Put In My Place

Yesterday afternoon Mr. Pointy Sticks and I headed down to the soon-to-be-closed Baltimore Daedalus store (partly for one last look at the books and partly because we wanted to have dinner at Atwaters, which is right there). I wandered about a bit and, after finding two books decided to sit down and work on my jellybean sock.

(Which is coming along quite nicely. Almost finished the first one.)

As I was sitting on the couch knitting a little boy (about 6, I would guess) stopped in front of me. After a minute he asked, "Are you knitting a sock?!" (By the way, I give him very high marks for recognizing that 1) I was knitting and 2) it was a sock.)

"Yup," I answered, "it's a sock."

"Wow," he said.

And then after a minute, "Did you knit those socks?" he asked, pointing to my feet.

"Yes." I said.

"Wow. Do you knit all your socks?"

"No," I said, "I'm not a very fast sock knitter. But I've knit about 20 pairs for myself and for friends."

"Do you knit other clothes?"

"Yes," I said, "I've knit hats and sweaters and scarves. You should learn to knit. It's a lot of fun."

At this point a young woman, in her early 30's I'd say, who was standing nearby said to the boy, "That's pretty neat, huh? That she makes socks and things?"

"Yeah," he said, and then turned to me and said, "Is that your grand-daughter?"

Grand-daughter!!?? I wanted to weep.

As he walked away, he called to the woman he was with and said, "Grandmommy, I think she should knit me something!"

Except that it would have been sort of odd, I almost asked the grandmother to give me his name and address so that I could knit him a hat. Or a pair of socks.