The Red Hat

 

                I spent part of Saturday at a meeting to discuss what we can do about the chronically homeless in our community—providers and activists together, with cookies, pizza, and carrot sticks, thinking about what has been tried, what are serious barriers, and how much anyone has left to throw into this effort. Everyone in the room is already at 110%, and the experts working directly with the people on the streets are even higher. Even so, being in the room thinking about how to give face and voice to the people sleeping out in January, moving them from data points to human beings in the eyes of the broader community, was healing. After the meeting, I stood in the parking lot, listening to the new moral dilemma: do we house a person who has been a refugee in the U.S. for many years and who has a criminal record? Doing so many soon put the entire shelter operation and the church sponsoring the mircoshelter in legal jeopardy.  How do we answer this question? More lives are at stake than our own.  Deep sighs…”And on that cheerful note,” we both said simultaneously, “I will see you soon.”

                I wandered home thinking about these huge issues. And there, on my doorstep, was a small box. I took it inside, opened it up, and found a beautifully knit red cap—the design that was used in Denmark, during WWII to indicate resistance to the Nazi occupations. It was made by an old student who practiced her knitting skills during class 20 years ago this winter. I put it on and went for a walk. It is warm. It is bright. It is beautiful.

                That evening, it was sitting in the living room next to the gnome I had just finished. An anti-fascist gnome (or person) from Oregon, I thought, would also wear a hand-knit wooly sweater. So I made an anti-fascist gnome, complete with hat and sweater, because, sometimes, as Mrs Who observed in A Wrinkle in Time, “the only way to deal with something deadly serious is to treat it a little lightly.”