The Trance of the Wheel

There are people who thrive on showing their unique-snowflake-ness to the world through the flashy display of their fringe hobbies. There is a kind of hobby-exhibitionism that these kinds of people revel in, a “look how strange I am, doing these strange things! Isn’t that strange? I’m so gosh-darned unique!” attitude that tends to get under my skin. It’s something I’m hypersensitive about because one of my hobbies — belly dance — requires a certain amount of willing exhibitionism, of diva and performer, to even fully engage with it on even the most basic level. And I am not one of those people.

Though not as much as belly dance, spinning falls into that category of odd hobby that people tend to find a little hippie, a little fringy, and a little weird. Because of that I’ve always been a little shy about spinning in public until I fell in with the Eastside Spinners Guild, a group of spinners that meets every Saturday, alternating between Starbucks here in Issaquah and Fortunato’s Wine Bar in Woodinville. Most people bring their spinning wheels and a few people bring regular drop spindles. I really wanted to join in even though I’ve always been a little self-conscious of spinning yarn in a public place (although I carry a spindle with wool in purse, I usually won’t do it in public — it’s generally reserved for lunch-time spinning in a secluded corner at work). I finally did join in a few weeks ago and have enjoyed the get-togethers I’ve been able to attend, and having so many other people to spin with I feel less like a weirdo doing some crazy hippie thing.

But what’s really strange is that I tend to attract all the people who want ask us what we’re doing. I have no idea why. There are usually at least ten people there and on days like today, twenty. All of them are equally capable of answering questions and all of them are just as friendly. But for some reason, they tend to pick me. And contrary to what I would have thought I thoroughly enjoy this.

It’s amazing the range of ages and types of people who walk up with furrowed brows and ask what exactly we’re doing: kids, the elderly, busy moms, men in their 40s…it doesn’t matter. Everyone is curious. All of them — with the exception of children, maybe — seem to have a vague idea that we’re making yarn but it’s as if, when they see us, they struggle to recall some ancient ancestral memory of spindles and animal fiber from tens of thousands of years ago to help address the fact that they feel like they know what they’re seeing but can’t quite put all the pieces together for a finished answer. It isn’t so much that they don’t know what we’re doing but that they can’t believe people would actually do this. I mean, you can go down and buy yarn, for God’s sake.

By far the most fun questions come from children, and today a boy who seemed to be about nine or ten stuck by my side like glue, with his attention undivided, for at least twenty minutes. He was completely entranced by the wheel. He marched up and started off with, “what are you making?” When I explained he hopped from question to question without hesitation like leaping from rock to rock in a pond. What does the yarn come from? If it comes from animals, how do I get it off of them? Once it’s off of them, how do I get it to look like what I was holding in my hand? (Because he was smart enough to know that animals aren’t nearly that clean, obviously.) And once the questions about the actual material were exhausted he moved on to the wheel itself. How do I get it to rotate? Why was the thing on my wheel that was spinning fast spinning more slowly than the lady next to me? So if the difference in the speed is because of things like the size of the circle on the spinning thing, why would you use different sized circles? (This kid was sharp.)

At a certain point he ran out of questions. His sister had sidled up at some point but was a little more shy about asking things. There was no sign of their parents, I just assumed they were somewhere in the coffee shop. He felt the fiber I was spinning and commented on how soft it was. I asked him if he’d like to see a picture of the alpacas I had and his eyes opened wide and he nodded with a smile, so I pulled up the picture on my cellphone. “You have all the colors!” He said. “Except for brown,” he added.

When he ran out of questions he simply watched. He stood there, right at my elbow, simply watching me and the rest of the ladies there making yarn, absorbing how things worked. Occasionally he would ask another technical question about the wheel but for the most part he was silent and he just watched. It was a lovely zen moment that made me appreciate today’s kids even though I tend to rail on, a little absurdly sometimes, about how too many of them don’t get enough time away from the TV and video games these days.

Which is completely ironic since I actually make video games for a living. I participate in the very thing that tends to get blamed for all the ills of society these days, including the attention span this kid was supposed to be lacking (though for the record, like most game developers I believe all things should be in moderation). And that made the moment even sweeter because it was as if we were both taking time out to appreciate something a little simpler, and he was completely absorbed in something that pre-dated all the technological ADD-inducing advancements that are constantly competing for his diminishing attention span, something thousands of years old but that seemed utterly new to him. And suddenly made it feel new to me again.

So thanks, kid, for the fun afternoon, whoever you were.