The in-flight movie screen for Seat 19-B was out of order.
This would have been less bothersome had the passenger in 19-B not brought along a book that he realized, about two chapters in, he had already read.
This, in turn, would have been less bothersome had this recent flight not been from Southern California to New Zealand, a flight of more than 13 hours, a flight so long it took off Wednesday night and landed Friday morning with Thursday disappearing into thin air at 35,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.
This would have been less bothersome if the passenger in 19-B was able to sleep on planes and thus had napped through the airborne boredom, and through stretches of rollercoaster-like hair-raising turbulence, until waking up Down Under.
All of this would have been less bothersome if the passenger in 19-B was not me.
And all of this changed for the better when the person in Seat 18-C, one row ahead of me and directly across the aisle to the right, opened a generously sized canvas book bag and, as if it were Mary Poppins’ magical bottomless carpet bag, from it started pulling out an arts and crafts store shelf worth of skeins of yarn — green, gold, red, and two shades of blue — and wooden knitting needles.
Suddenly I was in a time machine transported back half a century, while simultaneously in a flying machine heading forward 6,000 miles, thinking of my mom who was an accomplished knitter. One of the last gifts she gave me before passing away three decades ago was a gorgeous afghan the color of hot chocolate, made lighter by melted marshmallows, with a seashell pattern and tassel fringe.
This knitter, however, reminded me nothing of my mom. For starters, he looked more like a stereotypical motorcycle club member than someone in a knitting club. In his forties, I guessed, unshaven for two days I also guessed, toe to top he wore black boots, blue jeans, faded brown T-shirt with a slightly torn seam on the left shoulder with the short sleeves stretched taut over large biceps, plus tattoo sleeves — a dog’s face, a rabbit wearing a dress, and a butterfly among the images I could make out — on both arms, and a battered baseball cap.
“It distracts me from my fear of flying,” Jason, as I later learned his name to be, shared when I leaned forward to compliment his handiwork/artwork.
Watching him knit was a pleasant distraction for me as well, as calming and entertaining as watching fish in an aquarium.
Jason began by rolling the five skeins into a single ball that speedily grew from a marble into a baseball into a grapefruit into a good-sized cantaloupe that looked like a miniature globe of Earth. More than once, he had to pause his spinning hands in order to untangle a skein that had become as snagged as a back-lashed fishing line in a reel.
Once the knitting began, the two needles flicked and clicked like flashing swords in a Robin Hood fight, all whilst Jason’s fingers danced and his wedding band glinted, and row by row the scarf or sweater or afghan grew, its colors changing at random with some sections wide and others narrow, a yarn sunset unfurling on his lap.
“What are you making?” I asked after we landed.
“A sweater,” Jason answered. “For me.”
He paused and smiled and his round wire-rimmed glasses made him look like a poet or professor, or a knitter certainly, and added: “But my wife will probably steal it.”
Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Star and can be contacted at [email protected]. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.
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