>We don’t visit the cemetery where my dad is at rest.  There is no need.  In a prominent corner of her dining room, my mother keeps a shrine housed in a lacquered display case shipped home with a great deal of fuss and at outrageous cost during a visit to her family in Japan eleven years ago.  Every morning my mother prays, makes an offering of fruit and a cup of coffee fixed just the way my dad used to like it.  There is incense and a little gong which she gongs three times.  It’s all ooga-booga to me, but if this routine, this small, beautiful and perfect moment of reflection, reverence and remembrance is what my mother needs to carry on, then it’s OK.

My dad never got to see the blossoming of my crochet career.  Crochet to him was that stuff my mom and I did with the strings and sticks.  As long as we didn’t make too much noise while the ballgames were on TV, he hardly noticed.  Dad learned to love baseball as a teenager while working off his debt to the people who “adopted” him.  They paid his way to America from China, and in return they expected from him indentured servitude in their Chicago laundry.  Throughout those hard years the radio was his only company. He never said, but I imagine that the games on the radio that helped him through the long hours of drudgery were played by the Cubs… or maybe the White Sox.

By the time I knew him, he had  become a Boston Red Sox fan, that is until 1962.  That was the year of the major league expansion that created the New York Mets.  (Oh, Dad still followed the BoSox, particularly the career of Carl Yaztremski.  Does anyone else remember Yaz bread?)  By the time the fledgling team moved to Shea Stadium in 1964, my dad had become a Mets fan.  My god the Mets were lousy at first.  But I guess my dad loved rooting for the underdog, because he stuck with them.  I so vividly remember the “Cinderella” year, 1969, when the Mets won the World Series.  There was a lot of “I told you so” in our household that season.

So when Stacy Charles of Tahki Stacy Charles yarn company, on behalf of The National NeedleArts Association’s Stitch N Pitch event, asked me to share with my blog readers the details of one very special and monumental Mets game, I agreed.

On June 5th, at Mets Citi Field, crocheters will attempt to set the Guinness Book of World Records for Most People Crocheting Simultaneously.  Please check out the site to find out more about Stitch N Pitch, or download the flyer for details about this event.

I wonder what my dad would think.  It’s one thing to be in your living room sharing the sofa with two crocheters while the Mets game is on TV.  Quite another thing to be sitting in a section at a stadium among potentially hundreds and hundreds of crocheters.  I would like to think my dad would approve, even be impressed if the record got set.  But not so impressed that he wouldn’t be disappointed if the Mets lost the game.  Really.

BTW:  Final Score, NY Mets 6, Florida Marlins 1; Crocheters 419, Guinness World Record for Most People Crocheting Similtaneously set.