What's in YOUR Knitting Bag

Ok. One should never clean out one's knitting bag in public, no matter how innocuous it might seem. I succumbed to the temptation and started to clean mine out at the last knit night. I was looking for my tool kit to get my tape measure and scissors out, but could not find them. I began to pull stuff out of my knitting bag and placing it on the table in front of me. I noticed people's eyes were getting wider and wider. First, I pulled out a 2 gallon zip top bag containing a nearly finished pair of socks, a single sock on the needles, yarn attached, and a yet untouched skein of sock yarn. A quart size zip top bag containing a sock (out of some Cherry Tree Hill sparkly yarn) on the needles . Next I retrieved another 2 gallon bag with 8 skeins of spingering (thicker than fingering, thinner than sport) weight alpaca and my Elfin Lace Shawl filled out the project portion of the show. Finally, came the fun stuff: a memory card for my MP3 player; three tampons; over a dollar in loose change; two pens; assorted receipts; a paperback book; extra zip top bags; a screw - sans nut; three French hens; two turtledoves; and a partridge in a pear tree -- but no tool kit. Frustrating.

As I sat there looking at the mound of extraneous crap in front of me, I blamed it for the pain in my shoulder. (The 1500 grams of yarn and knitting needles couldn't possibly have been the culprit.) Of course, looking at the zip top bags of yarn, I began to wonder how I was going to fit all of this back into my bag. You can only bend the laws of physics so many times before you either have to become a physicist at Harvard to find new explanations for how it is possible to expand space to allow you to cram as many projects as necessary into one modestly sized bag, or start carrying an adjunct knitting bag.

What was worse, and my knitting comrades did not know this at the time, I have an even larger knitting bag at home that I use when I travel. My jumbo bag even has pockets to hold more non-knitting items the knitter deems essential to life as she knows it!

All of this kind of reminded me of Phil Donahue. I hear the mental gears locking. Fear not, there is a connection.

In the bad old 80's when hair spray use was in near addictive proportions; Supply Side Economics screwed us for the first time around; hair bands ruled the day; and leg warmers, ripped up sweat shirts, sweat bands, and leggings were all the rage, I lived through the death throes of this little thing called of the Cold War. (For those of you who don't remember because you were barely alive in the 80's, yes, my friends there was a Cold War with the Soviet Union - you know Russia and all its little friends whose names you can't pronounce.) About this time many journalists and others began to have a dialogue with the Soviet people. The thought was that if we could find common ground as people, it would be harder to launch the nukes.

Phil Donahue (Again, for those of you who don't remember the 80's - Phil had his own talk show, Donahue.) and a Soviet colleague,Vladimir Posner co-hosted a series of special Donahue talk shows. Phil would hold the microphone up so members of his audience in the US could ask questions of their Soviet counter parts and vice versa. One of the most interesting things that happened is that women in the US and women in the USSR emptied their purses on air. When they did, they discovered that women in the US and women in the USSR carry the same things in their bags.

Once we started humanizing the people who lived in the USSR, we realized how much like us they were. They, too, had to work for a living. They, too, had families and feared nuclear annihilation as much as we did. Humans talk. That's what we do. That's how we get to know one another. Dogs get their p-mail (my friend, Brooks', brain child, not mine); Humans stand around the water cooler. Some believe that is one of the key differences between humans and other species - our capacity for speech.

My observation is that perhaps it is time we started finding out what other women around the world carry in their bags. I doubt we will find WMD. Hopefully, we will find some common ground. With any luck, they, too, are knitters. An international knit night might not be a bad thing. As a matter of fact it might save 3,200 plus lives.