Benign Hobby or Cult?

It's been a wonderfully busy weekend. Thursday night I got a call from one of my high school buddies and she asked if she could stay at my place because she was coming into town for a funeral of a family member. YES! She moved out of town shortly after college because of her husband's job and has been "home" a few times since. As with most long distance friendships we would write/email a lot for a while when she would come visit and then the contact would wain and soon it would be - "When was the last time you'd talked to Jan? The chance to catch up for a whole weekend was wonderful.

Friday night I spend doing a quite clean up of the house and especially guest room. Thank goodness I have the Friday knitting group because that helps keep the house in pretty good shape since I clean for it once a week!

Saturday her flight came in a bit after noon and we went out to Q Cumbers for a late lunch. It's a salad/bakery/yummy stuff buffet and I hadn't been there for years. The afternoon was spent chatting and then...

I got the whole gang - well 7 of us - together Saturday night and we all had a great visit. Alyson is part of the knitting group and brought some knitting along with her. At some point during the evening and after I had helped her with some dropped stitches my cousin commented on his worries about the knitting. He fears that it's gone from a benign hobby to a cult. I had admitted I had a sock in my purse for when Jan was trying on some clothes at a store earlier in the day. We've got our own language, Al couldn't just come and sit, she had to knit. Then when we Al and I) traded the light-up knitting needles because she wanted the pink ones I had, she said something about this being great because now she could knit at the movies. That started Cousin off again. He threatened one of my other friends (the guy that's learning to crochet). "If you ever start knitting at a party, I'm dragging you to a deprogrammer!"

Are we a cult? Certainly knitting does go beyond benign hobby for many people. We have our own language, we have our own prophets (Elizabeth Zimmermann and others). It affects our every waking hour at times while we decide how to give our money offerings to the merchants to get our idols (yarn and needles) so we can offer up more of our time to this belief in knitting. We spend hours on end on the computer reading other blogs, writing our own and browsing everything on Ravelry. Yeah, I think for some this is a cult. But I don't want to be deprogrammed. Not now. Not ever.

This evening my friend was picked up by her brother (he was out of town yesterday) so she'll be staying with him the next couple days for the funeral. Before he came we spent the day talking and talking. What a wonderful present of friendship this weekend was. I'm refreshed and ready for another week of work (maybe).