It Was Acceptable In The Eighties

The amount of cackling I was doing over what we once considered gorgeous drew attention one evening from my twenty-year-old son and his friends.  To my astonishment, they were wildly impressed in general, but specifically with jacket no 28 to the right below and my son launched a campaign to have me make him one.     

And as it happened, I had been knitting exactly one of these for his father while giving birth to his older brother and had stuck in a jagged graph line of my live perception of a labour pain in darkest black along the back to make a point I felt needed recording that night.  So I thought the pattern might be sufficiently etched on my brain to give it a try all these years later, but that yarn wasn't to be got anymore... and nothing I could see was going to work easily with that pattern... and creating my own seemed a bit of a reach... but eventually I made a very rough job of an approximation of what he wanted - and for good measure, a sweater for my son's life-long friend and my godson too.

... and it's a measure of what all-round nice guys they've grown up to be that they seemed to like them in spite of their manifold enormous flaws - very much in the spirit of knitting, and I can't think of a better wish for both of them that they hold onto their glass-half-full outlook in life and let nothing take that away from them!