ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

One winter day late in 2002, I walked by a display of pretty crochet hooks in a craft store and wound up leaving with a “learn to crochet the easy way” kit and six skeins of yarn. After I figured out the basics, there was no stemming the tide of my passion for crochet. I crocheted until my fingers were raw and ached from holding the hook and the yarn just so. I watched TV and crocheted. I made collection calls at work and crocheted. I sat in bed at night and crocheted until I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

Yet in the time I spent, I never actually completed a single damn project.

The trouble with crochet was that while I liked having something to keep my hands busy, and I enjoyed the process of forming the stitches and so on, I hated the fact that you can crochet for like 270 hours and still have very little to show for your efforts. So by the time my feverish need to constantly crochet had subsided in summer 2003, I had a plastic tub full of yarn, hooks, lots of little patterned squares, pieces of various and sundry projects, and a thing that if I bordered it off could have served as a good-sized blanket for a premature infant. When I moved to Kansas City I kept all of these. Knowing myself as I do, I was well aware that someday, without warning, I would urgently need these things again and it would be stupid and wasteful to pitch perfectly good equipment just because the thought of crochet had begun to nauseate me.

The convenient thing about spending so much time in your own skin is that you get to know the person in there pretty well. So as I accurately predicted, my interest in crochet has returned with a vengeance. I was in Half Price Books last weekend with my neighbor after we had a brief and disappointing lunch at the Corner Restaurant in Westport, and I spotted a cheap crochet book. I flipped through a couple pages and found a pattern for a “stripey blanket” for a baby or perhaps a small dog. I immediately felt this crafty domestic switch click inside me and I began to mentally rehearse the contents of my basement, trying to figure out where all my crochet tools were.

I know that as a fickle person, my interest in all hobbies waxes and wans with no apparent rhyme or reason. I spend my free time voraciously alternating between crossword puzzles, sudoku, and other hobbies I pick up here and there. And since I know that I have a limited and unknown sustainability for my crochet habit, my only goal this time around is to make that damn blanket and actually finish the stupid thing. The nice thing about the pattern I chose is that it’s an easy one, requiring little concentration or ability, and which I can cobble together from leftover yarn. So I’ve already made significant progress tonight, although the only yarns I had that were all in the same texture were white, pastel yellow, and pastel pink. So the thing is going to look basically like an Easter egg when I’m done.

I don’t care. This is not about crochet. This is about having the satisfaction of finishing something I started.