For Better or Worsted Read Online Free PDF Page A

still shut when I left for work.
    For me, at least, life went on, and I had to get to Shedd & Royal Books and More. It was a short drive from my house to downtown Tarzana. I was about to turn into the parking lot when I saw a cop car pulled to the curb with its doors open, along with a throng of people on the sidewalk. Everyone was looking up and pointing.
    Someone had gotten the idea that all the San Fernando communities along Ventura Boulevard ought to have some kind of decoration to set them apart. Tarzana, due to the Tarzan connection, had gotten the Safari Walk. What it amounted to were some metal cutouts of jungle animals hanging from the light posts, an occasional topiary of a giraffe or elephant, and something they had the audacity to call mini parks. There were no trees or grass or even space, just a block of sidewalk replaced with red brick and one or two boulders.
    The heavyset cop and the others were staring at a light post. I didn’t get it at first, but then I saw the metal cutout of a monkey hanging above the street sign and something else about it. It was now attired in some kind of striped jacket.
    I parked the car and came around to the street to join the crowd.
    “What’s going on?” I said. Someone in the group said there’d been a yarn bombing.
    “Yarn bombing?” I said. The woman pointed to the little jacket, which hardly looked dangerous.
    “It’s like guerrilla crochet,” another woman in the crowd explained.
    “Gorilla?” a man asked, pointing at the metal form hanging from the light post. “It looks like a monkey to me.” The woman who’d done the explaining, rolled her eyes at the man and spelled out
guerrilla
for him. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.
    “It’s supposed to be a surprise splash of color and something soft and handmade,” the woman said. “I’ve seen street signs covered, mailboxes, even a car. But that was all somewhere else. This is the first time I’ve seen it around here.”
    “It looks harmless enough to me,” I said.
    “It’s like yarn graffiti,” a man in the group said.
    “I like to think they’re random acts of whimsy,” a white-haired woman in a red dress said.
    “However you want to describe it,” the cop said in a grumpy tone. “It’s illegal.” He asked if any of them had access to a ladder. The white-haired woman leaned in close.
    “One thing is strange. Most of what I’ve heard of has been knit, but that looks like crochet.”
    Something went off in my mind like a bomb. I knew somebody who was always trying to champion crochet. But how far would she go? By now the cop had gotten a ladder from one of the stores and leaned it against the light pole. It didn’t look that stable, and the cop didn’t look like he really wanted to be climbing it. Finally, he reached the monkey and stripped it of its jacket and threw it into the crowd. I caught it. Yup, it was crochet all right. I stuffed it in my pocket and went toward the bookstore.
    The Santa Ana wind had died down to a breeze, but the air still felt silky and dry. It was too hot to think about sweaters, even for a metal monkey. Who would figure that September would be one of the hottest months of the year? But the Santa Anas were like a hot breath blowing in from the desert, and it was the one time when the city side of the Santa Monica mountains lost their sea breeze, leaving it to roast along with us.
    Though the temperature still felt like summer, the bookstore window was all done up for Halloween and fall. There were piles of paper leaves and a display of spooky books. The entrance had been decked out for harvesttime and Halloween. A pile of pumpkins and gourds topped a small stack of bales of hay. The front tables held Halloween paper goods and fancy candy in the shape of bats and witches. More and more, the bookstore was turning into an everything store, set up with little boutique stations like the serenity table with its books on Zen, candles of all sorts,