Recently, I had begun to experience an intermittent technical difficulty with my cellphone, and then, on Sunday, the difficulty ceased to be intermittent.

I knew I needed to go in and get my phone fixed, but there were so many other things to do that I put it off until I no longer could, and since I already had a major errand to run today, I decided to tack on one more.

Knowing that I would be out of the house much of the day, I decided to take a smaller, more portable project than the animal afghan I have been working on, and settled on the Pocket Pal mouse I had recently unearthed as part of my finishing unfinished objects quest.

I came prepared to my appointment. While the technician ran a diagnostic test to determine what series of remedies she would try, I got out my Kindle, navigated my way to the pdf of the pattern I was using:

and got to work on the as-yet-unfinished mouse.

In under an hour, the technician had managed to do her magic, and I was once again able to hear incoming calls and texts, as well as the sound of the alarm that has been getting me up and out of bed for so much of my son’s high school career.

Happy that my phone was once again fully functional, I picked my mom up and took her along with me to Bean Traders (one of my all-time favorite coffee shops) where I gazed upon this pithy quote as I drank a triple macchiato to help me power through the rest of the day:

As I gazed on my Kindle and followed the directions for the remaining pieces of the mouse, I was reminded of an earlier time when my now 15-year-old son was much younger — every few weeks he would come home from school with the newspaper thin pages of the Scholastic Book order brochure.

I would read over the brochures carefully and then order some of his selections as well as some of mine. One of my more memorable choices was the Newberry Award winning book, The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo.

When the book arrived, I was thrilled.

I loved the cover art, and the enticing blurb in the Scholastic Book brochure had left me anxious to read the book to my son so that we could experience a memorable mother/son bonding moment to look back on in later years, and we did — just not in the way I expected.

To say that my son hated the book doesn’t quite capture his level of loathing. I read the first couple of paragraphs, and with each new sentence, his somewhat mild resistance became more firmly entrenched. When I could no longer hear myself read over his pleas for me to stop, I did.

I have yet to finish reading The Tale of Despereaux, but today while my son was at school and my mother was in series of rooms waiting to be seen by the doctor, I sat next to a window with Sally V. George’s pattern for Pocket Pals on my Kindle fashioning my own amigurumi Despereaux.

Once I got home I took all of the finished pieces:

and attached them where indicated in the pattern. Here is a view from the top:

and here is a view of Despereaux as he surveys his domain:

Sally V. George passed away in 1985, and her amazing and enchanting patterns are no longer readily available. This is, to my mind, incredibly sad; her pocket animals and forest friends are still unique among crochet designs, and it would be a shame to lose the visual vocabulary of joy these designs create.

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