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was not a character in a novel. I moped around my apartment for the rest of the day, knowing that no one would ever love me and that I didn’t deserve to be loved anyway. Then I had sex with a stranger and on the 1 train back from his apartment I finished the sock, which I sent Mike the next day along with a lame note.
    As I stood in line at the post office, sock-filled envelope in hand, I looked up at the grubby calendar on the wall and realized that it was ten years almost to the day I had last seen my mother alive. By the time I finished high school, the two of us had reached a détente: she no longer voiced any displeasure with my choice to be openly gay, and I did not push her for more. But the rift between us never mended completely. In 1992, in the morning hours before I left for my sophomore year of college, we sat together on the porch of my family’s ramshackle beach house and watched the tide ebb out to sea, knowing she would not live to see Thanksgiving. From the stereo inside, Joan Baez sang a song about the honest lullaby her mother had sung her, a song my mother had taught me years before, guitar on her knee and tenderness in her voice.
    “We’ve had a lot of time together,” my mother said to me as the waves washed farther and farther away, “and a lot of that time we’ve been really close, so it’s as if we’d had twice as much time as we’ve actually had.” As we laughed the next song started, about how for all we knew we might never meet again, and we had to love each other tonight because tomorrow might never come.
    My father came out to tell me we had to leave for the airport. I stayed put, because I knew what was coming next; moments later the air vibrated with Joan’s rendition of the spiritual from which thousands of people had drawn strength for hundreds of years. She was free at last, she sang, free from the world and all its sin; she was free at last, for she had been to the top of the mountain.
    “Goodbye, Mom,” I said, and walked out to the idling car.
    A few months later, the day before the 1992 presidential election, my father called to tell me my mother wasn’t long for this world. I flew home that night, but she, lying on a knitted blanket in her pale, wasted frame and her clean blue-and-white nightgown, barely breathing, had really already left, and nothing I could say would matter to her now. I flew back north the next morning. Her final earthly act of
tikkun olam
had been to sign her absentee ballot; shortly after Bill Clinton’s victory speech, she breathed her last. After my father called to give me the news, at two or three in the morning, I went to the campus church—I helped run the choir, so I had keys—and sat for an hour at the organ playing my favorite hymn:
Deck thyself, my soul, with gladness! Leave the gloomy haunts of sadness; come into the daylight’s splendor!
Then I called my friend Peter and we went out for pizza and he obviously wanted to console me but I did not meet his gaze and when we spoke it was only to gossip about friends and professors because what I felt was unnameable and because I feared putting it into words would shatter me.

    Yesterday, after finishing a pair of socks for my friend Victoria, I started knitting a polka-dotted tea cozy. This is my first felted project; that is to say, once I’m finished knitting it, I’ll put it in the washing machine and when I take it out it will be not a shapeless mass full of little holes but a piece of imperforate green, lavender, orange, and light blue polka-dotted felt the perfect shape and size to keep a teapot warm.
    The pattern I’m using requires only a small amount of the light blue yarn, but almost right away I found myself working it into places it wasn’t called for. The blue is the exact color of my mother’s dress in the painting that hung above my family’s fireplace for years; the oils depicted a four-year-old with short hair and a little ball in her hands. I asked her once why she