The Yarn Whisperer by Clara Parkes Page B

executive producer. “We’ve landed. Heading to baggage claim.”
    Back to reality, but all those nerves and butterflies were gone. I tackled the show and had a blast.
    When I got home, you can be sure I baked a celebratory pie—this one a glorious cherry creation with a woven lattice top. It wasn’t for visiting friends or family, or for that busload of stranded tourists down at the town hall. It was just for me—and it was, on both the outside
and
the inside, perfect.

PABLO CASALS, GRANDPA, AND ME

    FROM THE AGE of ten, cellist Pablo Casals began every day with a walk. Then he’d return home and perform two J. S. Bach preludes and fugues on the piano. “It fills me with an awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being,” he said in
Joys and Sorrows: Reflections by Pablo Casals as Told to Albert E. Kahn.
“Every morning of my life I see nature first, then I see Bach.”
    My paternal grandfather cut this quote out of a magazine and taped it to the downstairs china closet, right above his black rotary phone, partially obscuring the view of my grandma’s blue Royal Worcester breakfast set. It was directly across from a tiny powder room with red, white, and blue wallpaper dating back to the bicentennial. I passed that piece of paper for years before ever reading it, but the words have stayed with me.
    My grandpa was a disciplined man. Accomplished in his field, methodical to a fault. He ate the same lunch every day for forty years: one can of kippered herrings and two rye crackers that cost him “exactly twenty-seven cents” from the Navy commissary. (My mother refuses to acknowledge inflation when she tells the story. It was, and shall forever be, twenty-seven cents.) He wore the same few suits and ties until they were threadbare. One pair of L.L.Bean shoes kept him suitably shod for most of his retired life, just over nineteen years.
    Bach was his hero, and he had little tolerance for anything else. My father once played him a Puccini aria, and he snorted, “What’s
her
problem?” He didn’t have much patience for my own music, either, although I did try to introduce him to The Sugarcubes, not realizing that the album cover I kept showing him featured line drawings of naked people. Oops.
    My grandpa idolized Casals, a man he’d heard perform in Europe and whom he felt could genuinely interpret the mathematical beauty of Bach. I used to think my grandpa also held on to Casals’s words because they validated his own need for order, for the comfort of routine.
    In his work as a solar physicist, my grandpa changed our understanding of the sun’s ultraviolet spectrum. He was a scientist, his mind a sort of cell-based supercomputer able to process vast amounts of data. Taking leaps and trusting the unknown, those were completely foreign to his nature. Everything new had to be studied, evaluated, its merits and pitfalls dissected, poked, and prodded to within an inch of its life. He didn’t get elected to the National Academy of Sciences for wavinghis hands in the air and saying, “Oh hell, let’s give it a go and see what happens.”
    As an impetuous teenager, this drove me nuts. Who
cares
which air conditioner we get? They’re all going to break in a few years anyway. But my grandpa knew that if he crunched the data, he’d be able to figure out which machine really was the best. Toward that end,
Consumer Reports
magazines were always on the dining-room table. Appliance salesmen who knew him rolled their eyes when they saw him coming.
    One summer was dedicated to the question of whether or not my grandparents should replace the refrigerator on the porch. It was an ancient machine with a round condenser on the top and a heavy door that clicked when it opened and closed. It never kept the ice cream quite cold enough. But was it the freezer’s fault? My grandpa had discovered