Elizabeth and I were playing over at Donica's in her tree house. Donica very proudly demonstrated how clever she was in coming up with a way of unrolling toilet paper, pulling it through her fingers, that she had decided looked convincingly like knitting. I wasn't all that impressed, but I'd never seen anyone knitting in person, so I guessed it looked good enough. But how convincing could it be if you weren't even holding a pair of pretend knitting needles? She was very proud of herself, and far be it from me to take even a remote chance of hurting someone's feelings, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt and didn't say anything.
Since it was Donica's house, she got to decide what we were all going to play: House. Donica was the mommy (what else?), and I was the daddy (the only boy), and I guess Elizabeth was our baby (even though she was the oldest). Donica defined the scenario for our play-time with some sort of activity that involved herself and Elizabeth, but didn't really have a credible opening for me to get involved in the interaction. So she generously allowed me to rewind her roll of toilet paper and use it pretend to be knitting.
I wasn't sure if it was really OK for a guy to be knitting, but what else was there to do? Besides, knitting seemed like a grown-up kind of thing that I'd seen old ladies doing on our black-and-white TV. So I rewound the heaping stream of toilet paper back onto the cardboard roll and proceeded to run it through my fingers as best I could remember seeing Donica do it.
Apparently my powers of observation during the few seconds of Donica's earlier demonstration didn't measure up to her standards. "No, not like THAT!!" She snatched the roll out of my hands and proceeded to do what looked to me to be the exact same thing I had just done. "This is the way you do it!" she proclaimed.
Feelings hurt, I said I didn't want to play any more and ran home.
I'm not sure what knitting is, but it sure seems hard and confusing.
