dad’s why I’m a historian in the first place. I’m not an artist. But, he taught me the importance of everyday things, everyday events. My dad loved the weave of a cloth—the part that every thread would play. I thought that’s what studying history would mean—giving every thread its due.
But now I’m somewhere in the middle of my tome on “Emergent Nationalism and Labor Movements in Sumatran Palm Plantations, 1913–1947”—(self-deprecating aside) ya’ want to read it already don’t you?—and I wonder. I wonder if all these words and all this work matter nearly as much as I want them too. I never see the whole cloth anymore —just threads—and lately, even those slip in and out of focus.
The knitting helps. It reminds me what a single thread can do.
(She looks at yarn in her hands.)
And what it can’t.
I taught myself to knit seven months ago. I’m still not very good. I always get my stitches too tight—but I thought I could at least make something warm to wrap up a baby on cold nights. Something a child could remember as she grew. Jay and I’d been trying for two years. And then it came . . . my own Annunciation. My own personal Gabriel, in the form of two little lines on a plastic stick.
But not all of us are Marys.
No fall or trauma. No warning. Just some cramping and a thread of blood that didn’t stop for days. And even though there was no more baby to knit for, I couldn’t put the needles away. To see them sitting unused was just one more reminder that God hadn’t send an angel for me.
(After a pause.) They have these shadow puppet plays in Yogya. A puppeteer creates these epics by casting shadows on a lighted screen. The performance goes on all night. And my dad and I used to argue about what side of the screen to sit on—because you could sit on either. You could watch the puppeteer himself, from the backside of the screen, moving three or four puppets at a time . . . or you could sit in front and watch the illusion—the shadows coming to life. My dad always wanted the illusion, of course. I wanted to see the man behind the screen. I wanted to see the man making the shadows.
And I still do. I want to see this God whose shadows are supposed to be dancing across my life, because I think He’s left the building. “The Holy Spirit will overshadow you,” Gabriel says to Mary. I got no such promise from my Puppeteer.
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