Posted on 01/16/2004 12:45:43 PM PST by the_devils_advocate_666
What's wrong with this picture?
A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. She is reading a book, he is knitting.
If you said, ''Men don't knit, women do,'' that's not the right answer. Actually, there is nothing wrong with the picture.
More men are knitting today, including many whose names you will recognize -- such as Roosevelt ''Rosey'' Grier, a former star tackle with the New York Giants pro football team and the Los Angeles Rams; actors Russell Crowe and David Arquette, and Robert Gottlieb, former editor of The New Yorker magazine.
Knitting can also be an aid to your prayer life, some women have found. A few years ago, Chris Pokorny started a knitting/crocheting/sewing ministry at her church, the Edgebrook Evangelic knits hats, scarves, mittens, baby clothes, and other warm things for the needy.
''Every once in a while I will see somebody on the street wearing a hat or scarf that I made,'' Pokorny says. ''It makes me warm all over.''
''The only rule we have,'' Pokorny adds, ''is that we must pray for the person who will receive the item we are working on.''
Not many teenagers knit but it might be good if they did. Young people need to slow down and relax more. But boys are apt to consider knitting sissified.
They ought to meet Grier, the 300-pound, 6-foot-6-inch ex-pro football player of the 1950s and '60s.
Grier was the one who played the memorable role of subduing Sirhan Sirhan on the night of Robert Kennedy's assassination in Los Angeles in 1968.
In addition to his autobiography, ''Rosey: An Autobiography: The Gentle Giant'' (Honor Books, 1986), he wrote ''Rosey Grier's Needlepoint for Men'' (Walker Co, 1973). (Needlepoint is a cousin to knitting and crocheting.) Photographs of Rosey doing needlepoint appeared in the New York Times, on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post and on the centerfold of Look magazine.
And nobody would call Grier a sissy. Before Grier became a born-again Christian he had a ''roving eye and a yen for beautiful women.'' That's why, he said, he got into needlepoint. ''It was a handy device for striking up conversations with girls,'' he said.
Boys and young men, take note.
For the rest of us, knitting, needlepoint and crocheting can be a way of not only improving our prayer life and our social life but eliminating the pressures and stresses of 21st-century living. Knit one, purl two.
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