CIRCULAR KNITTING

I loved smoking. Really. I was passionate about cigarettes. I loved everything about them. I adored that first tang of sulfur when the match was blown out, the initial draw, the long middle, that last sour, greedily sucked puff at the butt end of the smoke. I loved that smoking gave me an excuse to sit and do nothing. Seven minutes of silence is precious sometimes. Other times, smoking gave me something to hide behind. Like in all the best Bogie movies, the way a person holds her cigarette tells you something about her, and my smoking said I’m not scared. But of course, that wasn’t true.

I’m not normally a very shy person, but in highly social settings, I get nerves so badly that I have to have something to grip, something to anchor me down. During my twenties, that something was smoking. At parties, I was the one who first got a glass of wine from the host and then immediately went to stand outside with the other socially awkward addicts. There was a bond among us, an agreement reached when we lit each other’s cigarettes with the butt ends of our own. We understood each other. And the fact that we looked like cool kids smoking outside, while we really were just nervous, was a lie we’d keep to ourselves.

I had tried to quit many times before, but I had a pack-a-day habit, and I failed, again and again. I know it sounds stupid, but quitting felt like losing a friend. No, worse. It felt like losing twenty of my best little filter-tipped friends, all standing at attention in my purse, always there for me, ready to get me out of sticky situations, easing the stresses of everyday life. If I quit, what would I hide behind?

It wasn’t until just before my thirtieth birthday, when I gave myself the ultimate bribe, that I gave up smoking for good: If I quit, I could buy as much yarn as I wanted. Everything. The finest merino, baby alpaca—even cashmere wasn’t off-limits. Heck, I was going to save four bucks a day by not buying cigarettes. I could almost afford qiviut.

The Mayo Clinic in Minnesota says that keeping the hands busy by taking up knitting can help with quitting smoking, and med-school doctors note that knitting lowers your heart rate, your blood pressure, and your breaths per minute. Knitting had always been soothing to me and, maybe, just maybe, it would offer me the same shelter that smoking had. Even better, I would be doing something productive rather than destructive.

So I bought yarn like sheep were going bald, and I kept the sock yarn in my purse in the same spot my cigarettes had been. Yarn was a different, healthier lifeline, and hey, I got to knit indoors! As a smoker I’d always been outside huddled in the cold and rain. Every time I craved a cigarette, I pulled out my yarn. I made more socks that first year than I’d made in the previous ten years.

Sock knitting is almost entirely thoughtless knitting. I don’t like fancy, lacy, patterned socks. My socks are just good old stockinette tubes with a heel and a ribbed cuff. I like the challenge of having to concentrate on sweaters and shawls, but I’m not looking for anything complicated when it comes to the socks I carry around in my purse. I just need them to be there for me, whether I’m stuck in line at the post office, or at a party chatting with people I barely know.

More than just helping me remain calm, smoking had always been a literal screen to hide behind when I felt something worse than feeling stressed: when I felt inadequate. If I tripped off a curb, I’d light up a cigarette and laugh it off. If I was unsure about the right answer to a question, I’d take a casual puff while considering my best options. I’d pretend that I was cool when, really, I was feeling woefully underprepared. I knew I wasn’t cool. It was just another lie I told myself about smoking—in my heart of hearts I knew I was killing myself and looking like a bit of an asshole at the same time. But I hid behind the smoke regardless, ignoring that voice, until I quit and picked up the needles in desperation.

I was reminded of this recently, when I was signing books at the Oakland Fiber and Textile Festival. It was a gorgeous day in the Bay Area, the first really warm day of the summer. People frolicked in summer sundresses and shorts, slathering on the first layers of summer sunscreen. Children laughed and ran in the grass while knitters congregated under large umbrellas, admiring each other’s work.

I sat at a small table with the occasional lanolin-scented breeze wafting by. I got to meet readers, see friends, and sign books, all the while knitting socks in green Miss Babs yarn with blue heels and toes.

But even though it was awesome, it was still scary to sit out in the open with the book of my heart at my elbow, people riffling through it and choosing to either buy it or walk on. So instead of staring at people perusing my book and making them squirm, I knitted. They were able to look at the front cover, flip it over and read the back, look at the quotes, and think about the price, while I hid behind my yarn, available for answering questions, avoiding the hard sell.

What they didn’t know was that every time I frowned and looked down, fiddling with something on the needle, I was faking it.

I don’t have to look at my knitting when working socks (unless I’m turning the heel), which makes them a great portable project for social activities. When you can carry on a whole, uninterrupted conversation while maintaining eye contact, no one minds if you knit. In fact, the non-knitters are kind of impressed.

But it doesn’t feel impressive. To me, it feels necessary for survival, in exactly the way cigarettes used to.

So when two knitting sisters suddenly started arguing next to my table, one saying she’d heard of my book, the other saying, no, she hadn’t, she was thinking of another book, I squinted at my yarn and then gasped as if I’d dropped a stitch while the sisters bickered. They argued the relative merit of knitting fiction as a whole while I kept my head down and my eyes on my work. To them, I looked engrossed, while in reality, I was just doing the knit stitch, over and over, around and around. I could have easily done this if I’d been dropped down a pitch black well. I was so grateful to have my sock—I was hiding in plain sight, just like I used to with cigarettes. Everyone ignores the girl smoking while leaning against the concrete wall, no one makes eye contact. I loved that knitting brought me back that anonymity. The sisters didn’t notice me (or buy the book, for that matter).

I hadn’t thought ahead, though. After an hour, I finished my sock. Worse, it was the second one, so I couldn’t just cast on again with the same yarn. I thought of doing something I’ve done in the past, which is to knit on with no regard for what the actual length was meant to be, planning to rip out the excess when safely behind closed doors, but I knew I had three more hours to sit at my book table, and I couldn’t bear the thought of later having to rip out five inches of useless sock.

And I couldn’t even consider my only other option: not knitting. Oh, no. Impossible. To sit and talk to strangers about my writing? Without knitting? No way. I looked jealously at the skater kid who cruised past on the sidewalk, cigarette clamped between his lips. I wanted to knock him off the board, or to bum one like I used to, like I hadn’t done in years and years.

I had a flutter or two of panic in my chest, and my stomach flipped.

Then I looked around: I was surrounded by table after table of yarn vendors.

Duh.

The panic went away, and I felt the cool assuredness that comes right before a yarn purchase. I crossed to the nearest booth and grabbed the closet sock-weight yarn. I didn’t care what color it was, or what fiber composition it was made of, I just cared that I could cast on. Immediately.

I lucked out. The yarn was gorgeous: Amy Klimt’s hand-dyed merino/cashmere/tencel in self-striping red, pink, and white. Each color change was clear and crisp, and I couldn’t wait to get each stripe made. In the next three hours, I met dozens of new people, sold lots of books, and knitted almost to the heel of my delicious new candy-cane sock.

The beast was soothed. I would survive. Even better, I’d have something to show for it.

And I was reminded again that our craft, with its particular alchemy, changes time and effort into something beautiful and useful, whereas smoking just changed clean lungs into dirty, damaged ones. At its core, smoking didn’t transform me into a better anything, and when I used to tell myself it did—that it made me cooler, more confident, more likable—I was lying to myself. But knitting transforms not only yarn into clothing, but knitters into calm, confident people who have a community of their own. And we still have something to hide behind when necessary.