Finding a Primer

Words have always been my friend.  They have provided comfort, fun, information and sometimes consolation.  They took me far away and kept me close to home and gave me adventures no matter how dull, no matter how confined my day to day world was.  And sometimes words abandon me and become a source of bewilderment and pain.

These things are train problems. From grade 5 and possibly even grade 4 math: Two trains are going down a 60 km track toward each other.  The first is traveling x  fast.  The second is traveling y fast. How far will each travel before they meet?

When I see problems like this, the words jumble up on the page into a pile and become incomprehensible.  The letters won't lie down into order and all I can see is that there is going to be a train wreck.  Two trains are going toward each other and they are going to meet and how could it possibly end well?

I found something very like that yesterday and though I cannot make head or tails of the directions, though the particular skill I was trying to learn remains a mystery,  my inability was illuminating. Seeing that pile, that hump of letters, understanding that it was a pile, a jumble, a hump, a hill, was new and yet I know beyond a doubt, I have seen it before, over and over again. Many many times.

The words piled up and no amount of help, no guidance will make those words lie down and behave. I don't have the skills, the words, the language to explain just where the problems are.  It isn't that I don't want to ask but that I am unable. I am mute. The explanation is jumbled up in there too. I sit there feeling foolish, and I am pretty sure sitting watching me is uncomfortable for those around me.

This is the point where some people simply decide that I am stubborn and perverse and not really very bright. Perhaps deciding this gives them a sense of context, a label under which to place me.  Perhaps doing so, gives them so comfort.  I understand that.  I am a big fan of finding comfort.  (My young instructor - what a wonderful young woman she is - made no decisions, applied no labels, slotted me not, though I could see she felt helpless and inadequate. I hope she is reading this.  I'd like her to understand.)  

I developed a headache and that was it for the day.

I drove home feeling ridiculous, feeling like a mystified 10 year old, feeling incredibly stupid yet knowing that I am not, knowing that I am reasonably intelligent, knowing that knitting is my territory as sure as words have always been.  If this is how kids feel who suffer from learning disabilities, oh sweet heavens, what a horrid thing to have to live through without any idea of how to cope.

At least I know that if these words never order themselves, I can put the stitches on 2 needles and do a perfectly marvelous graft and no one will ever know of my little 'issue'.

This is not the first time I have come across train wrecks in knitting.   I think it is the source of my nervousness about patterns.  I think it might be why I completely 'get' Elizabeth Zimmermann and Barbra Walker's work.  They don't describe things word for word, they don't mix numbers and letters. They are spare of words and I delight in that and now, I completely understand why.  It also makes my frustration, impatience and tenseness with counting to 2 in lace and with at least one perfectly wonderful scarf pattern I recently tried, completely understandable.

I'm not sure why, so suddenly, after all these many years, I recognized the primer with which to break the jumbles that form.  Perhaps it is age, perhaps it is the state of my vision and its moving, weaving, waving letters, perhaps it is that knitting provides the framework. I doubt that I can stop the words from jumbling when they will, but at least I understand that there is something specific happening and maybe one day soon I will break the code to swiftly putting the words back into orderly rows.

I'm going to work through the this wee graft and find the words to explain how I have to think about it.  Part of my job in being a student was to give my instructor other ways to describe it to people. Maybe struggling through this with this new primer, will lead to a second value or a second letter to break this mysterious code.