Warmed by Foreign Wool

Enough of bitter blogging: let us celebrate the baggage we collect in life, that keeps us warm. This is a night-time blog, which may make it just a hair dark, don't you know. The rest have all been things of the morning. I am just in from walking the dog, under the starry sky: Orion is heading west, standing upright on the treetops, and the moon is a Cheshire cat in the upper branches. This morning, out walking at about the hour the schoolbusses come around, the birds were shouting happily from those same trees, even though the hawk was up and looking for his breakfast, and even though the day before a great owl had been silhouetted against the sky on that tree there, just as clear as clear. Valentine's is past, they've chosen their mates, and they're busy at the business of life.

It was cold out – it does get pretty cold, here in Texas; all depends on which direction the wind is from, and now it is in the north – and so I bundled up with the works, because the dog walks veeeery slowly, these days: wool socks, long-johns under the jeans, a long-sleeved t-shirt under the sweater, then the satin-lined wool coat, the blue-silk scarf, the blue-wool-felt beret, and the blue-knit-wool gloves. And I think to myself: these gloves I bought, one desperate night on the Rue Daguerre (or actually Robin bought them for me), to replace the brown ones, completely worn through at the finger tips, which Robin bought me, one desperate night on Ichiban-cho in Sendai, four years back, to replace ones lost, stolen or strayed, all the way back to the butter-soft leather gloves stolen from my pocket on a bus in Rome, just a couple of weeks after I got them for my 37th birthday, January 29, 1993, from the guanti shop on Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, just between Largo Argentina and Piazza del Gesu – the little one that used to be run by the little couple… At the same shop on the same day, Robin bought me my foulard, literally “all wool and a yard wide,” and now I see why the lads from the Great War used that expression to commend a mate who was trusty to the end: it is absolute proof against cold, especially when it is clean and cleverly knotted so that the triangle is in the front. I liked the black-and-white arabesque pattern as being writer-like in its inkiness. The beret that covered my ears tonight is a new addition, from a stationery shop in Aigues-Mortes, bought on another occasion when I had left home ill-equipped. My blue-silk scarf was a gift from Thailand, the purple scarf, tie-dyed with geckos was a gift from my brother, the spiderweb-of-rainbow-threads scarf is from the Tibetan shop on Solano Avenue, Berkeley (the one closer to the hill, not the one closer to the Safeway), meant for my mother but then I realized that in the nursing home, she will not be needing scarves any more, or shoes, or jackets, or jewelry, or much else. She is in her own Wood Between the Worlds, and she is beginning not to want to stay there much longer. She doesn’t eat much; she doesn’t drink much.

Do we care where that wool comes from? Certainly, as consumers, we might like to know that the people who made what we wear were happy to do so, that they were paid well, that they could chat with friends while they worked, that the wool came from sheep who roamed hillsides we might like to roam, that the dying works and spinning mills were clean, bright places that didn’t foul the streams around them. We like to think that the people who sold those things to us or to the people we love to give to us like to work in that little shop, or at that counter in the big department store, and that it pleased them to think that someone would be warmer because of them. The fact that we can often believe none of what I have just said in this paragraph to be true goes a long way to explain why we are such a sad race of humans, these days. But most of all, we like to remember how we came to be wearing the things at all: again, from whom they came, from which street, at which moment of our lives.

So how does all this fit together? In this wise: I am warmed by woolens that were gifts from those I love or who love me, gifts that came when they were needed, and came from all over creation, and half the warmth in them is in the knowing where they came from, from whom, and how, or at least the smile that comes along with the warmth comes from there. And other things warm us, likewise. The smile in the branches of the tree is a gift from knowing Alice in Wonderland, thanks to my mother, and the gift of knowing Orion from someone’s pointing it out, long years ago: my mother again. And my mother: my mother no longer remembers who gave her what, from minute to minute and from day to day; she had a great epiphany at Christmas, when we stood in her room and she beamed at us, but life from day to day is a sad mystery: how did I come to this room with that TV in it and who are these people and what are they to me? Why don’t they let me get at this dratted scab on my forehead? I’ll scratch it if it’s the last thing I do! Sometimes I think my son comes to see me, but then he goes away again, and that old man who says he’s my husband Howard, but how can that be? When we don’t know where the wool we are wearing comes from any more, it may be time to stop eating much or drinking much. Stands to reason.