For comfort I reach for a scarf my mom knitted for my dad.
The impeachment hearings continue, late in the afternoon of January 30, 2020.
This morning as I left the house my hand reached out and picked up a scarf that generally stays rolled up in a basket on a wooden bench just inside the front door. A basket full of scarves and toques and gloves, because in Montreal I need as many of these as I did pairs of sunglasses when I lived in Florida. I don’t take this scarf outside the house much, because I tend to lose things and would be sad to lose it. So it stays in the basket not so much to wear, as to serve as a sort of token of family history.
My mother knitted this scarf in Colorado as a Christmas present for my dad, who had been sent there from Pennsylvania, where they met, to teach skiing to troops in the 10th Mountain Division of the US Army in preparation for being posted overseas. It’s hand-knit with three strands of wool yarn—red, white, and navy blue—in a seed stitch that changes from knit to purl (or back) every dozen stitches or so, forming faintly demarkated longitudinal panels that lie perfectly flat.
Dad wasn’t a citizen yet, so, even though he wanted to enlist, he wasn’t permitted to. Aliens were, however, subject to the draft. He had passed the word along somehow—perhaps asking someone he knew to speak for him. Word that he would welcome being drafted. Not long after, he received notice to report for his physical. He and mom had just been married that summer.
I have been thinking of them, the way they sat glued to the television all through Watergate. I can’t even imagine how my dad would react now if he were alive. He would go ballistic of course. They both would. He took such pride in voting, in civic life, even in paying taxes—telling me that “it is a privilege to pay taxes in a democracy.” And they were fundamentally loyal. When I phoned them in 1986 to froth at the mouth at Americans bombing Libya without declaring war, my mother simply said in her schoolteacher voice “my dear, what did you expect?”
So holding the scarf in my hand and then feeling its warmth around my neck I experienced a fresh appreciation for my mother’s decision to give her new husband, her German-born partly Jewish music-loving husband, a handmade patriotic artefact that would wrap him in both her love and her appreciation for his service to his new country. Somehow those loves melded during the war. Those who were fighting believed they were defending the US and, really, the “free world” against a horrible totalitarian machine. And they were. And they succeeded.
Will this all be lost, now? From where I stand, I feel as though I’ve been holding my breath for weeks. And, however unrealistic I might be in the face of many sober predications, I use considerable strength simply holding the outcome in limbo. Hoping I truly don’t know how it will end.
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