When Nicki was little, but old enough to understand that people gave each other gifts, it occurred to me that I should come up with something that she could give to me for Christmas, birthdays, whatever. When I was a kid, my dad had two things that he needed on a regular basis -- a key case and a wallet. Each would last about two years before wearing out and it went to me to be the one to replace them each Christmas. There was no surprise to it, but at least they were things that I could afford and it pleased me to see him use them on a daily basis.
At the time that I was trying to come up with something, I had just bought some knee-high boots. I realized that I needed to wear them with relatively bulky socks in order to be comfortable. I bought some and got a kick out of getting what I thought were extremely tacky-looking socks with crazy stripes, weird-colored argyles, strange patterns because I knew they would be hidden in the boots. I could look very "put together" and stylish, all the while wearing something completely outrageous.
It hit me that socks were something that Nicki could give me. She could have fun looking for the most outrageously tacky pair of socks she could find, they weren't very expensive for a child's budget and they were something that I knew I would be able to use. It was a very special thing between the two of us. I sort of let it be known in the family that no one else was to give me tacky socks. That was Nicki's domain alone.
Over the years, she gave me some of the most outrageous socks I could ever hope for. We would laugh together when I opened my present at how truly ugly some of them were, and she would laugh again when she saw me wear them. My last birthday before she died, she gave me a dozen pair of socks, including two pairs of Christmas socks and a Halloween pair with skulls and pumpkins.
Naturally, some of them have worn out over the years or been eaten by clothes dryers. I'm not much for darning, so when a pair has become unwearable, I've placed the remnants in a special part of a dresser drawer. With her being gone, I've been running out. I bought some at
The Joy of Socks, but it's just not the same.
Since my relatively recent return to knitting, I've been reading about a lot of people making socks. I've never made true socks before. Some slipper-type socks, but not socks that anybody could actually wear with shoes. they require the use of really fine yarn and little tiny needles, both of which I have avoided like the plague.
I decided to give them a try, though. I bought some extremely expensive yarn and made my first pair for Jim, as the first thing I've ever made for him. He liked them a lot. I've just finished my second pair for him. "Just" as in within the past half hour.
I've been thinking about how Nicki liked to knit and it would likely have been a logical progression for her to learn to knit socks by now, continuing our tradition of tacky socks by making them herself, rather than buying them. There is quite a trend these days of rather outrageous sock yarn, including self-striping yarn. I got several different colorways of it and I'm going to make myself socks next. The first one is this combination of blues and purple and green called "Martinique." I know it's a form of denial to imagine that she's making them for me, but that's okay. Denial's what gets me from one day to the next, or, as Lennon said, it's what gets me through the night.
