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''He's always on his cell phone,'' said Andrew Sollinger, a friend. ''He's a
big-hearted operator.''
Ms. Merlis, 32, a former lawyer, quit her job in 1997 to purchase YarnCo with
her college roommate. Now, Ms. Merlis spends her days surrounded by yarn as
colorful as billiard balls -- and by women. YarnCo is a cross between a
maternity ward and a cafe. The customers, many expectant mothers, spend hours
knitting together at a farmhouse table, their needles clacking like manual
typewriters.
In November, Mr. Jacobs, whose blind dates are about as numerous as the
Grateful Dead concerts he has attended (175), walked into YarnCo and asked,
''Who's Jordana?''
She remembered: ''He was this really friendly guy who seemed to be interested
in what we were doing. He was asking a lot of questions about knitting and about
me. He was very, very chatty.''
As they spoke, he admired her lack of makeup, knowledge of Knicks players and
reluctance to go out with him on a date. (She had a boyfriend at the time.)
''She's not a girl's girl,'' Mr. Jacobs said. ''She's a guy's girl. She's not
much of a skirt-wearer. She's tough. She's physical.''
Soon Mr. Jacobs became a YarnCo regular on Saturday mornings, schmoozing with
everyone from grandmothers visiting from Oklahoma to stylish students copying
sweaters they'd seen at Barneys -- and trying to convince Ms. Merlis to date
him.
''He'd bring his newspaper and coffee and pull up a stool next to me at the
cash register and just sit there,'' she recalled. After a few months, she told
him ''If you're going to sit here, you have to learn to knit.''
For some ''guy's guys'' that might have been that. But he took up knitting.
In May, Ms. Merlis agreed to go to a Knicks game with him, and then a few nights
later, to a movie. As he recalled, she knitted from the beginning of the film to
the end producing a scarf the length of a boa constrictor, which amazed him.
Five weeks later, the couple took a trip together to Sun Valley, Idaho,
white-river rafting, hiking and knitting together. On that trip, both decided
(without saying so) that they wanted to marry each other.
On March 16, they returned to Sun Valley to marry on the deck of the
Roundhouse Restaurant atop Bald Mountain, surrounded by 39 guests, most of them
in ski boots. The bride wore a puffy white jacket, black ski pants and blue
rectangular glasses like those Kate Hudson wore in ''Almost Famous.'' Mr. Jacobs
arrived in black snowboarding pants, a tuxedo shirt, a bow tie, a Grateful Dead
belt and a black cap (knitted by Ms. Merlis).
Friends say Mr. Jacobs has changed. In his free time, he knits delicate baby
hats, which sell at YarnCo, where he has become a matchmaker for the women at
the farmhouse table. ''One day, Jeff was here and he said, 'Who wants to be set
up with one of my single friends?' '' Ms. Merlis recalled. ''He was raffling off
men, giving out their phone numbers.''
But in the fall of 1999, another friend told Mr. Jacobs about Jordana
Beth Merlis, a die-hard fan of knitting. ''We were talking about the woes of
being single men in the city,'' Mr. Jacobs recalled. ''I wanted to find someone
athletic and smart and funny and down to earth. My friend's response was 'I know
the perfect girl.' He said, 'Her name is Jordana and she owns the YarnCo, so
just go into the store and ask her out.' I was like: 'Yeah, I'll have occasion
to go into a yarn store. Thanks a lot.' ''
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