Golf = Easy, Knitting = Hard

Saturday prooved it: Golf is Easy. We played golf at Anchor Golf Land demonstrating not only mastery of our Par 3 golf skills but extraordinary family management: golfing with children. Okay, the children were not mine (mine is in Maine) but Clementine and Lou Lou kept themselves entertained on the mini golf course while we played our short game.

Yes, golf is easy. I must say, though, in a few short months - and even though I'm not very good -I've outgrown the par 3 business. I had several bad holes on Saturday and only one par; Nancy had any number of pars but was only pursuaded to keep score at the end; Brendan even had a birdie. We are ready to move on.

Knitting is hard, though. Sunday night I attended one of the most liberating knitting sessions we've had at our Jersey City group, and we talked about the "wrong" way to knit. I took reasonably priced lessons when I learned to play golf, but my grandmother taught me how to knit and I've never had a professional class or teacher. I've been knitting, on and off, for about 40 years - and let me tell you, old habits die hard. Lynn - a bold self taught knitter and artist - told us while trying to identify why her knitting warped to the right all the time, she sat down with the Stitch and Bitch book and learned that she was twisting knit stitches when doing stockinette stitch and that she was in fact knitting the wrong way. It looked like Continental stitch, but it was really just twisted rib.

Is it possible, we thought, to knit the wrong way? Isn't this contrary to every feminist notion we 40 something women have about art, craft, orgasms, child rearing? Coming of age in the early 80's, weren't we indoctrinated that there is no such thing as one right way, just our way? We spent a few minutes watching each other knit. Everyone was different - the way we held our needles, kept yarn tension, cast on. I confessed that even I learned recently that I did YO differently than anything I had seen in a book, and that it was holding me back from success with lace patterns.

If you start to learn something like golf when you are older, something you can sometimes wonder if you have the time to invest to learn how to get good at it. And I do have to say it's important to me to be good at it. It's humbling to know that even after doing something for 40 years, though, that you still have something to learn.