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At this very moment, young Emerson was 9 years, 37 weeks, 2 days, 11 hours, and 46 seconds old, and he had just learned how to knit backwards—that is, to tink. Entranced by his new-found knowledge, young Emerson tinked miles and miles of his grandmother's carefully knit stockinette sleeves and garter-stitch garters, amazed by his ability to transform flat fabric into simple string.
"Don't you want to learn how to make something and not take it apart?" young Emerson's grandmother asked. Young Emerson merely shook his head as he continued to uncreate her creations.
As he grew older, young Emerson taught himself to tink not only k and p stitches, but to also tink the knitting alphabet soup of k2togs, ssks, sl1-k2tog-psso, and the painful sl2-k1-psso. At 10 years, 2 weeks, 29 days, 48 minutes and 5 seconds of age, young Emerson knew he could now read knitted fabric for mistakes. As his grandmother knit from arcane instructions, young Emerson instructed her when her knitting turned to knots.
But though his grandmother enjoyed having a knit fixer by her side, one fateful day, young Emerson's fix-it skills were needed elsewhere. The facts were these: 1 day, 9 hours, 3 minutes and 39 seconds ago, the next-door neighbors uncovered the corpse of their precious pooch. The neighbors wanted to know why their dead dog clenched a knitting needle in his jaws and, more importantly, why he had been strangled by young Emerson's grandmother's favorite yarn.
To clear his grandmother's name, young Emerson took to the streets and questioned friends and foes, pursuing every dropped hint as relentlessly as he would a dropped stitch. He doggedly tracked the metaphorical scent of the canine killer to his grandmother's long-time knitting rival and neighbor, one Mrs. Nicole B. Knickerbocker. Fueled by spite and by the consuming desire to win the blue ribbon for best sweater at the next county fair, Mrs. Knickerbocker had cruelly and heartlessly murdered the happy neighborhood hound, stopping his breath and, ultimately, his heart with a skein of cherry red Red Heart yarn.
The heartbroken and shocked neighbors apologized to his grandmother and presented young Emerson with a shining silver dollar. As young Emerson clutched the coin in his sweaty fist, he felt a loosening in an unexamined seam of his soul, and he knew then where his destiny would lead him.
Young Emerson turned that night to his grandmother and asked her to teach him how to knit. His detective skills now honed to a needle-sharp point, young Emerson was free to create—to knit, and not to tink.