My wife loves to crochet. She has been doing a lot of it lately, and it makes me think about some of the items she has made in the past. Here is a story about one of them.
Since my retirement at the age of fifty-two, I have done all of the grocery shopping for our household. Since I do almost all of the cooking, this makes sense. In the process of doing this, I have made friends with a number of the employees of my local supermarket, and I enjoy being greeted warmly and treated like a “regular” whenever I visit. A few years ago, on a routine visit to the store, I met someone who taught me more than I wanted to know.
I said hello to one of my friends at the market, a young cashier with a smile so bright that it looked as if her teeth were lit from within. She was pushing a cart down one of the aisles rather than working the register as usual. She was walking with a very tiny, very elderly woman, a woman who could not have been more than five feet tall, and could not have weighed more than ninety pounds, a pound for every year of age that she appeared to be. I realized that the cashier was patiently helping the elderly woman shop for groceries, and thought how nice it was that she was doing so in such a pleasant and caring fashion. And I went about my business. It was just a few days before Thanksgiving.
When it came time to check out, I got on line, coincidentally, directly behind this little old lady. In addition to the usual grocery items…bread…milk…potatoes…I noticed that she was purchasing a pretty little arrangement of fresh flowers in autumn shades of brown and golden yellow. I commented to her (I talk to strangers…it’s a bad habit, but it’s too late to break it now) that I thought the arrangement was beautiful. She told me that she was invited to Thanksgiving dinner, and she said that she would never show up “empty handed.” I heard her ask the cashier to please call for a taxi. Even though she spoke in a cultured manner, this woman did not look like she could afford a bus, let alone a taxi. I asked her where she lived, and it was only a few miles away, so I offered to drive her. I carried her packages along with my own, since she was not strong enough to manage even a portion of them, I helped her into my truck, and off we went. She told me that her name was Katherine.
I asked about her family (since she was shopping alone and with the help of one of the supermarket’s employees) and she told me that she had no children, and that her husband was long deceased. He had been a Civil Engineer. They had lived for many years near the supermarket where I met her, on a street called Grand Concourse, which is and has always been just as luxurious as it sounds. They were members of the local country club. Her husband had lost his job, and soon after, had taken ill. By the time he had passed away, they had gone through everything they had, including the house. So the county moved her into a tiny room in this public housing project, one of the most notorious, dangerous addresses in the city.
I parked on the street, and Katherine and I took the long walk through the gap that had been broken into the tall iron fence, across the brown lawn, and up to her place. When she unlocked her door, she was greeted by one of the largest cats I have ever seen, a huge gray tabby. His name, she told me, was Jack, and he was, as she put it…”My best friend…the light of my life.” I had not felt so sad since my mother died. I did not go inside. I asked her if it would be alright if my wife and I came to visit her now and then. She was very pleased with this prospect, and I said goodbye and went on my way.
I thought about Katherine quite a bit in the days after our initial meeting, particularly at Thanksgiving dinner, surrounded as I was by friends and family, with enough food to feed an army. Perhaps these thoughts resulted from the fact that this was my first Thanksgiving without my mother, who died at nearly ninety-six years of age. The psycho-dynamics of my new-found need to help this elderly stranger were pretty obvious. Or it may just have been the sadness of it all. I suggested to my wife that with Christmas coming, we should go visit Katherine. She had no phone, so we would have to just show up at her door.
A few days before Christmas we went out and got a large cardboard box. I cut the top off, and my wife decorated it with the most beautiful and colorful Christmas wrap that we could find. I returned to the supermarket and searched out the cashier that, as it turned out, regularly helped Katherine do her shopping. So the cashier and I went through the whole store, selecting items that Katherine usually purchased for herself, as well as some luxury items that the cashier knew Katherine liked, but could not afford on a regular basis. And we kept selecting until this large box was overflowing. There was a canned ham for Christmas Dinner, a bottle of sparkling apple cider for New Year’s Eve, and even cat food and a catnip-stuffed toy for Jack.
We drove to Katherine’s place, and I knocked on the door. She was very happy to see me, and pleased to meet my wife. The dark and shabby room was illuminated by a small, brightly lit Christmas tree, under which Jack was napping…at least until he smelled catnip and realized that he had a new toy. We put the box in Katherine’s tiny kitchenette, visited for a bit, and said our goodbyes…promising to return soon. My smile vanished as soon as the door closed behind us. My wife and I had taken care of my mother for nearly eighteen years. We had taken her everyplace we went, tucked her in at night, and made sure that she wasn’t lonely. There was no one to do this for Katherine. No one.
When I met my wife, she had never done any needlework, but she read about an organization that provides handmade blankets to sick and homeless children, and it set something off in her determined little soul. She painstakingly taught herself to crochet, and later to knit, for the purpose of making blankets to give away to this organization. Since she now had all the needed skills, my wife decided to crochet an afghan to help keep this lovely, frail woman warm, since she had told us about the problems with the heat in the housing project. My wife thought the afghan, since it was to be handmade, would remind Katherine that at least someone was thinking of her. So, crochet hook and yarn in hand, she went to work.
A few weeks of constant effort later it was done…beautiful, colorful, warm, and perfect. Big enough to cover, but not so big that it would be difficult for tiny little Katherine to use. Best of all, it would brighten up a dismal dwelling with its rainbow of pastels. We couldn’t wait to see the look on her face, so the next day we drove to Katherine’s home. We knocked, but there was no answer. We thought that she must be out shopping or visiting. On our way back, we stopped by the supermarket on the off chance that she might be there. We asked her cashier friend, and were shocked to find that just a couple of weeks earlier, Katherine had died suddenly.
My wife has been crocheting up a storm lately, and because of that I’ve been thinking about Katherine…imagining what she must have been like when she was younger, in her lovely home with her loving husband. Thinking about her listening to music. Thinking about her going dancing at the country club on a Saturday night. Thinking about her and her husband visiting friends and bringing gifts…so as “not to show up empty handed.” And I’ve been thinking about her dying. I was told that she died suddenly, but I don’t think so. I think that she started dying many years earlier. She started dying when her husband got sick, and died a bit more when she lost her home, and died a bit more when there was no heat in her dark, tiny room, and so on. There is something so very wrong in a world where lovely people like Katherine end their lives like that…alone. I learned from Katherine that when you are alone in the world, sudden death is not really sudden after all. We all die just a bit every time life deals us a weak hand of cards, but most especially when we are playing solitaire.
Katherine never did get to see that beautiful afghan. It was white with pink, light blue, aqua, lavender, and pale yellow stripes, in a “waffle weave” design. It’s a shame…she would have liked it, and we would have so enjoyed giving it to her. And I like to think that it would have helped just a little bit to keep her warm against the chill, not only of the winter, but of old age and poverty and loneliness. We wanted to adopt Jack the cat, so we asked around at the housing project, and were told that he had been taken in by one of Katherine’s neighbors. I hope he’s being well cared for, the way Katherine would have wanted it. After all, he was her best friend…the light of her life.
