Philadelphia  - Letting go is seldom easy, but often therapeutic.

The silky feel of the taupe-colored kid mohair yarn was enough to outweigh the saleswoman's caution that the gauge would be off if I used it to knit the afghan I planned to make. I bought it anyway. The project wasn't tricky, just straight knitting, no pattern - a Zen-like experience, or so I anticipated.

And it was a great theory. Fluffs of mohair filled the empty spaces created by the airiness of the wrong gauge. The calming color complemented a meditative state of mind.

But my needles often split the already fine strands of yarn, creating even wispier bits that I overlooked coming back on the next row . . . resulting in dropped stitches and the frustration of threading them up through tangles of yarn. When I accidentally purled an entire row, I nearly wept but ripped it out and vowed to be more careful.

Still the afghan simply wasn't going right, that was certain. So I gave up. Something I seldom do. And returned the yarn to the store - asking the saleswoman to please pass it along to someone who would be equally enchanted by its delicate good looks and give it a good home.

A week later I started a new afghan - a slightly thicker mohair blend, deeper color, this time knitting and purling alternate rows. I continued to occasionally drop and then pick up stitches, but I'm now fast approaching its destined sixty-inch length (and all accomplished in a fairly meditative state - as I had originally anticipated).

Thoughts on Writing
Roger Rosenblatt's book Unless It Moves the Human Heart tells of Edgar Doctorow throwing out the first 150 pages of what would become The Book of Daniel. "You think that's hard to do?" Rosenblatt asks. "You'd be surprised. When you know something doesn't work, and you chuck it, the feeling is pure liberation, nearly as good as doing something right in the first place. Actually the feeling is better because the elimination of the wrong choice fortifies the rightness of the right one."

I couldn't have said it better myself.