There is a blue sleeveless sweater
in my dresser drawer. I have had it for
over half a century. It has a beautiful
design, but the color has faded, and the wool is frazzled. I don’t use it anymore, but once in a while,
I take it out, just to look at it, and remember the person who knitted it, my
mother.
I grew up in a small seaside town
called Puri on the Bay of Bengal, in India.
It never got too cold there, so all we needed in winter was either a
thin shawl or a sleeveless sweater. We
were five siblings in the house, the sixth one already out of the house in
Kolkata. Although my father was the
bread winner, it was my mother who was the glue that kept the family together. She did all the cooking using a coal burning
stove that had to be fired up each morning.
There was no refrigerator, so fresh food had to be cooked every
day. She worked hard all day, and yet
she was always pleasant. She was an
avid reader, who inspired us to read. She
loved music, played the harmonium, and taught my two sisters how to sing. She also spent a considerable amount of time
sewing and knitting. I was in the second
year of college in 1958, when she knitted this particular blue sweater for
me. I loved it, and used to wear it all
winter long.
I brought the sweater with me when
I came to the U.S. in 1966 to attend graduate school in New York City. I got my Ph.D, did a post-doctoral stint in
Germany, and came back in 1975 to do a second post-doc assignment at the University
of Missouri-Rolla. That is where I met my wife Semahat, a beautiful young woman
from Turkey, who had arrived the previous year in Rolla to do her M.S. degree
in Metallurgy. We got married in 1976 and moved to Pittsburgh in 1978, where
both of us started working for Westinghouse, I as a research scientist, and she
as a metallurgical engineer. Like many
other immigrant professionals, we became part of the American fabric with a
house in the suburb, two kids (a daughter and a son), and two cars. I kept using my blue sweater throughout that
time.
Now I am a retired old man. Kids live far away in Atlanta, although not
as far away as I was from my parents. My
wife of 38 years passed away suddenly in her sleep in 2014. As I kept thinking about her, I realized that
she had some of the same qualities that made my mother so special. May be
subconsciously, I was looking for a person with those qualities. She was a great cook, an avid reader, and a
knitter among many other things. She
knitted me a green, long sleeve turtleneck sweater suitable for Pittsburgh
weather, which I treasure. My blue
sweater is too old to wear any more, but I am still saving it as reminder of time
gone by, of a less complicated life that was carefree, happy, and peaceful.
