The Bride

   I must admit that it is really hard to maintain a knitting blog when my major project has been flying stealth since I cast on.   The person I'm making it for is tremendously special to me and I wish I had the stones to design her gift personally, but I will have to content myself with altering the pattern in a meaningful way.   There is a longstanding tradition among knitters to create, even personally design, for the milestone days of those we love.   If you are lucky enough to be in the charmed circle of love around a serious knitter, just buckle up and prepare to see what they can do.   Allow me, instead of displaying her knits, to introduce you to the Recipient.

   The Bride is one of the people that most consistently amazes me.   We met in the lounge at the medical school dormitory the day I moved in, both of us trying to understand just what it was we were about to take on.   It turns out that she should never have worried even for a moment.   This tiny little person with a huge personality balanced by quiet calm in the face of ridiculous pressure can do fairly literally anything.   She has far more capacity for learning than I thought was possible in a human being, and she pushed her friends to learn more and faster than we thought ourselves capable of (Work! *kshh* work!).   She found her passion in surgery, and she is perfect for it, being uniquely capable of calmly learning while attendings scream and long long days slip by.   When I picture her, it is with the gleam of satisfaction in her eye that she had when she got to close the wound those times in third year.

    I chose to attend my medical school, a well-known private school in the Midwest, in part in order to meet different people with different life experiences, and The Bride was just that...a person whose life could hardly have been more different than mine.   She grew up on the other side of the world, and the bits and pieces she let slip about her early life indicated no bed of roses.  California and UC Berkeley shaped her college life, and she always had stories to share about living in a commune, especially about the people she had met.   I eagerly sought out her stories, though she may never have known that I did, because her life was far more fascinating than she realized.   She didn't share everything, being an intensely private person, so what she did share with her closest friends were like little jewels.   We didn't always know when she was dating someone, but she seemed to seek out those whose lives were as outside-the-box and rich with experiences as her own.  

   Several times throughout the four years, the Bride shared with me the rituals of her Jewish faith.   She even referred to me as "Honorary Jew" for being one of the most reliable about accompanying her to services and for being curious enough about her faith and culture to learn more.   She did not attend weekly services and would never have thought of herself as devout, but like all Jewish people, she had decided what Judaism meant to her, and she maintained many traditions, deeply committed to keeping this part of her identity shining.   She wears her faith proudly, perhaps nudged on by the thought of relatives and ancestors who were not allowed to.  

   When we, her girlfriends, were about to meet the man who is now her fiancé, our first thought was of whether or not this person would be her match, would measure up to her.   We had seen her choose people that, while nice and funny and interesting, were unable to match her in wit, in brilliance, in energy, in ambition.   The moment we met this charming, funny, sophisticated lawyer who kept pace with her in every way, we just knew. To lovingly embarrass her a bit, one of us began to refer to him as "Captain Awesome."   He shares her faith, is not intimidated by any little bit of her awesome, and is her match...we are proud to watch her begin a life with him.  

   Now that I have said all this, I expect to receive a mostly-angry email or phone call from her when she has read it.   She has always acted supremely uncomfortable with anyone publicly saying good things about her.   I hope she knows that I wrote it because it is true. I hope she knows that this is exactly how we feel about her and that we want her to know it.

Mazel tov, friend.