basalt tank

I completed Nora Gaughan’s Basalt Tank from Knitting Nature just in time to show it off at Ally Pally. One person, the lovely Robynn from Purlescence.com recognized it, bless her. (Anyone who needs a knitting indulgence should check out her site– they have beautiful, quality things, free fairy-tale based patterns and great service.)

I don’t know how I feel about the finished tank. It certainly fits me, and was a joy to knit. I marvel at the math involved in the pattern. Knitting the hexagons which grow one from the other, meditation on the maths needed to invent such a thing is inevitable. It made me realize that it was not my own inadequacies that made higher maths “out of bounds” for me, but a deliberately discouraging educational system that told me not to bother.

I guess in my late thirties I am now realizing that I would have been good at things like calculus if I’d only been given the chance. As a young girl I certainly wouldn’t have insisted I’d be given a chance, though that is what it would have taken.

I remember being 12 and my algebra teacher called me to the board to answer a problem. His manner was much like a drill sergeant and he terrified me. I wished I had a shell– maybe the Basalt Tank– to crawl into. I froze up at the board. I was one of two girls in the class. He said, “is there a young man here who can save her?” And there were laugher and volunteers. He never called me to the board again.

Years later I was in a playground and I saw him on the sidewalk. I went up to him an asked him why he had done that. To my amazement he had remembered me and said something presumptuous and backhanded like, “You had a brilliant mind, but you weren’t using it.”

Knitting this tank I realized that he was, and still is, terribly wrong.