The Blue Sweater

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.