RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32967, 13 July 1972, Page 9

RANDOM REMINDER

PONCHO LINE Professors and plumbers are regarded as the comically forgetful people, but they do not have the field to themselves. A Sumner woman had a call from a friend one evening. Next day, the friend telephoned to ask if she had left her knitting behind. Her hostess searched, unsuccessfully. The knitting lady then checked out a couple of other houses she had visited in the previous day or two, again without success. But she was nothing if not determined, and she tracked back her movements, for she had arrived in Christchurch after a

visit to the North Island. Her investigations, by telephone and mail, took in the New Zealand Railways Department and the Aramoana, an aunt in Nelson, a motel in Palmerston North, a tea-rooms on the West Coast. But no-one had picked up her dropped stitches.

Months later, her Sumner friend was about to shift house. So she telephoned again, asking whether the knitting had been unearthed in the house removal process. Again no luck. Months later again — half a year, in fact, after she had reported her loss

over a considerable area of New Zealand, she had forgotten, at last, about her loss.

It was the end of the summer, and she was busy packing away her daughters’ lightweight pyjamas and bringing out the winter ones. From the top shelf of a cupboard, she was enveloped by a poncho. Then, and only then, she remembered that she had taken a sharp dislike to the pattern she had been knitting, and had converted the material into this Spanish-style garment for one of the girls.