The story of Three Irish Girls… a fairy tale. Chapter Five.

Read the previous chapter here.

"I'm not going to sit down, you ugly whore," the boy sneered.

Stunned, the girl spackled a frozen, calm expression on her face. Her first day as a teacher -- her first interaction with a student -- was not going as planned. When she bounced cheerily into her tiny classroom and asked everyone to take a seat, all the students cooperated. Except for one boy in the back of the room.

"Would you mind finding a seat? We're about to get started!" the girl enthused. Years of preparation had led her to this point. Years of preparation and many thousands of dollars. Years of preparation had not prepared her for this. What do you say to a student who's not only uncooperative, but highly disruptive? the girl wondered. He just called me an ugly whore! You have got to be kidding me! What did I do to deserve that?


The girl stared him down. The room was silent. A friend tugged on the hem of the boy's shirt -- a gesture nearly imperceptible -- and the boy took a seat.

"You WILL follow my directions," the girl said firmly, quietly. "You WILL respect the people in this classroom, including me."

The rubber band of her teacher persona snapped back into place, and  the girl began the class again. This time, things went more smoothly.

How had she found herself here? College graduation had come and gone. She had moved to the big city, taken a job at a school for students who were court-appointed to a special program. Their large public high schools couldn't handle them anymore -- they were chronically truant, chronically disruptive to the learning environment, and chronically less than law-abiding citizens. This program was their last stop before a juvenile work camp on the cold, flat prairie several hours to the west.

She found teaching exhausting. Often, she would drive herself home, numb from having expended an extraordinary amount of energy, only to collapse on the couch for two hours before dinner.

Students cycled in and out of the program -- some committed new crimes and were sent away, others came in, recently appointed by the court. Some of them, supposedly in the 10th grade, could not read beyond a first grade level.

It was emotionally taxing as well. "Where is Andrew today?" the young teacher once asked a colleague. Andrew was never absent.

"You didn't hear?" the colleague replied. "He was arrested last night for allegedly beating up a crack-addicted prostitute."

"Where is Dan?" the young teacher asked another time.

"Dan was shot. He's in the hospital." The image of her interaction with Dan on her first day as a teacher flickered in front of her eyes.

"How as your day?" the teacher asked her roommate early one evening. Her roommate, also a teacher, worked at a different inner city school.

"Pretty good. Only one fight today. We got to it before weapons were drawn," the roommate answered.

"Oh, that's good," the teacher replied.

"What about you?" the roommate inquired.

The teacher sighed, stretching out on the couch. The watery winter sun was sinking in the sky. Is it too early for bed? she wondered to herself.

This is how the roommates could often be found when they weren't at school: lying opposite each other on separate couches, trying to regain some strength to cook dinner and begin the task of grading and planning for the next day.

"Hello?" the roommate asked. "How was your day?"

"Fine," the teacher replied. "No one called me an ugly whore, so that was good. I did find out that one of my students is pregnant. She's only 14."

"We need to do some yoga or something," the roommate joked. "It can't be normal for two healthy individuals to lie on the couch for two hours a night after work."

"Get started," the teacher joked. "I want to see 72 yoga poses in the next 15 minutes. Go." She covered her eyes with a pillow.

"I don't think there are even 72 different yoga poses," the roommate said.

"Make up some new ones," the teacher replied. "I need a nap. A nap and some chocolate and a massage and a million dollars." She turned over on the couch, her back facing out.

"I know what you can do that's better than yoga!" the roommate yelled.The teacher heard a door open down the short hall in their apartment.

"You better NOT be in my room!" she yelled. The roommate didn't answer, and the teacher closed her eyes again. She felt a sharp poke in between her should blades. "Knock it OFF!" the teacher griped, swatting blindly at the roommate behind her. She flipped over on the couch to see a large pile of yarn and knitting needles spread out on the carpeting in front of her.

"You need to do knitting yoga!" the roommate said. "It's double the relaxation! Look!"

The teacher watched as the roommate attempted several yoga poses while pretending to knit.

"Hilarious. Put it in your stand up act," the teacher deadpanned. "Now give that stuff back to me, it was my grandma's."

"Do you seriously know how to knit?" the roommate asked.

"I used to. I could probably figure it out again. What you failed to include in this pile, when you so callously pilfered the belongings from my closet, was the booklet called Learn to Knit. Go get it."

"This one?" the roommate asked, handing her a giant copy of Problems in Public Policy: a Case Study.

"Oh yes, that's the one, thank you. Ha. Have I mentioned that I find you hilarious? Because I do, I find you extremely hilarious, this is the funniest experience I've ever had in my life." The teacher stared blankly at the roommate.

The roommate returned with the now-worn copy of the booklet. "I don't believe YOU know how to knit," the roommate said.

After referring to the booklet, the teacher-girl was able to quickly cast on thirty stitches and begin knitting. "Look at me. I am so relaxed," the teacher said, in a feigned faint on the couch.

The knitting remained on the couch, and each night the teacher knit a little more. Having learned how to keep her knitting from curling inward, the new object grew tidily in her lap. My sister's birthday is soon -- maybe I'll make a scarf for her, she thought.

As is the human experience, the girl couldn't tell what lay ahead on her life's path. She didn't know yet how teaching and knitting would someday become inextricably linked. She was unaware that something would soon take her far away from this place, far from being a young teacher in a bad school in the inner city, far from the exhausted self knitting a steel blue scarf on the couch as her roommate looked on.

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The story of Three Irish Girls… a fairy tale. Chapter Four.

Read the previous chapter here.

The girl excitedly began a scarf with her size seven needles and her spruce-colored wool. Was it blue? Was it green? It didn't matter -- she wanted to wear it around her neck.

She watched as her fingers slid past several inches of knitting, knitting that curled inward at the edges. Hrm, she thought to herself, I hope that will go away.


Little by little, both the scarf and her confidence grew.

One day she discovered she'd used almost all of her ball of yarn, and her scarf was only sixteen inches long. What should she do? And exactly why was her knitting curling inward so badly?

Lacking the means and the desire to go back to the yarn shop, the knitting was once again put aside, this time not to be touched again for years.

Though the girl didn't know it, tragedy loomed on the horizon.

As it is wont to do, time passed quickly.  Years raced, and the girl's mother could hardly believe that a college student stood where the gangly girl once was. Goodbyes were said. Memories were packed. Apartments were located.

Late on a winter night, the ring of the telephone pierced the darkness. Her roommate wasn't home from her job yet, so the girl picked up the receiver sleepily. The voice on the other end brought news that made her eyes squeeze shut, struggling to retain the tears.

Both of her grandparents, dead in a car accident. Killed in an instant by a speeding teenager who sailed through a red light, joy riding with his friend. Witnessed by a cousin at a nearby gas station, who watched as her aunt and uncle's car was decimated, rendering the occupants unrecognizable to her.

After the shock came sadness. The sadness was magnified by the slap of reality that required the girl's family to go through every last one of her grandparents' personal belongings. Nearly fifty years of family memories had to be categorized: Keep? Toss? Sell? This was not how it was supposed to go. A man was not supposed to lose both parents at once.

"Is there anything special you want from Grandma and Grandpa's house?" the girl's father asked her.

She didn't hesitate before asking for the one thing she knew she wanted: her grandmother's knitting.  Housed in a trunk at the foot of her bed, the girl went through the collection item by item.

Here were the metal needles in all shapes and sizes that clacked together at every family gathering. Here was the straw bag with fruit on it her grandmother kept next to the kitchen table with her project. Here was a pair of slippers, half completed. Here were bags of acrylic in every color, held double to make thick socks. Here was some unmarked  blue wool. Here was some mauve mohair with a label written in French. Here it was, all of the smells, all of the sounds, all of her memories of her grandmother, now placed carefully in the back seat of her car.

The girl drove back to her apartment and put the collection in her tiny closet. It was too much to look at just then, the pain was too fresh. Someday, she thought. Someday.


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The story of Three Irish Girls… a fairy tale. Part three.

Read the previous chapter here.

The girl recovered from her illness, and regret quickly set in. She hadn't learned how to cast on. She couldn't make anything without holes in it. So much for the sweater of her dreams.


She stared at the half-completed hot pad. The hole glared at her. She tried knitting a few more rows, but the stitches seemed unfamiliar in her hands.

Determined to learn how to cast on and fix holes, she decided to try one last source: a book from the library. She walked in and headed straight to the knitting section, pulling every related book off the shelf.   She carried her teetering stack to a table and began flipping through the books, hoping to find a picture or a drawing she could understand.

The Complete Book of Traditional Aran Knitting?

101 Sweaters You Can Knit and Crochet?

Glorious Knitting by Kaffe Fassett?

Good Housekeeping Step-by-Step Encyclopedia of Needlecraft?

That was exactly what she needed. Step-by-step. Putting the other books back on the cart to be reshelved, she presented her library card and walked the block home.

In her room, the gangly girl decided it was better to start anew than to struggle through her already ruined projects.  Eager to learn to cast on, she found the knitting section in the Good Housekeeping book.

Maybe one of the other types of casting on would be easier, she thought. But I don't know if they're right -- the shop owner didn't show those to me. The girl spent the next hour trying to cast on stitches. She wished she could ask someone for help. The only people she knew that knew how to knit had already declined to help.

I guess I just can't do this, she thought.

The other portions of the book interested her, particularly the cross stitch section. She loved the colorful pictures you could make -- and there was only one stitch to learn -- an X.

The knitting needles and yarn were put inside a little-used suitcase in her closet, where they sat untouched for a long time. The girl went on to be very successful at cross stitching. She learned to sew and made some clothes for herself.  She dabbled in quilt making.  She loved to arrange flowers and spent hours wandering around the greenhouse and floral shop nearby. The smell inside the greenhouse was intoxicating.

Slowly, the girl became less gangly.  People stopped describing her as coltish, and she grew into her arms and legs. Contacts aided her quest to leave behind the geekiness of her early adolescence. While her appearance gradually changed, her inner self did not. She was still in love with the idea of knitting, still loved to create things, still made weekly trips to the library and brought home as many books as would fit in both her backpack and her arms.

She embarked on an illustrious career as a babysitter.  People from all over the city clamored for her services. She genuinely loved children and took good care of her charges. She spent hours playing with and reading to the children, and then after they went to bed, she would spend at least an hour straightening the house -- putting away all the toys, doing all the dishes -- whether the children had dirtied them or not. She dusted, she swept.  And because she couldn't run the vacuum cleaner after the children had gone to bed, she would often crawl across the floor picking up pieces of lint by hand to make the carpet look presentable.

Such a trustworthy babysitter was she that parents would often not come home until very late at night -- so late that many of the television stations were no longer broadcasting.  The girl would often finish her book, her cleaning, and her homework and be left with nothing to do.  More than once she wished she had a project she could bring with her, like knitting. She never felt comfortable falling asleep, no matter how late the hour. She wanted the parents to know that someone was awake and ensuring all was well with their children -- what if something happened to the baby when she was asleep?

One night at a home where she frequently babysat, she noticed something she'd never seen there before: a tote bag with yarn and knitting needles sticking out of it.  She didn't want to be nosy, but she opened the bag just a smidge to see what was inside.  There were the makings of a navy blue and white children's sweater.  Excitement bubbled in her chest -- maybe this person could show her how to cast on, and to help refresh her memory about knitting and purling.

The parents returned home relatively early that night, and before she was driven home, she worked up the courage to ask about the knitting. "I saw your knitting bag when I was cleaning," she said. "I put it over here so the boys wouldn't bother it."

"Oh, that's fine -- thank you," the mother replied. "Did everything go OK?"

"Yes, the boys were good, no problems," the girl said. "I did take one phone message -- here," she said, handing over the neatly written scrap of paper. "I learned to knit a long time ago, but I think I forgot how."

"Oh? What did you make?" the mother asked.

"Nothing really -- just a dishcloth with a hole and a hot pad with a hole. I got sick and missed the last class and never learned how to cast on."

"Didn't you learn casting on first?"

"Yes, but I could never get the hang of it, and the teacher was busy helping other people. I tried to learn from a book, but couldn't follow the directions."

"Oh, it's easy -- here, I'll show you," the mother said, pulling out her knitting bag.  "I have some extra needles right here. You just make a slip knot, like this. Then you just hold both strands of yarn in your left hand. Now put your index finger and your thumb in between the strands of yarn, and pull your fingers apart." She demonstrated the motion. It seemed easy enough.

"Then you're just going to take some yarn from each of those strands. You take your needle and scoop the yarn from next to your thumb, and then you move the needle over and scoop the yarn from next to your index finger, see? Then you just tighten up the yarn so it's snug against the needle, and do it again. Try it."

The girl held the yarn and needle in her hands. "Put your thumb and index finger in between the two strands, and spread them apart," the mother said. "Now make sure you're still holding the yarn with your other fingers. Good. Now scoop the yarn... and scoop the other side... good! Now tighten it up. Good, try it again. Scoop, scoop, tighten. See, you've got it."

"Wow, I've never been able to get this before!" the girl said. "I can't believe I've been trying to learn this for years."

"If I'd known you wanted to knit, I could have shown you," the mother said. "I can't believe that other teacher never showed you how to cast on."

"Well, she did try. I just couldn't get it."

"Well, she didn't try very hard then, because it's taken you about two minutes to learn it."

The girl continued to scoop, scoop, tighten, and within a few minutes had twenty stitches on her needle.

"Do you want to take the needles and yarn home?" the mother asked. "You can bring it back the next time you come over."

"No, I have some at home. I'll go home right now and practice. Thank you so much, I really appreciate it. You're a good teacher."

"Before I had kids, I was a home ec teacher." The mother smiled. "See, you've got it. Let me know if you need any more help."

The girl couldn't wait to get home and practice. Her delusions of grandeur gone, she knew she wouldn't be knitting the sweater of her dreams anytime soon. But she was going to learn how to knit, little by little.

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The story of Three Irish Girls… a fairy tale. Part two.

Read part one here.

Trying to hide her disappointment, the gangly girl took her two inches of ugly knitting and put it into the squeaky top drawer of her dresser, hoping no one would ask to see it.

She tried again the next day. Buoyed by her ability to at least complete the knit stitch, she kept working on her little dishcloth for most of the morning, completing three more inches.

Three days later, she picked up her dishcloth again and tried to add a few rows, only to discover she had forgotten how to knit.  She tried consulting her Learn to Knit booklet, but the diagrams didn't look like what the shop owner had taught her to do.  Frustrated, she decided to wait until her next knitting class to ask for help.

At the yarn shop, the other class members happily showed off their completed dishcloths. Several had moved on to the next project in the booklet: a wool pot holder. When it was the girl's turn to share, she didn't want to hold up her tiny dishcloth, still on the needles. "I had a little trouble," she mumbled to the group.

"Let me see that," the owner said, taking the blue cotton from the girl's hands. The owner began knitting very quickly, talking all the while to the rest of the group. "Tonight we're going to learn how to bind off, and how to make the purl stitch," she announced. "If you haven't started already, we're going to choose some yarn for our pot holders." She motioned toward the shelf behind her. "You want to choose a color from this section of yarn here." She continued to knit, and gestured to the girl, indicating that she too should choose a color of wool for a pot holder.

After the other women had made their selections, the girl purposefully headed toward the shelves full of wool, selecting the dark spruce color she had eyed months before.

"Good, OK, let's learn about binding off," the owner announced, handing back the dishcloth to the girl. Amazingly, three perfect inches had been added to the cloth in the short time the class had been making their selections.

It wasn't the first time the girl had needed help to finish a project. There was the  stamped, quilted pot holder she made in second grade. When her teacher had told them to make small quilt stitches around the perimeter of the red tulip, the girl struggled to keep her stitches looking even while all the other students raced through the stitching. I want it to look nice, not like a second grader did it, she remembered thinking.

There was also the nine-patch pillow top she made in the fourth grade. Another color disappointment: the peaches and light blues would match nothing in her house, and she never finished the pillow.

The yarn shop owner showed them how to knit two stitches, then bring the first knit stitch over the second knit stitch. The girl found this much easier than casting on, and within minutes had finished binding off her dishcloth.

She studied her creation. One end was much wider than the other. The section where she had bound off felt very tight compared to the cast on edge. There were a few small holes, and a big loop on the edge of one side that didn't seem to belong anywhere. She tried not to think about it and instead focused on the beautiful pot holder she was about to make.

The instructor used the girl's yarn and needles to cast on as she was talking to the class about the purl stitch. She told them to knit a row, and then she would show them how to purl back. The girl found purling easier than expected and was able to keep up with the class as they knit and purled, knit and purled.

"This yarn is much easier for me to knit with," the gangly girl mentioned to the group.

"Me too," several others murmured in response.

"That's because wool is naturally stretchier than cotton, and it's easier on your hands. It's more forgiving," the owner replied.

By the end of the night, she had knit and purled five inches of a blue-green pot holder. The color would definitely not match her mother's kitchen, but she didn't care. She loved it.

Eager to show her night's work to her mother, she left the yarn shop and hurtled into the cold darkness. The parking lot was nearly empty, save for the students leaving the class and heading to their own cars. Why wasn't her mother waiting in the warm car, like last time?

The girl turned to wait inside the double doors of the building, trying to stave off the cold that made the inside of her nose feel frozen and her eyes water. The door was locked. She stamped her feet, hoping her mother would come soon and she wouldn't have to wait all night, dying of hypothermia.

Soon enough, she heard the familiar zip of her parent's station wagon coming down the road that intersected with the parking lot. Her dad pulled up to the door, honking the horn. Didn't he see her standing there? Honking wasn't necessary.

At home, she found her mother reading in bed. "How'd it go?" her mother called to her.

"Fine," the girl said. She showed her mother the beginnings of a pot holder.

"Very good!" her mother said. "Your stitches look so nice!"

"Thanks," the girl said. "I like this yarn better than the other yarn."

"What are you going to make with this?"

"A pot holder. I have to knit a really long rectangle and then fold it over and sew up the edges."

"That will be great," her mother said.

The next day, the girl noticed a small hole in the left side of the pot holder. Unable to fix it, she continued knitting a little each day. I can just sew the hole shut when I'm done, she thought.

By the night before her final class, she had knit ten inches of her pot holder. She was determined to finish the project, and determined to learn how to cast on so she could begin a new project: the sweater of her dreams.

The next day dawned bright and frigid. Sunny skies in the winter only meant one thing: Unbearable temperatures.

The day also brought a stomach virus that made the girl feel dizzy and weak. My knitting class, the girl thought. My last knitting class.

She would have to miss it.

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The story of Three Irish Girls… a fairy tale

Once upon a time, there was a twelve year old girl who lived with her family in the cold, cold North.  She was gangly and awkward and wore glasses much too big for her face. She loved to make things, and often checked out craft books from the nearby library. 

The library had a whole section of books that was off limits to her -- not because she wasn't allowed to read them, but because they were about knitting, and she didn't know how.

Both of her grandmothers loved to knit, but neither would teach her how. One declared that trying to teach the gangly girl would make her too nervous -- she didn't have enough patience to teach someone to knit. The other had poor vision and could no longer see well enough to be a helpful teacher.

There were a few yarn shops in the city where the girl lived -- one that was particularly intriguing had beautiful sweaters and scarves draped in the window. A few times she'd gone into the shop to look at the sweaters -- they would be just the thing with her black leggings, scrunch socks, and ankle boots. Disappointed to find the sweaters very expensive, she wondered if she could make a sweater herself.

A deep spruce-colored wool caught her eye. What could she make with it? she wondered. Nothing, she told herself. You don't know how to knit. You can't even use it to make macrame planters -- it's not thick enough.

On her way out of the shop,  she noticed a sign in the window. A sign for a beginner's knitting class. Everyone welcome, it said. She asked her mother if she could sign up for the class, which was scheduled to meet three times for two hours each. The class was $25, plus the cost of materials.

Intimidated but fascinated at the prospect of making herself a beautiful sweater, the girl signed up for the class, and eagerly awaited the first session.

On the night of the class, she styled her bangs with a curling iron, spritzing them with large quantities of hairspray so they would pouf perfectly, complementing her large plastic glasses.  She bundled up in her many layers of clothing, and boarded the bus to the yarn shop, sure that she was just hours away from beginning a beautiful sweater.

Once outside the shop, she took a deep breath, nervous that she would be the only young girl there. Everyone welcome, she reminded herself.

Shyly, she pushed open the door, and the owner of the shop emerged from the depths of the shelving.

"Hello. Is there anything I can help you with?" the shop owner asked.

"I'm here for the knitting class," the twelve year old replied.

"Oh? What is your name?" the owner asked, referencing a sheet behind the counter.

Satisfied that the girl was indeed a paid student, the shop owner ushered her to the seating area. Eight older women turned to stare silently. There was no one young there. Everyone is at least as old as my mom, if not older, the girl thought.

Feeling the heat rise in her face, the gangly girl sat down in the nearest folding chair and stared at the ground, hoping the women would stop staring and go back to their conversation. The shop owner told the group that they were going make a dishcloth, and that by the end of the night, they'd be the proud owners of a new kitchen accessory.

She brought out the balls of appropriate cotton yarn and gave each student a chance at selecting a color. The gangly girl didn't like any of them -- she knew none of them would go with her mother's carefully chosen kitchen decor. She picked the closest match she could find -- a dusty light blue.

Armed with the size 7 needles the owner told her she must have, the girl tried in vain to follow along with the instructions on how to cast on. The yarn kept getting hopelessly twisted and didn't even remotely resemble the owner's example.

The other women chattered about their jobs and their babies and their husbands. Several broke out a bottle of wine. The girl felt completely lost and completely out of place.  She couldn't cast on. She couldn't hold the needles. The other women got it right away, it seemed. She wanted to cry. I shouldn't have come, she thought. This isn't for me.

She watched the other women learn the knit stitch, unable to follow along because she couldn't even cast on. Tears began to form.

Finally, the owner came to her aid, did the cast on for her, and began to show her how to make the knit stitch. The girl found herself knitting a lumpy, lopsided, holey garter stitch dishcloth for the remaining twenty minutes of the class.

Disheartened, the girl took her needles, her ball of yarn, her Learn to Knit booklet, and her 16 pounds of winter wear out of the shop. She trudged down the stairs and through the building that housed the yarn shop, putting on her three scarves, two winter coats, four hats, two sets of long underwear, and six mittens on each hand before daring to open the door to the outside world.

There was her mother, waiting in a warm car in the parking lot. "How was it?" her mother asked enthusiastically.

"Fine," the girl replied, afraid to reveal her failure.

"Let me see what you made!"

"No, that's OK. I'll show you later," the girl said.

Her mother drove them home, past the big lake and up the small hill to the old house where they lived.

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