about this gleeful when she let me play with her spinning wheel on Tuesday when we met up back in Boston after the nuptial festivities. The extremely ugly little woolturds I spun in no way reflect the loveliness and seductive qualities of her Majacraft Rose. Even the gentlemen present were hypnotized by its awesome dual-treadle action. Eric’s status as a suitor worthy of my beloved friend was sealed when he gave her this wonder on her last birthday.

In the midst of all this fun was a dash through two other states, a memorial party for my grandmother that became a full-blown reunion of both sides of the family, and a visit to the legendary Webs (I wanted to pitch a tent and move in). We came home. I got laid out by a vicious sore throat, which is still gnawing at my vocal cords with its nasty pointy teeth, but is giving way to a cough. Huzzah.

Anyway, it’s been a busy time. I’ll show you some piddly little scraps of knitting soon, and the skirt I just finished in my beginner’s sewing class. It’s actually pretty cute, even though I didn’t get the zipper exactly right. But right now I need some beauty rest. Tomorrow is Anniversary Day chez Garter, and the hubby has lined up a lovely romantic getaway at the Columbia Gorge Hotel. Scraps of knitting and skirts with wobbly lines of stitching totally look better in luxe jazz-age hotels, right? Right. I somehow suspect there are very few papas among my readers, but if you’re out there, Happy Father’s Day, dudes.

I have a Tall Drink of Water Texan Brother-in-Law. It’s one of those spicy twists in life I never could have foreseen, like living in New York City or marrying a boy I met in high school. TDWTBL is more than your average Coor’s Lite-drinking, Stetson-wearing, two-stepping, fence-mending, calf-branding desperado: he’s also a math genius who turned down a Harvard scholarship, an engineering wizard who can build custom work vehicles out of his head without ever drawing up plans, an ace golfer, a state-ranked marksman, a good cook, and a helluva gentleman. He married Mr. Garter’s twin sister a year ago, and we all met up in NYC for the wedding of our friends Ian and Cindy.

Cindy is Italian-Canadian and Ian lived in Italy for about eight years studying and practicing architecture. Here they are:

What I like most about this picture is the paparazzi in the background. Now you want a full shot of Cindy’s awesome dress, don’t you?

It’s Carolina Ferrera, but not from the actual wedding-gown line. The underlayer has green and yellow stripes, and there are little sprays of yellow and green floral motifs on the outer layer of organza. At the reception she wore a wide green belt that goes with it. Cindy and Ian always look sharp. It was quite the mix of people at this wedding: uber-fashionable Milanese designers, urban New York types, Idaho back country kids, Montreal cosmopolites, everybody’s parents, and TDWTBL in his spanking new white Stetson — the first new cowboy hat he’s ever purchased, because he wanted to do New York City right. Here’s the closest Mr. Garter came to capturing the Stetson on film:

TDWTBL grew up in Terlingua, Texas, which is marked as a ghost town on most maps. It’s just outside Big Bend National Park, the least visited of the national parks and also (or perhaps because so) one of the most worth visiting. Parts of it look like the surface of the moon. Drive for five minutes and the desert is suddenly riotous with blooming cacti and other formidable plants, or a towering range of vermilion mountains heaves in sight. At the southern perimeter is a lush belt of cottonwoods full of bird life and javelinas, and the muddy Rio Grande muscling through. It’s literally a stone’s throw across to Mexico (we threw stones). I grew up on the Canadian border (or rather with the knowledge that it was about three miles offshore, that that some of the islands were arbitrarily on our side and some on theirs, and that you could see the headlights of the cars driving north from Victoria at night), but the border at Big Bend is a national border as borders have only ever existed in the folkloric section of my imagination. There’s the river, and a few scrubby yards of shore, and then there are the Cliffs of Insanity. Seriously. The face of Mexico thrusts up so vertiginously that you feel you could break against it. You feel small. You wonder at the fortitude of anyone who ever eked out a living in that landscape in the days before air conditioning and indoor water faucets. This is where TDWTBL grew up.

The trip to NYC was his third airplane ride. The first thing he and Mr. Garter’s sister did on arrival was to whip out the ironing board. They are obsessive ironers. Anything that will lie prone long enough to be soused in starch gets vigorous and daily ironing. They iron socks. TDWTBL’s blue jeans can stand up by themselves: I have seen them do this. Once everyone was pressed and armored to brave the big city, we all went down to Ian’s mother’s house for a big wedding-eve party. Afterwards, it was suggested that the groom ought to do a little drinking on his last night of bachelorhood. Some of his friends went out to scout the area for a bar. The area in question is the East 30’s, and anyone who’s lived in New York knows what that means: all the bars are basically extensions of the college frat party scene, but with smarter clothes and more disposable income. Most of them are meat markets with no character and bad music, and it was one of these that Ian’s friends chose. We knew what we were in for, but we didn’t want to be party poopers.

First we needed to meet with the approval of the two colossal bouncers, so we dutifully presented our IDs. I still have a New York driver’s license, so they let me right through. I squashed myself between a couple of budding investment bankers and tried to make my way to the bar; then I realized I’d lost the rest of my party. I squashed back out again. Sure enough, the bouncers were giving my Stetson-clad brother-in-law a hard time. He’d taken the test for his commercial driver’s license a couple of weeks earlier, they clipped his old license when he passed, and he’s still waiting for the new license to arrive. Knowing that many establishments won’t accept a clipped license as valid ID, he presented his concealed weapons permit. The bouncer took one look at this Texan with a handgun license, called his colleague over, and pulled TDWTBL aside.

“Are you carrying, man?” one of the behemoths asked him, sotto voce. TDWTBL does a very respectful “No sir”, and fortunately the bouncers bought it and didn’t insist on patting him down. (Not that they’d have been able to feel much through all that starch.)

We lasted about a minute and thirty seconds in the bar — long enough for TDWTBL and his Stetson to draw a lot of astonished and rather appreciative looks from the clientele. We decided Ian would understand if we opted out of the debauchery. As it turned out, TDWTBL’s favorite part of the trip was a night stroll through Battery Park to see the Statue of Liberty all lit up and listen to the waves lapping the pier and the night fishermen conversing amicably between casts. Afterward we ambled up past Ground Zero and St. Paul’s and City Hall (TDWTBL said the gas lamps made him think of Jack the Ripper; I was busy exulting over the Calder stabiles on display down there), and a couple of us developed a craving for noodles. We found a little place in Chinatown that was still open at midnight and cranked TDWTBL’s horizons just a little bit wider.

He was a tremendously good sport about the whole trip. He patiently suffered the Italians to take pictures of his hat, but he was disdainful of his overcooked filet mignon at the wedding supper. He plucked the rosemary sprig from the center with distaste and remarked, “I ain’t never seen a steak grow grass before.” After the wedding, I helped him find a place to buy some Copenhagen. This is a habit he’s trying to quit, but I believed the man when he said he needed more than gum to handle New York City. I’ve never bought chewing tobacco before (in fact, I’d sooner pack my lip with rabbit turds … and I’ll thank my mother not to bring up what I may or may not have done in this line as a country baby), but I like being the kind of girl who knows where to find things people need, and I did live in the neighborhood for two years.

All in all, a fulfilling trip. I’ll save my reunion with my knitting pals and my indiscretions in Habu for next time: if you’ve made it this far I applaud your stamina and bow in thanks.

I hope all you mothers out there had a wonderful day and felt fully appreciated.