Iris knits her sock-slippers, sitting in her mechanical rocking chair framed by the picture window looking out on the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
I wrote this story for the Moss Rock Review in Victoria , BC, and as a Christmas gift for family and friends, but like it enough that I’m ‘gifting’ it to a broader audience. Please feel free to share it with anyone you think might enjoy it. If you are offended by the ‘cultural Christian’ you will meet in Casting On, my apologies. This is not a criticism of anyone else’s beliefs so much as an exploration of my own. Craig Spence craig-spence@shaw.ca www.craigspencewriter.ca 250-208-3825
Casting On by Craig Spence © 2012 First you make a ‘slip knot’, I believe it’s called. Then you work the wool around the point of your needles in such a way that another knot follows on, and another after that, and another, and another. You continue this process, row upon row, until two dimensions emerge – a single strand insinuating itself into the length and breadth of an abstract reality. You articulate the knots, making the bright, coloured panels curve into identifiable shapes – always the same shapes in Iris’s case… another pair of sock-slippers. She will tease me if she ever reads this. I can imagine her, even as I write, enthroned on her mechanical rocking chair in her front room, framed by the picture window that looks out on Dallas Road. Glance beyond, through the glass, and there’s Juan de Fuca Strait, back dropped by the Olympic Mountains – the rim of this quadrant of world, capped by a sky that varies in hue from slate grey to bright blue. Closer in there’s people walking dogs, flying kites, riding bikes, whizzing by in cars.
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But that’s another universe from the one occupied by Iris. Her world seems to end on the point of her knitting needles, that convergence of mind, matter and routine which constitutes an obstinate reality for her and me. My mother-in-law remains something of a mystery. Serena laughs at my confusion. “Stop trying to figure her out,” she says, almost scornfully. I protest that she is a derivative of that old woman we see rocking inscrutably in her wondrous chair, stringing together knots of wool into the repeated forms of brightly coloured slippers. I point out that Serena herself has an aura of mystery about her. She snorts at such comparisons, calls me: The Brain Box to expose my lack of comprehension. I have to laugh whenever she says that, because it’s a backhanded compliment… the implication being that Serena hasn’t figured me out yet, that she will be disappointed if she ever does. She’s shrewd that way - plays emotions like I play chess. The sock-slippers Iris knits go mostly to the Silver Threads thrift shop. “It’s as good a cause as any,” she says, as if supporting seniors strength and stretch classes, Scrabble clubs, foot clinics and so on was just another byproduct of her craft. Her slippers ‘fly off the shelves’ by all accounts. No wonder, when they’re priced lower than the cost of the wool it takes to make them. To support her habit she does sell a portion of her output ‘direct’. Well, she doesn’t actually sell
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the stock herself. Serena’s brother Martin is her ‘manager’. He takes box loads of her slippers to craft fairs and flogs them for six bucks a pair. More recently he’s been taking out ads on Craig’s List and meeting customers at the garage door of Iris’s bungalow, as if he were the proprietor of a suspect shop on some crooked back street selling illegal goods. Oxymoron that: illegal goods. Martin is a bit of an enigma himself. Never married. Not interested in having kids of his own. Makes his money playing the markets from ‘command central’, an office he’s rigged up in what used to be Serena’s bedroom. Command Central connects to all the major stock exchanges from here to Timbuktu, Martin assures me. But, as if that weren’t enough, he’s got a back up plan. “If I lose a little on the markets,” he occasionally boasts, “I can always earn it back playing poker.” Which he does most nights. Not at the casinos, though. Marty prefers ‘private tables’ where the stakes are high, taxes low. “Don’t judge him,” Serena says whenever we talk about Marty. And if I squawk that I’m not judging, just observing, she laughs as if I don’t know anything. The toughest knot between Iris and me is religion. I’m not talking about a ‘knot that binds’; I’m talking about something more like a cramped muscle that makes you wince and gnash your teeth. Not that I’m Christian in the conventional sense of the word. I’m a man of science,
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actually, of new ideas that are mostly old now. I can’t disregard Darwin, or Einstein, or Copernicus, or the overwhelming weight of evidence that says we are an evolved species, driven by the same life force that propels rats through sewers, or wolves on the hunt, or microbes to cluster on dead meat, or spiders darning their magnificent webs, or cedar trees thrusting up from the matted forest floor. God, to me, is not something you paint onto the roof of a Sistine Chapel and say “I am finished!”. Despite all that, though, I still believe in a sentimental sort of way in the God old Reverend Kennedy used to preach about at Norwood United Church. I liked Reverend Kennedy. During that period when my parents were still church goers and I was forced to sit between them on the pew in my scratchy, wool suit, I was indoctrinated – that’s the most neutral word I can come up with – into his fold. “Get over it,” Serena says when I plead my case, categorizing myself as a ‘cultural Christian’. Iris is not so kind. She just keeps on knitting, nodding knowingly, as if my sappy piety is encompassed in her Technicolor wisdom – like a naked foot swaddled in a pair of snuggly sock-slippers. Iris is an out-and-out atheist; Serena a ‘Yogist’ as far as I can make out. Marty an individualist. None of them believes in Christmas, except as a date on the marketer’s calendar that must be observed if one does not wish to offend neighbours
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and weaken the economy. So we play along to the best of our abilities. In season Serena and I string a few lights along the eves, nail a cedar wreath to the front door and put up a tree in the living room. We’re polite. We offer friends eggnog, and cook a Christmas dinner – Serena is researching the availability of vegetarian turkey and low cholesterol pudding, innovations I’m resisting with an increasing sense of futility. As for Iris and Marty, they don’t do anything to honour the day, which I suppose is the best that can be expected of them. Well, maybe I’m being a bit harsh there. Perhaps Iris’s atheism is not so ironclad as she pretends. On Christmas Eve five years ago Marty showed up at our front door just before we were off to bed. It was the year we had a major snowfall, so his toque and shoulders were caked with snow, his face ruddy with cold. “Can’t come in,” he said. “Just here to drop this off.” He held out a package wrapped in what appeared to be the cover of the previous week’s Monday Magazine. “What’s this?” I asked, trying not to sound overly suspicious. “Present from Mom.” I thought we had a deal – no presents on Christmas except anonymous donations to worthy causes in one another’s names. This was a transgression. “But,” I blustered… “Can’t stand around,” Marty cut me short. “Roads are getting bad and I haven’t got any snows on.” His car was
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slewed into a bank on Dallas Road, the engine still running, lights glimmering through the blizzard, wipers flapping. He turned and trudged down the steps before I could get in a word edgewise. Serena and I talked it through in bed afterward. If Iris was breaking the pact, she must have had good reason. If she was giving me a present, it would be a statement of sorts, a tweak in our long standing stalemate over the ‘meaning of Christmas’. No, I shouldn’t phone her. No, I shouldn’t schlep over to her place in my rubber boots and demand an explanation. No! “Relax, Hun,” she coached. “The kid’s will be over in the morning; we’ll open our presents then, and find out what Mum bestowed on you. I’m sure it will be okay.” I conceded the point, but still felt cheated. Serena says we dream when ‘our energy is not in balance’. I interpret this to mean electrical impulses are zipping across synaptic gaps in our imbalanced nervous networks, triggering random imagery: dreams, if you will, as plasma in flux. That night I dreamed myself in the front row of the Belfry Theatre. The lights were down, but I could tell the seats all around me were empty. Only one person sat in the audience: me. A sitar started twanging nasally somewhere in the wings, then a man whirled onto the stage, whipped like a tornado by the music. His silk garments ballooned out and flowed around
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him as he spun. His face was turned up, and he smiled, ravished by inner joy. He was wearing a green and yellow pair of Iris’s sock-slippers. Next came a Russian ballerina, swooping in on the elegant chords of Swan Lake. She swept round the stage with excruciating grace, her fuzzy, blue sockslippers pointing and flashing with energetic precision. The jostling entourage grew to include Buddhist, Jew, Cree, Maori, Muslim, Coast Salish, Sikh, you-name-it dancers, all shod in Iris’s sock-slippers, which darted about like a flock of erratic, gaudy birds. Last Mary and Joseph shuffled onto the stage, slowly for the sake of their child. And guess what: they wore sockslippers too, and so did Christ, his tiny booties adorned with little ball tassels – the only time I’ve ever seen such a variation in Iris’s pattern. I never told anybody about my dream. Not Serena, not Marty, not Iris. When I opened her present next morning, there – nestled in last week’s Monday Magazine – was a lovely pair of green, white and red sock-slippers. Every time I put them on – which is every Christmas morning – I feel like I might just cut a caper. And Iris, when she deigns to join us for Christmas dinner – which she always does – knows it. I can tell by her serene smile that she’s perfectly well aware of how complete the circle becomes once you ‘cast out’, if I may be permitted to use a bit of knitting terminology.
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