Ruthless Knitting

Lately, I haven’t had much to say about my knitting. I’ve been doing a lot of what I think of as Duty Knitting — working on things I have to finish so I can move on to other things. I got myself into this mess by knitting one sock for my mother that doesn’t fit her. This necessitated the knitting of another sock that will fit her. Then I volunteered to knit a test sock for Nicole. And to finish Grandma’s socks — which were, at least, only a 1/2 sock commitment. Before I knew it, I had three socks that needed mates. Meanwhile, I knit the front of a garment, creating the need for me to knit the (almost entirely plain) back. So my knitting queue looks something like this: second Oriel sock, back of Habu top, second 9 to 5 sock, second Red Herring sock. All of these projects are beautiful, and I thoroughly enjoyed creating the first half of all of them. But I am enough of a process knitter that second halves are not as much fun for me, while I am enough of a product knitter (also known as a “duty-bound knitter”) that I can’t imagine leaving those second halves unmade. And given how busy I have been with work, for which I have been putting in punishing hours to catch up, the knitting is proceeding very slowly these days. Thus, I see my knitting life mapped out for me for the next several weeks, and lo, it is dull.

So. Let’s see what Florence is up to, shall we?

We last left Florence in May 1927, when Slim was nowhere to be found and Bob had popped in for a visit. The diary picks up again a year later.

April 4, 1928. We started to clean house.

April 8 Easter Sunday. Louises all here. Snowed + blowed. Was not very nice. Louise, Little Billie and I were weighed on April 7 1928. I weighed 90 lbs Bill 42 and Louise 141.

I was to quit at the store on April 7 but did not quit that week.

Hmm. Things were a bit gloomy in the land of Florence, what with the bad Easter weather and her plan/desire to quit her job. Perhaps weighing 90 pounds was some consolation. (Louise, by the way, was her sister, and Little Billie her nephew.)

The next diary entries are inexplicably dated from the previous month:

March 19, 1928. Went to Buffalo. Left New Castle at 10:51 and arrived at Buffalo at 4:10. Bob met me. We went to shows and had a very nice time. We left Saturday Mar. 24 for Canada and came back from Toronto on Sunday Mar 25. Mother called me at evening that Grandpa I. died Sunday Mar 24 at 10:40 A.M. Bob and Mr. Wills went to Albany and Cornell N.Y. Monday A.M. at 4 o’clock to see about that job they were bidding on. They came home that night about 12 o’clock. I came home Tuesday. Left at 4 something and got into New Castle about 9:30. Harry and Frances met me in the Ford. Grandpa was buried on Wednesday Mar 28 at 2 P.M. Rev Binginer(?) preached the services.

April 3, 1928. Slim left that morning on the run and did not come back that night. He was not back yet Easter Sunday April 8. Wednesday April 4 Chas Bentfield was in Pittsburgh. Said he saw Slim in Ambridge. Had a letter from Bob. Said they got the job April 3 $71,000.00 job.

I gather from this rather mixed set of entries that Bob was still in contention, especially given Slim’s ongoing absences. The $71,000 job (that’s 1928 dollars, people) sounds like good news, though it might have kept him in New York unable to visit for a while. And obviously, the death of Florence’s grandfather was bad news.

The next entry is long and quite interesting:

April 11, 1928. Slim came home on the 2:30 train in the A.M. He went to bed could not sleep and woke mother up and talked with her. He seemed to be very delirious but worked the next day April 12, 1928. He was in bad shape on the train. Imagined he saw and heard things. That night I stayed home from Grandma’s and stayed up with him all night. He did not sleep a wink + neither did I. He was delirious all night. We had Dr. for him about 8:30. He said he would be alright in a few days. He improved the next day. The High School play was Friday evening April 13 1928. I stayed home with Slim + stayed up that night with him. He was seeing things all night and was very bad. Then that morning he went in on the 6:40 train and met Rowland + he took him to St. Francis Hospital Saturday afternoon April 14, 1928. I called up hospital Sat. + Sunday + he was getting along O.K. Then Monday morning I went to Pittsburgh. Had a talk with Rowland and then I called Aunt Lottie + her + I went out to hospital to see Slim. They did not want to let us in but after I talked awhile they let me go up to see him. He was up + around looked real good. Said he felt alright. Then when we came down we went to Jinko Arcade to see his Dr. Dr Hemminger + he said he did not know when he could come out. He would see him on Tuesday morning and then let me know. I went home with Aunt Lottie and stayed all night. Expect to stay until Slim gets out of hospital.

Thursday Slim got out of hospital.

Did you follow all that? The short version: Slim got sick, Florence nursed him, Slim got better. The longer version is more interesting: Slim became delirious and woke up Florence’s mother in the middle of the night to talk to her (aside: Was Slim sleeping at Florence’s house? Rather unexpected and unsuitable, don’t you think?). He went to work hallucinating, possibly endangering the lives of passengers. Florence stayed up with him all night the next two nights straight while he hallucinated and was “very bad.” They sent him to the hospital in Pittsburgh, where Florence remained by Slim’s side (to the extent possible) for the next four days.

Folks, I think Bob is out of the running. Florence’s devotion to Slim is extreme, and since he apparently made it through his health crisis, I suspect he clinched his place as Suitor Number 1.

Meanwhile, I turned a corner in my knitting. Well, not literally. But David and I took a 54-mile bike ride last weekend, which gave me plenty of time to think about my frustration with the Duty Knitting. I started counting up all of the sweaters that I have mentally designed but not yet knit. I currently have the yarn to make four separate designs, and I have designed and swatched two more but not bought the yarn for them yet. That’s quite a queue, people! No wonder the Duty Knitting is getting me down.

But while I was thinking about my project list, it occurred to me that six sweaters = “the Ruthless Knitting Fall/Winter 2007 Collection,” currently in its planning stages but coming to a website near you (this website, that is) in the coming months. For some reason, thinking about these six sweaters as my collection-to-be makes me feel enormously better. I will devote this fall and winter to creating them all, and it will be fun. I just have a few other projects to wrap up first, as well as some design decisions to figure out via swatching. (Just to be clear — it is a “collection” in my own mind only. I don’t intend to write up all of these patterns, nor do I intend to sell them. The label is not to be taken seriously.) The Duty Knitting no longer seems like such a burden.

Meanwhile, Florence also had a decision to make. Slim or Bob? As much fun as her diary is to read and contemplate, however, it is not a novel, and Florence did not weave in all the ends of her story for us. These are her last two entries:

May 16, 1928. Louise and I opened up at Jake Fishers.

Saturday May 18, 1927. Street car hit Slim’s car at Conway.

That last entry is a doozy, isn’t it? When I first read it, I thought, “Slim’s been wounded! Or killed! And this is the last entry, so we’ll never know what happened to him!” But then I re-read the date: 1927. Slim’s car was hit by another car before any of the events of this post. In fact, it seems that his car was hit right around the time that Bob reappeared on the scene. Apparently, Slim wasn’t hurt. He just has bad luck with cars; you’ll recall that he had to return to Pittsburgh at an earlier point because his car had “burned.”

As for “Louise and I opened up at Jake Fishers,” I’m not sure what that means. As best I can figure, one either opens up a nightclub as a performer, or one opens up a store as an employee. There’s no other internal evidence to help us determine whether Florence and her sister were a wild pair of performing flappers or tame shopgirls.

And that’s it. No closure.

But I did a little digging. First, I did some literal digging: right after I finished reading the diary for the first time, I realized that the little sewing table that had containted the diary also contained an address book that I had thrown away, and that it might also have been Florence’s. So I recovered it from the trash and flipped through it. Nothing of interest appeared among the addresses and phone numbers, and I was about to write it off as unhelpful when I saw a note on one of the last pages. It read: “Slim’s Social Security,” followed by a number.

Reader, she married Slim. Why else would she have jotted down his social security number? Only wives do that.

But I wanted more evidence, so I kept looking. The diary has Florence’s (rather unusual) last name in it, and I used it to do a bit of Internet geneaology research. Via an entry about one of her grandparents from a 1908 book, I learned that Florence was the son of a barber and that she had an older sister named Louise, as well as a twin sister named Frances. Using a list of her grandfather’s descendants, I confirmed that Florence married Slim, while her sister Frances married a man named Harry. (That must be the “Harry and Frances” who met Florence in the Ford.)

Still, I wanted more information. And I wanted to return the diary to Florence’s family, now that I had figured out who they were. So I sent an e-mail to a man in Germany whose e-mail address I found on a genealogy website. He contacted Florence’s second cousin, who e-mailed me with her physical address and a note about how delighted she would be to receive the diary. (The whole series of e-mails took about 24 hours. Isn’t the Internet great?)

The second cousin was able to tell me that Florence and Frances were born in 1906. Florence married her sweetheart, Slim, and in 1965 they lived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. After Slim died, Florence remarried twice. Using the information about her latter two husbands, I found an obituary online for Florence’s second husband that mentions that Florence died in 1998. She lived to be 92 years old.

And so the adventures of Florence come to an end. In honor of the fun we’ve had together, and the fact that I’m once again at peace with my knitting, I’ve decided to name the Habu top after Florence and to offer the pattern (assuming it comes out well) for free here on the site. I just have to finish knitting it first. Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 10:45 am and is filed under 2007 Collection, Adventures of Florence, Design, Reflections, Self-Discipline. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.