Hooked for Life

This one is for my mother, Doris McCabe, who put that first hook in my hand. Thanks, Mom.

I
learned to crochet when I was in the fifth grade. I wanted to make a granny square because my mother was making some for an afghan for the living room and it looked like fun. She gave me a skein of royal blue acrylic and a hook, and she showed me how to make those 3-dc shells. Having the attention span of a flea at that age (and actually I am not much better now), in the middle of round two I ran across the street with my hook and yarn to show my friends how cool I was. I sat on their porch and carefully finished the round—3 dc, ch 1, 3 dc in each space—and went on to work rounds three and four in the same manner.

Well, if you know how to make a granny square, and I have to assume that if you are reading this book you do, you know what happened. It got all oval and ruffly and didn’t look like a granny square at all. That very day I was introduced to two very important concepts in crocheting. My neighbor Mrs. Gonzalez said that while it might not look like what I was expecting, it was still very nicely done so maybe I wasn’t making a
granny square after all but a doily—she was my early free-form influence. And then, my mother said I should rip it out and do it right—my first lesson in the importance of following the pattern if you want the project to look anything like the model. I ripped it out. Mrs. Gonzalez was fun but I had to live with my mother. But from that day forth, I really was Hooked for Life.

Writing this book was challenging in ways that I was not expecting. When I’d written my previous essays, I have to say they came very easily. (Please don’t tell my editors this—I like to make it look difficult so they don’t feel bad about paying me for my hard work.) My process for first-person work is almost always the same: I sit down and blather out a first draft of whatever story I want to tell, then I go back and do some paring and fiddling. By and large, if I can’t dribble out a beginning, middle, and end in the first draft, the idea isn’t quite ready for public consumption and I flit on to something else until it is.

This time, I made a list of things I wanted to write about, stories I wanted to tell, and I went to work. And when I went back and read over the early drafts, they weren’t as clever as I had hoped. They weren’t as glib, as funny as the other pieces. Some of them were downright angry—crocheters in general, and I in particular, can get so beaten down sometimes, feeling like the poor relation of our much hipper, trendier cousins, knitters. I wasn’t mocking my crochet obsession as I did with my knitting one, but I was defending it. Which is maybe very noble, but doesn’t make for a scintillating read.

So I decided this book would be a celebration of what crocheting is to those of us who love it. Not an apologia to those who do not understand, for they probably never will. Not a defense of crochet, for it needs no defending. Not a history of crochet, because although we sadly need one, I am not a scholar (if you want to know why, read the essay on how
I crocheted through school from eighth grade on). This book is a celebration of what is wonderful about the craft, nay, the art, of crochet. It includes a little half-cocked history, a sweet knowing smile at its foibles, and as always my tales of how my own life has been formed, row by row, round by round, by the work that I do. If you look down on crochet, put this book down. It isn’t my job to change your mind. But if you love crochet as I do, or at least have a yarny open mind, please read on. There is more to honor than to scorn, and I welcome you on my journey.

O
nce upon a time, I wrote an essay that mentioned a doctor friend. I called him a vascular surgeon. After publication of the essay, he heatedly (although with a slight self-deprecating smile so I wouldn’t panic) told me that he was board certified in internal medicine and vascular medicine, and as such, was not just a vascular surgeon as I had so glibly christened him. I pointed out that inserting his full title would have wreaked havoc with my sentence structure, and since it wasn’t a medical book, he would need to get over it. He did. I think.

In the further interest of sentence structure, where a personal pronoun needed to be used to refer to a crocheter, I used she or her, not he or she, or his or her, or whatever gender-inclusive combination that would have fit. It’s not that I don’t know that there are male crocheters. It’s not that I wanted to exclude the male readers of this book. It’s just that I find that dual-gender language clunky and I wanted to avoid it, and crocheters by demographic are overwhelmingly female. Please don’t hate me.