Sweater Love

Here's the thing: I'm allergic to wool

London, Ontario. 1991-ish. I walked out of my boyfriend Patrick’s apartment wearing his Irish fisherman’s sweater over a black turtleneck and jeans. He didn’t notice what I wore until we were well on our way to St. Peter’s Cathedral. He was Roman Catholic, while I was nothing in particular beyond vaguely Christian because my heritage rolled that way—towards Rome—versus further east towards Mecca or Lhasa or beyond.

We went to the Catholic cathedral together, but I didn’t take communion on account I’d never been baptized. One draw was the choir—truly spectacular. Good church music has always touched my soul, touches it still, as does the ritual of Mass itself. The ritual succeeds for me despite the flawed men who lead it from the altar. It’s the rituals that hold me back from adopting the philosophy of radical atheists who blame the world’s problems on religion rather than the men who exploit the people looking for something to believe in; people seeking to make sense of the nonsensical, uncontrollable, unpredictable wild world in which we must survive as social creatures, and must also live with ourselves: nonsensical, unpredictable, wild individuals prone to self-destruction.

After Mass we’d go across the street to the Richmond Café, which served the best pain au chocolat around. We drank French roast and indulged in fancy pastries we couldn’t really afford because we were grad students, who would have been better off cooking omelettes at home, nutritionally and budgetarily speaking, but our souls called out for Latin and croissants because their connecting power beat cooking eggs under the crappy lighting in his crappy apartment with its tissue walls and electric stove with just two functioning elements that burned the bottom of the omelettes.

Drinking real coffee from an espresso machine rather than the stuff from his Mr. Coffee, overlooking the cathedral and its manicured gardens, pastry flaking onto my new sweater—I mean his sweater—I felt confident in the future. I pictured myself wearing it in France one day, on the coast of Normandy someday, the two of us eating galettes and drinking calvados, a moody mist lowering over the English Channel.

That sweater outlasted the boyfriend. I kept it for another ten years, but lost it long before I ever made it to the beaches of Normandy. My mother carefully washed a coffee stain out of it once, after I’d worn it while riding in another man’s VW Rabbit, holding a Tim Horton’s double double when the driver shifted from 1st to 2nd gear, jolting me a little, causing the coffee to slosh through the sippy hole in the cup’s lid onto my chest.

Here’s the thing: I’m allergic to wool. My skin itches all over from direct contact with it. But that sweater looked so good on me I layered up with long-sleeved turtlenecks and lived with whatever itches penetrated to my skin.

Why? Maybe because it raised my faith in my own better days to come with better men, better apartments, better jobs, and a better self who didn’t need a man’s sweater to move through the world anymore.

Before I absconded with his sweater, Patrick took me home to meet his parents in Sault Ste. Marie, where we went to church with his mother. His father stayed home. At one point I glanced at her and noted her closed eyes, hands in prayer position, praying hard, sincerely, a faint smile on her lips, and a glow emanating from her earnest, open face turned upward toward sunlight pouring in from a stained-glass window devoted to some saint or another. Those closed eyes, upturned face, and that glow.

In that moment, I regretted my parents hadn’t raised me in The Church. Surely they could have mitigated the negative and accentuated the positive? But they saw no positives in religion. Their spiritual lives were bleak.

Patrick’s mother’s face in the morning light of a church in the hinterland said more to me about the presence of God than some priest ever could. My parents would think her simple, perhaps even weak. What foolishness.

She gifted me with a silk scarf I still have today. Such kindness. Too bad her son wasn’t right for me. His addictions made me nervous. She may have prayed for freedom from those. She may have prayed I’d be the reason for their end.

But I flew away with my sweater and scarf, carrying the people with me in spirit.

That’s it for this week. I hope you’re well, happy, and loved.

P.S. This is a cotton sweater from L.L. Bean that closely resembles Patrick’s old wool sweater. The scarf is the one his mom gave me.

P.P.S. Please feed the algorithm a 🩷. It gets cranky when it’s hungry. Much obliged.