Where's My Yarn by Eugene Wyatt
A display of natural dyed yarns at the winter Greenmarket in Union Square. NYC
December 2004
Ad homonym, it’s wool to dye for, two months late from the spinners and too late for the holiday rush but it’s now back at the farm as yarn. What a struggling wait. I would call the spinner every Monday and politely listen to her many and varied off-putting: Thanksgiving, scheduling problems, the office party, two people out with the flu, then hearing the promise of “maybe next week” I would hang up, exit my polite lying guise and release my truth in a 10 letter blue streak, loudly enough to scatter the cats and cringe the interns, where’s my mother yarn?
Week after week, with my yarn stock depleting and my color choices narrowing, I resigned myself to selling little at the market. Slow days are broke days, but good for reading. I might read the Times and The New Yorker or a book from Barnes and Noble that I buy in the morning and return in the evening to get my money back. Sometimes I keep the book but usually I don’t so I handle it gently, careful not to spill tea on the pages, where’s my money yarn?
Hour after hour after selling nothing, an unsuspecting knitter intrudes upon my slow daze reading. What! how dare you, my attitude must convey, can’t you see I’m having a slow day. Then I might answer a question with a barb sending her away shaking her head. I’m making a slow day slower; feeling worse for my inburst, I wait for the next knitter to repair, and where’s my innocence yarn?
On cold days, I’m a popular guy. Farmers and market managers stop to warm their hands; they seem to have more interest in my under, or worse, over-explained views when it’s in the 20’s. This condescension for warmth brings with it an awareness: me too, by over-adding my I-me-my-ness to the world, I bore. So I listen, subtracting my advice, as a good conversationalist should. The conversation are personal or banal but nonetheless they interest me and range from what inane thing the Buffalo guy did , or why Gabrielle is in a snit, to how Whole Foods will impact the market.Thus I pass the time listening to gossip that warms as much as the glowing propane heater does huddled before it, but where’s my idiom yarn?
A nap smoothes and speeds the day; I will lay down in the front seat of the truck and cover myself in sheep skins using an old, wool sweater for a pillow. I sleep well in New York. The far-away voices and the tapering horns become a sonic coincidence that soothes. I don’t count sheep, I thank them, and the dogs and the cats and the friends and the enemies, and the spinners too, as I close my eyes. I love that crazy twilight between wakefulness and dream where the ballerina parks the fire truck and this scene doesn’t not make sense to me. Asleep, to awaken, to drive back to the farm, and there’s my yarn.
Eugene Wyatt
