photo #9181101

In Australia, a man named Alfie Date moved into a retirement home at the age of 109. About 12 hours after he arrived, two of the nurses came to his room and asked if he could knit. He could, he’d been at it since 1932. They told him about a program asking volunteers to knit tiny woolen sweaters for an endangered species called Little Penguins. The sweaters stop oil-covered birds from cleaning themselves with their beaks during a spill, because the oil is toxic if they swallow it. Alfie said yes. He spent his last two years knitting hundreds of them. He was lost in 2016, at 110.