Knitting Feeds

I’m sitting at my desk, and it’s “Day Zero” for the bike rally, which is what Ken calls Packing Day. That’s the day before departure, the day that we show up with all the worldly goods we’ll need for the next week (including our knitting) and load it all into bins and walk away from it. The support volunteers will drive it to our Day One stop for tomorrow night, and then we’ll cycle 114km to catch up with it. (That sounds bonkers, doesn’t it?) It’s rather late – or at least it’s Bike Rally late, which means that it’s not even gone nine yet and I’m ready for bed. I have to be awake ridiculously early in the morning – I haven’t quite done the math but I’ve got to be up, dressed, fed, caffeinated and across town with a sunny attitude and a ready bike at 7am and that sounds like such a challenge if I am not absolutely lying in my bed by 10pm.

Ken’s here, he’s upstairs puttering with a few things, and Joe’s watching the Olympics and I’m sitting here taking a few minutes to write to you before I go up and lie down and begin the night before process of anxiously making a mental list of all the things I don’t want to forget tomorrow. My bike jersey has three pockets and Ken has a small backpack that I can put things in- he’ll stash it with one of the drivers. I’ve got to remember to pack my toothbrush after I use it, and to bring three chamois butters in my pockets (one for me, one for Jen and one for Fenner) and I need my ID (whoops, I think I put that in my bins) and I kept out a little bit of knitting – just the socks that I started for my Self-Imposed-Sock-of-the-Month Club, and they’re just a bit of toes but I still want to take them and I’ll need something to knit as we make our way there.

I also have to remember my puffer – a new addition to my checklist. A year after having Covid I still have virus-induced asthma. It’s crappy. I’d hoped it would give up and wander off but despite a perfect lifetime of terrific asthma-free lung function -15 months post-covid I can’t cycle more than a few blocks without wheezing like an old accordion. (Thanks Covid, you’re a jerk.) It’s a whole new thing learning to carry the medicine with me when ride, but I’m getting the hang and it works, so that’s kinda motivating.

As we did a few last minute tasks tonight, putting our license plates on our bikes, organizing our jerseys and shoes and bike shorts for tomorrow and I told Ken that I am officially at the “why do I do this to myself” phase of getting ready. I’ve been there all day – It’s so much work and it’s so tiring and tomorrow’s supposed to be about 40 degrees (that’s 104 for our American friends) and the Rally is hard, so so hard, and and while I do all of it and think about the week ahead of me it helps to revisit all the reasons I bother.

I could go on forever about how important the work that PWA does is. I could tell you about the difference that they make in the lives of people with HIV and AIDS. I could tell you about the people I have met that have explained to me that PWA saved their life. That they got back a sense of belonging and community and comfort, or that it’s the place where they don’t feel ashamed, or stigmatized or that it’s the place that helped them get the meds that they need to be healthy and to get them to an undetectable viral load so that not only are they healthy, but they’re not able to pass it on to anyone else, stopping this beast in its tracks. I could tell you that PWA helped them get a haircut. I could tell you that they helped them with vet services for a beloved pet, or provided the skills and confidence to get a job, or gave them access to the Essentials Market (a much more dignified name for a food bank) to get the food that they needed to feed their kids this week, or provided child care or a drive for a medical appointment.

Mostly though, I would tell you that like almost everyone who rides the Rally, I’m doing it because there is a kind of world I want to live in, and I think that we all have a responsibility to try and build it together, and that those of us who are able to show up and fundraise and make some noise have a moral obligation to do just that on behalf of not just the clients who need the service systems we’re building, but for those of us who simply can’t. Maybe that’s you right now. Maybe the most you can do right now to build that kind of world is read this, and think about it. Maybe the most you can do is donate. Maybe donating is impossible for you and the way you can help is to forward the request to someone who can – putting it on your feed or on your socials. Maybe you are someone who needs to use these services yourself. *

Anyway, tomorrow as I start my ride with Team Knit, that’s what I’lll be thinking about. Doing my best to fundraise, and raise awareness and well… it’s going to be really hard. As always, you are the missing piece. Team Knit”s efforts change nothing without your help, and we are so grateful for you and any help you can give, no matter what it looks like.

Team Knit is:

Me. (Stephanie)

Ken (like always)

Cameron (currently away for an important family time)

Jen (welcome back Jen, it’s been 8 years)

Fenner (Jen’s kid, now a whopping 16 years old and old enough!

I think I’ve figured out how to blog from my ipad, so there’s a tiny chance I’ll be able to do that on the ride or in Montreal- and in my last blog post I said that I would write you an entry for every $1000 we raised, which means that right now I owe you more than 40 blog posts, and I better get on it.

Thanks for everything, please keep helping. I think you’re great.

* a little note about that. Did you know that a very great many (more than a third) of the clients who use PWA are women? HIV/AIDs has always exploited the vulnerable, and these days a client at the agency is just as likely to be a mother with children (sometimes HIV+ as well) as a gay man. The face of this pandemic might not quite be what you think. I’m not just allied to the LGBTQ2S+ community, I’m showing up for those mamas.

I have always been, much to my own disappointment and that of my mother, a person who is a rather vulnerable to criticism. My grandfather thought that criticism was valuable and told you a lot about where you should be putting your energy if you’re trying to improve yourself, and maybe because I’m a bit weak or maybe because I took that a little too seriously, I have always taken the things that people say about me right to heart, and tried to do something with it. I think that this has worked on some things – but there’s a whole raft of other stuff about me that just seems intractable no matter now many times I vow to be the sort of person with a really tidy house who also doesn’t talk too much. Usually, when I confess that I’m sort of vulnerable this way all sorts of people try to reassure me that I’m pretty great and I shouldn’t worry about what other people think, and that’s super nice of them. I appreciate it a lot, while also not being able to really think that’s true. Caring what other people think is important to me and the civil society I’d like to live in, and I care what you think of me, and for the most part I think I’m better for it, especially as I get older and work out exactly which opinions matter, and which are differences of opinion that I’m kinda proud of.

Now, I’ve written before how being someone who takes criticism easily to heart makes it really hard to be a writer, especially one who gets to read her reviews right here on the blog, or in my inbox. It can make me nervous about writing in general and well – I think I’m always going to struggle with that. So a while ago I went to write to you about the Bike Rally and Team Knit this year, and to tell you that I’m going to try and blog about everything as frequently as I’m able in exchange for donations, and stopped, and didn’t. See, I received a comment from someone that said that she felt this blog only existed to be a personal go fund me for the Bike Rally (that’s an oxymoron by the way, you can’t have a personal fundraiser that’s for a charity the money is going to the charity for crying out loud I’m not buying shoes) and I realized that if I posted now she could think I was doing just as she said, and I worried that she would have more criticism that hurt my feelings and I didn’t post. This went on for a while even though this reader said she was deleting me and wasn’t going to read anymore, because I’ve always figured that if one person leaves a comment, they’re really speaking on behalf of a bunch of knitters who feel the same way but can’t be arsed to leave a comment. (This is like me believing that all spiders are hiding a secret ability to jump. You can’t tell me otherwise, despite evidence to the contrary- I said it was a secret.) It doesn’t matter if that’s true or not, because I realized something shocking about it yesterday, and here it comes.

I don’t care.

Even if every little bit of that is true, and I am only using the blog as a fundraiser at the moment, do you know what? That’s a great legacy. That’s an amazing thing for this blog to do. If that is the culmination of twenty years of blogging – that I’ve told you the story of my knitting and this family for two decades and created a platform that exists so that knitters can make the world a better place? Sign me up. Send me the tee-shirt. Cool beans, I’m in, I think that I like that about me.

I have also been kinda bummed about the world lately- and somehow it has felt to me like there are so many problems right now that it is impossible to write fairly about anything. If I write about the climate aren’t I ignoring Gaza? If I write about Gaza then I am a boor who must turn my attention to Ukraine, and how could we overlook the Sudan – do you even care about Niger? Do you know the temperature of the Atlantic ocean? Aren’t politics keeping you up at night? Are you worried about eroding human rights? It feels to me many days like the world is completely out of control and these problems are so many and so big that it can feel hard to do anything about any of it. Luckily though, I am a knitter and so are you (probably) and that means that unlike a lot of people, we have an antidote. Team Knit.

Team Knit is a little group of knitters (mostly in my family) who every year, ride their bikes from Toronto to Montreal (that’s 660km – or 410 miles, for my American friends) to raise funds for PWA. (Toronto People with AIDS foundation.) This year Team Knit is:

Me. (Stephanie)

Ken (like always)

Cameron*

Jen (welcome back Jen, it’s been 8 years)

Fenner (Jen’s kid, now a whopping 16 years old and old enough!)

*Quick note about Cam- he has an injury this year that’s preventing him from riding. He’s still dedicated to the ride and the cause, so he’s signed up as crew and will spend the six days making the ride go from another angle.

How is that an antidote? Glad you asked. In fundraising – what I was just writing about is a big, big part of what fundraisers are trying to overcome. The problem that almost nobody has a spare few million dollars, and that means that most donations are going to be rather smaller than that, to say the least. Now, most humans are smart enough to look at a problem and realize that some money would go a long way to helping, but understand that it would be a lot of money. Then they realize that they don’t have a lot of money, they just can spare a little bit, and don’t donate, because there’s no way that $10 can solve the problem, and so they don’t give anything. There’s other people though – people who understand the concept of “cumulative action” – and those people are different. Those people have learned somehow, through experience or education, that a small action isn’t futile, if it’s combined with many other small actions, and those people will indeed take a small action or make a small gift because they know their little piece is an essential part of something big. Fundraisers love these people – this kind of person creates really differences in the world, and guess what.

All knitters understand Cumulative Action. Every, single one of them. Knitting teaches you that one small action does matter. That one small action, like knitting a stitch, isn’t unimportant. It’s vital. One small action repeated many times is a sweater. Or a shawl. Or a pair of socks to hold the feet of someone you love, and that idea? The concept of cumulative action? It makes knitters the most remarkable fundraisers of all. Other groups, they have to rely on the small part of their community that understands that… knitters? Our whole group gets it. Our whole group sees that one small thing – put together with many other things can create something enormous, and wonderful, and magical.

More than this, there is a bonus, and it is that this feels great. Taking a small action that becomes huge in cooperation with your community is a remarkable way for people to know what it must feel like to make huge gifts, to be a philanthropist, to know that they are actually taking an action big enough to create real, tangible change and difference in the world, to be someone who is shaping that world- to lift the feeling that nothing matters, that you can’t do anything, that it’s all out of your control. It’s not. It’s not at all. You’re just not going to do it by yourself.

Please give if you can. As always, I believe there are so many ways to help – the wave of cumulative action roars fastest with lots of us. If you can’t afford to give, please help by spreading the word, telling a friend, asking a business, or reaching out to any billionaires you may know. You’re Team Knit, let’s go.

(I forgot to tell you about the deal. For every $1000 we raise, I’ll write one blog post. It’s a small thing, but it’s something I can do.)

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