Update: I got the approval! My sincere thanks to the OCF Board and the Craft Inventory crew for maintaining this opportunity.
I'm waiting to hear if my OCF logo items were approved. I keep telling myself to be patient and have trust, and have faith in my clear self-expression, but darn if I am not anxious about it. I had a "grandfathered" logo item, which is what you get if you are approved for at least five years. You still have to apply each year, but you are not judged, unless I suppose the quality of your work shows significant decline. I decided to stop making the silk scarves and flags I had been making.
They never did sell very well, and I had to make the price artificially low to get any interest in them. They were gorgeous, no doubt about that, but the many processes to get them to be that way were fraught with ways to ruin them, and they didn't like being taken to the dusty woods and hung in the sun. I never mastered the display or the packaging, and when I broke my foot the same year as I secured a big printing contract in April, I didn't make any new ones. I didn't make any new ones last year either, and I felt that was really a breach of my contract. A logo item is supposed to be something precious. Since mine were dated, it was right there that none said 2013. When I finally admitted that none were going to say 2014, I knew it was over.
I'm generally bad at letting go, but I think I will be able to handle this. I can always bring them back and re-jury them. My major plan of shifting from clothing to silk seems impractical. Sure, silkscreened silk is fairly unusual and luscious and wearable, but silk is expensive, has to be imported from China, and is quite difficult to work with. Pricing them to reflect the work is a huge challenge.
But I still want to get out of the fashion clothing business. It's going to take awhile. Instead of trying to make it with silk, I turned to the items I already make, that do sell. My hats are solid as a product, and I think I will be able to continue with them indefinitely, within my physical limitations. I enjoy them, my customers enjoy them, and although they are a commercial hat that I decorate, I buy great quality hats, use plenty of artistry in the decoration, and am working on some ideas that will involve more handwork.
My tote bags are the same. I search out and buy really good quality bags. I keep the price down a bit too low to make the kind of profit a businessperson is supposed to, but working for two cents an hour has never bothered me. I am the boss, and I take lots of breaks and take bike rides when I want. I put a lot into the decorating, making the art and screens, doing all the printing myself, and trying to make beautiful complex designs that people will love. In the craft of screenprinting, the t-shirt or tote bag is considered a blank canvas, and the item significantly transformed by the work. My bags definitely meet this standard.
I also, just to be clear, pack them up and haul them to the blocks every Saturday, and dry them out when they get wet, give them away when they get ruined, and figure out ways to keep them in top quality until they sell. A person gets a lot for their $10 when they buy one of my bags, and people love the more expensive versions too. (I charge more for the ones I dye, and for the more expensive styles.)
So in preparation for my latest shift, I went to my extensive collection of OCF logos and made one the right size, with the right areas for ink and no ink, essentially re-drawing the logo to suit my purposes. I kept it as accurate as possible. I made two screens, different sizes (I would charge a customer $50 for that.) I ordered a lot of different bag samples, to see what was really out there for me to use. I printed up five, chose four for the jurying, labeled them, filled out the form, paid my $10 fee. So just for the chance to put them before the decision-makers, I invested at least $100 worth of work. Not a problem.
I would imagine all the people who make logo items go through this process. You can't jury an idea, and thank goodness, it isn't about name recognition or how much you pay the Fair or help the Fair. It is a simple voting evaluation process, done by the Board and organized by the Craft Inventory crew.
It has taken a lot of years to get the process right, and it seems pretty fair the way it is currently being done. However, unless the Board member has a working knowledge of a lot of crafts, they might not know just what they are evaluating.
I'm scared because what I submitted looks like a simple, commercial tote bag with a simple print of a very familiar icon. Nothing about it says years of dedication or dollars of investment. I thought a lot about making a multicolor, splashy logo print, but I didn't do it for two reasons. One, that would really be a lot of effort for a speculative end, and it would still likely look like a simple product, because in the age of computers, we have seen that logo in every kind of multicolored glory. The Elders wanted a t-shirt made, but they wanted a multicolor peach with a green leaf, etc., and I just can't print something like what you see on a computer or on a letterhead. People's expectations have passed beyond what can be screenprinted by hand.
I have to print each color of ink with a squeegee that I hold in both hands, and to use the kind of waterbase ink I use, I have to do it rather quickly, and if I am doing more than one color I have to do it even more quickly, and tote bags are hard to print on because they are so textured, and I have found that I really can't be all that ambitious within the craft. At least not on a $10 tote. So to think of doing many dozens of multicolored fancy logos between mid-April and July, not to mention making the investment in the bags, dyeing them, sewing the ones that rip during the dyeing, printing them with my old arms and back, I have limits. I knew if I wowed the Board with a fancy print, I would not be able to deliver the quantity of them needed, at least this year. Not handmade ones anyway.
And the thing that bothers me the most about it all is not whether or not I get approved and get to make the bags, simple or complex, or who is evaluating me and what they know or see, or whether what I make will sell or whether I will make enough of them, or whether or not the bag market will be over-saturated or still be a good one. What really bothers me is that it is indeed possible to make and sell a complex, multicolored bag of great beauty, through the processes of direct print or heat transfers. These, to avoid a lengthy explanation, are not really hand-done processes. Direct print is done by a computer right onto the bag. Looks beautiful. Transfers are printed by machines on paper and then glued to the bag with heat. Plastic ink, plastic print, low durability, not significant handwork. Not handmade products. But customers think they are.
And those products are being sold at OCF and elsewhere, and being passed off as handmade products. Technology came and offered a way, and people took it. Several very popular artists I could name, but won't, use the transfers and the direct prints to make garments, and yes, to make tote bags. This might shock you, but you have bought these things at Saturday Market and at the OCF, and they were wonderful, and you loved them. I loved them. The totes with the birds and the beautiful peaches on them were lovely. They sold like hotcakes. The hoodies with the patches on the back, the commemorative shirts, the many many dozens and hundreds of event items that were in such high demand, were not handmade.
Yes, they were designed by wonderful and talented artists whom we like or even love, and they made a lot of people feel good on both sides of the transaction. The designs started out as art. They still appear to be art. They just aren't really craft, and the people who order them and take them out of the boxes aren't really craftspeople.
So there is one part of this dilemma. All of the Board members judging my crafts have seen these commercially made and decorated products offered by the Fair and they proudly use them and display them, and their expectation of what a tote bag can look like and the price it can demand are adjusted to fit that reality. My offering pales in comparison. I can't compete. And I shouldn't have to.
I get that the Fair, like any event, would not be sensible if it did not offer event merchandise to the willing public. Having this be in the Fair's budgetary control through the commemorative products is sensible and practical. Craftspeople have a hard time making enough things to satisfy that kind of demand, and we might just fail to do so, not bring enough shirts or bags or water bottles or whatever the public needed and was willing to buy. When the volume of official OCF items started to become apparent, I, as someone trying to sell t-shirts, felt pretty defensive. I didn't want to be petty, but my immediate thought was that I was paying a lot to be competed with in this way. I grew to believe that there was room for it, that there were enough people willing to buy things that it was kind of a fine detail that some of them weren't hand-crafted.
I've grown less willing to excuse it. If my logo bags are approved, I will at least feel that I have a fighting chance of survival selling them, since people really do enjoy buying from a real craftsperson. They enjoy feeling the connection, and being a part of that vital relationship, so I have that edge the official stuff will never have. It becomes murky when the commemoratives are the designs of a really popular artist, but I think that ship has sailed far and wide in the last few years. Those things sell. The Fair makes money. Everyone thinks they are buying a handmade item with that popular artist's work on it. Everyone is happy about it but curmudgeons like me, and of course we are partly just jealous. Because we can't compete. And we don't want to.
One thing I love about Saturday Market is that we do not compete. We all get the same 8x8, and we all pay the same $10 plus 10%. We make or break it through the ways we are individuals, and it is very direct. It is what is called a *level playing field.*
Saturday Market does sell tote bags, at cost, as a courtesy to customers, but they are printed by a member. (Yes, it is me.) OCF has made the effort in the last two years to have the staff shirts printed by members, and I applaud them loudly for that. It is a huge change and probably a lot more trouble and expense, but it makes me feel so much more valued and trusting. I don't know where the commemoratives are produced and there may indeed be some hand-crafted items among them, but having them be handcrafted is one shift I would like to see. Offering commercially made items to the public with one hand and trying to promote and restrict selling everything else to craftspeople is a tricky balancing act and it doesn't feel good. It's even hard to see things like the wonderful printed rayon peaches strung out from Odyssey. Those look handmade, but I don't think any Fair artist who works in printed and handpainted rayon made them. I love them, but I hate them too.
This offering of commercial goods has contributed to the erosion we've all noticed in what is being sold. It has made the atmosphere more welcoming of commercially made items, has made some craftspeople resentful and defiant, and I think we can do better. It might mean the Fair makes less money. It's not a small question to consider. It's in line with the small factory issue currently being addressed by Craft Inventory and Craft Committee. They seem okay, until you think about how they change the marketplace for the real hand-crafting artisan.
I'm certainly not going to be impolite if my items are not approved. Jurying is hard and I hate it and am so very grateful to have the grandmothered status that I do. I'm well aware that my goods wouldn't get into any of the high-end craft Fairs I used to do. The Fair keeps me alive and I do love it and I recognize how difficult it is to have coherent and consistent policies and practices. I don't expect perfection. I do want to keep going in the right direction.
I've said before that being this age (I'm about to turn 64 and the Fair and Market are both 45) brings a refinement stage. Those things that bother us become intolerable, or we learn to get more coherent excuses, or we change our behaviors to line up with our convictions. I want to keep making and selling at OCF, and keep myself alive and committed. I want to be honored and valued for what I do, and kept alive.
I want the same for my organizations. I'm willing to work for it. If I don't succeed in getting what I want (the logo approval) I'll be gracious. If I do, I'll do my best to walk the line of practical, sustainable, and beautiful effort. I'll probably make that multicolored peach in some do-able fashion. I'm very grateful to be here right now, a part of so many amazing efforts by so many exceptional people. I don't want to have any ugly confrontations or even any ugly thoughts.
I just want us all to keep going in what I see as the right direction. It sounds simpler than it is. It's a long walk, and this is a long post. I have to go. It's time for Jeopardy. Thank you for all you do. Thank you for listening.
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
Sunday, April 6, 2014
That was Too Much!
Opening Day of our beloved Saturday Market was yesterday, not too wet, not too cold, and my sales were great! Right on my last year's average, which is an excellent start, and gets me going. I haven't really made any money this winter...lived off savings, felt the luxury of not working for money. Got to focus on my Jell-O Art adventures, my writing, my other needed areas of improvement. It was time to refocus, and I am glad to be back doing retail, despite the difficulties.
I felt especially vulnerable yesterday, and especially tired last night. The emotional openness I bring downtown can be exhausting, and it's pretty hard to protect myself from it. People really need to tell their stories. One word of empathy leads to the next, more horrifying story, as we all figure out how to re-establish our intimacy as well as our boundaries.
I am really so grateful for every sale, every dollar, every word of appreciation, that it gets in the way of business. I am surprised someone wants to really buy, impressed with their decisiveness, and that they would choose me, and my goods, to spend their dollars upon. People actually make a point of coming to support me, and not just me, and it brings tears to my eyes, often. If I don't cry a little on a Market Day, it is an uneventful one.
I got big hugs, ones that conveyed deep heart stuff. I got compassionate listeners. I got frozen out by people who used to like me, drawn in by people I have nearly ignored. I was chosen and passed over. One woman found one thing in the booth she liked, a mirror made by a fellow vendor. Nothing of mine. I got three custom jobs, two of which I had tried to say no to, and am glad I didn't succeed in driving them away. Some of my acquaintances were friendlier, some I missed even saying hi to. I'm sure I breezed past quite a few people who thought I was a snob, or maybe they could tell I was hurrying to get back to my booth. I couldn't shop until after three, and by then the farmers were leaving and I was too tired to want anything.
Whatever is going on with my body, food allergies or hayfever, or something, was a problem but not an insoluble one. I love supporting the food vendors and I dearly wanted to, but most everything included cheese or milk, and I knew it would be a mistake to test that one. Dave kindly fed me spinach, avocado, ham and strawberries, and that got me home, where I had squirrelled away sorbet and things I could eat. A great number of my fellow vendors share these food issues, as it turns out, and they bring their own food, something I have to get more in the habit of. My habit has been to run over and get my faves from the various food booths, or the farmers, and I love so much bringing home cake or fried fish to heat up, a treat and reward for my hard work. I have to change habits, at least until I get a handle on this. It will be okay.
The biking and lifting were harder than they used to be, but I can still do them. I felt weak. I got worried about next month, when Tuesday Market starts, and the obvious future in the long term, but that is just the ongoing challenge of age, of trying not to focus on fears but preparations and adaptation. Lighter loads have to happen, and they will as the weather improves. Everything will work, as it always has, and my job is to relax and take it all in stride.
Sad, distressing, and unexpected things happen, here, there, and every single day. They will be manageable if my attitude is manageable. My expectations have to be in line with what is presenting itself. I can do these things. I'll put a few more things about self-preservation on my list for next week. Like a scarf. I forgot to take a scarf. It would actually have made a big difference.
Time to have my weekly chat with Mom so I'll close. Maybe I'll come back and post photos, if I don't take a nap. I need a nap.
I felt especially vulnerable yesterday, and especially tired last night. The emotional openness I bring downtown can be exhausting, and it's pretty hard to protect myself from it. People really need to tell their stories. One word of empathy leads to the next, more horrifying story, as we all figure out how to re-establish our intimacy as well as our boundaries.
I am really so grateful for every sale, every dollar, every word of appreciation, that it gets in the way of business. I am surprised someone wants to really buy, impressed with their decisiveness, and that they would choose me, and my goods, to spend their dollars upon. People actually make a point of coming to support me, and not just me, and it brings tears to my eyes, often. If I don't cry a little on a Market Day, it is an uneventful one.
I got big hugs, ones that conveyed deep heart stuff. I got compassionate listeners. I got frozen out by people who used to like me, drawn in by people I have nearly ignored. I was chosen and passed over. One woman found one thing in the booth she liked, a mirror made by a fellow vendor. Nothing of mine. I got three custom jobs, two of which I had tried to say no to, and am glad I didn't succeed in driving them away. Some of my acquaintances were friendlier, some I missed even saying hi to. I'm sure I breezed past quite a few people who thought I was a snob, or maybe they could tell I was hurrying to get back to my booth. I couldn't shop until after three, and by then the farmers were leaving and I was too tired to want anything.
Whatever is going on with my body, food allergies or hayfever, or something, was a problem but not an insoluble one. I love supporting the food vendors and I dearly wanted to, but most everything included cheese or milk, and I knew it would be a mistake to test that one. Dave kindly fed me spinach, avocado, ham and strawberries, and that got me home, where I had squirrelled away sorbet and things I could eat. A great number of my fellow vendors share these food issues, as it turns out, and they bring their own food, something I have to get more in the habit of. My habit has been to run over and get my faves from the various food booths, or the farmers, and I love so much bringing home cake or fried fish to heat up, a treat and reward for my hard work. I have to change habits, at least until I get a handle on this. It will be okay.
The biking and lifting were harder than they used to be, but I can still do them. I felt weak. I got worried about next month, when Tuesday Market starts, and the obvious future in the long term, but that is just the ongoing challenge of age, of trying not to focus on fears but preparations and adaptation. Lighter loads have to happen, and they will as the weather improves. Everything will work, as it always has, and my job is to relax and take it all in stride.
Sad, distressing, and unexpected things happen, here, there, and every single day. They will be manageable if my attitude is manageable. My expectations have to be in line with what is presenting itself. I can do these things. I'll put a few more things about self-preservation on my list for next week. Like a scarf. I forgot to take a scarf. It would actually have made a big difference.
Time to have my weekly chat with Mom so I'll close. Maybe I'll come back and post photos, if I don't take a nap. I need a nap.
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Observing Changes
This is a heady time for me, with a lot of things in the air, a lot of personal risk, but a calm center somehow. Of course Spring, the hopeful season, is here, and the Saturday Market will open very soon in response. Many of us are really ready for that. I have made almost no money all winter (Jell-O Art is a full-time job), so am really ready for some retail. It's not that I haven't been working, just not so much in my shirt shop. Though I made Jell-O shirts! (And Babes with Axes, thank you, thank you.)
A few years ago I noticed that the maple tree I can see from my kitchen goes through a pink flush when the buds appear with the leaves inside. It's subtle, and the first year I noticed it I was astonished, as I have been looking out that window for many years. This year it lasted for over a week, here and there on the tree at first, and then quite evident, but not so much when the sky was cloudy, gloriously against the intense blue we had for several days last week. Every time I go outside I notice things that I have not remarked upon to myself, even though I must have seen them in passing for years, even decades. I think this close observation developed from my house research, as I have learned to look at the physical presentation of something, a house or a person, or a news article or an object, and try to see the story behind it. It's a deep observation that is gratifying, and I'm happy to be developing it, even though it makes me sad for all the things I have missed before. When it comes to people, I've been extremely saddened by the deaths of people I really should have paid more attention to, in a more focused and personal way, and that is a particularly important lesson in being here, now, and alert. I hope I learn it well.What was I so afraid of? It seems so trivial.
I've been doing a lot of business writing in my roles with OCF and the Market, which I enjoy but also makes me nervous sometimes. I've observed that close scrutiny has worked for me here, too. The minutes-taking is so very detail-oriented, even when I am supported by the voice recorder, and it can be crucial that the intent of words be transmitted as well as the words. It's really a skill-set that goes way beyond spelling and grammar, and it also is satisfying to be able to serve my organizational families in this way, but there is the risk part too. I can't make up or reveal intent that I might see but is not really in the words; I can't use my knowledge of the person or outside factors that weren't actually stated at the meetings. It can be really hard to just stick to the slippery type of facts in discussions. Even when things are said with conviction, they may not be factual, and I can misinterpret just as quickly as the next person. Some things are crucial, although most are not, and all of the minutes are reviewed by the groups before being adopted into the public record, but still, they have to be right.
I don't feel that as pressure most times, though I do get overly conscientious and pedantic about some things. I like motions to be in formal language, and I dislike using people's names, not wanting to set anyone up to be a target for something they said in a semi-public meeting. People say the most shocking things as jokes, and I have to know when they are kidding. It's usually not that difficult, but I get frustrated with too much flippancy. Anger and confrontation, of course, really derail the meetings, and damage everyone there. When those come up, everyone thinks about quitting and never attending another meeting.
There's one kind of knotty aspect I worry about: the recordings. They are actually not the public record, as only the approved minutes are. The recordings should probably be discarded, although back when we used the little cassettes we saved them all, and occasionally someone had the need to listen to the original discussions for some fine point. Lots of fine points are left out of the minutes, as well as who expressed them, so there is some value in the original recordings, and I also take detailed notes which often include names, but those are also my interpretations. So the recordings are valuable, but again, I don't want to be a party to making anyone a target. Interesting that when I listen to the recordings, if there is anger or confrontation, it is never as shocking as it was when I was in the room. At that distance, I can hear behind the anger.
You wouldn't think I would have to worry about targets in these very human organizations, but irrational and angry people are everywhere and hippies don't have a corner on human understanding. Everyone is capable of going instantly to a defensive stance over any issue and often that is the default, before they even consider the other aspects or ask for clarification. Close observation, mostly learned from co-counselling, has increased my ability to see through these defensive patterns, to a degree, but if I am attacked, I can go into altered states of intense anxiety, so I'm pretty protective about interactions with angry people. A lot of my avoidance patterns are simply to keep myself safe from the anger of others. I quail and am useless in person, but in the safety of my kitchen, I find I can do written analysis fairly well and respond to it in a fairly helpful way, if I take the time to make sure my thoughts are clear and get over feeling irrationally targeted.
It's kind of simple sometimes, just asking the question "Is that me?" In other words, am I coming from my own defensive stance, or an irrational place of my own? Again, very subtle stuff at times, and often about deep fears and what is called occluded material, things you are yourself not really able to be aware of or access rational thought around. Deep, deep stuff like trauma and loss, separation and fear.
So writing letters concerning kicking people out of places they love is really hard. I merely walked by a young couple last night who were blanket-vending downtown, and being arrested at that moment, and my heart sank. I wondered all the way home why things had progressed to arrest. The police seemed nice enough, but they were charged with enforcing the rules, and the couple had no doubt been warned. I had seen them in another spot before the meeting and guessed that they were doing that shuffle of desperation when you move across the street or down the block and set up again, thinking maybe you won't be noticed, will wear the authorities out, or somehow escape the fate you probably don't believe is coming. That couple probably did not believe arrest and an expensive ticket would add to their problems, and they surely had some problems if they were trying to sell jewelry from a blanket on the sidewalk. It was just sad, and I wanted to save them, but of course I just walked over to the Kiva and then home so I wouldn't miss Jeopardy. Oh, the irony of it all.
The concept of jeopardy has been on my mind, as over the last two months we (the RadarAngels) wrote the show for the Jell-O Art Show performance, a parody of the TV show which will of course be hilarious, to us at least, and we hope to our audience. Early on I felt that everyone in the place should experience some subtle type of jeopardy that they could easily overcome, a symbolic growth pushed by art, in particular Jell-O art, kind of like the unfolding maple buds which made it through the snow and pinked up anyway, and the loved ones who lived their lives and then found the lives over, as we all will. Deep stuff about safety, risk, our short lives, our world of things, houses, craft objects, and all around the circle the way things always go, but made light of through music and fun, and resolved in a positive manner so we all could leave feeling safe.
So to go on just a bit more before everyone gets tired of reading, I have to use all the skills I've got to do difficult things sometimes, but with support, I can do them, and it gets easier all the time. When I first started to volunteer for OCF, there were a lot of major shifts in my thinking as I joined with thousands of people to not just experience the event, not just participate in it on my level of using it as a part of my income stream, but to deepen my commitment to making it work well for not just me, but others like me, and even others who were not like me. I felt compelled to speak from my experience for the mutual understanding of others with different experiences. I was a lot more selfish at first. Gradually I have started to join those who are caring for the event/organization long past our individual lives, way outside our own country fair. (You know the way there are thousands of different country fairs going on at once out there, simultaneously.) I certainly am not at the decision-making level on any big scale, and don't want to be, but in the craft realm I have begun to be able to take a stand and have some clear convictions. It's not easy! It's way easier to reserve judgement, continue observing, and allow, than it is to take action and make something change.
The current struggle, which is not a new one, is at the core one of the survival of the craftsperson. To continue to thrive making things by hand, one at a time, out of the impossibly vague recesses of our individual creativity, taking raw materials and ending up with an object of beauty and utility--this is a delicate and tenuous thing. Jell-O Art in it's gorgeous impracticality shines an important light on this, but you'll have to read about that in the other blog (Gelatinaceae.blogspot.com). To cut to the chase, I have begun to fight for the survival of the handcrafted artist. Not just to fear for her. Not just to observe the increasing difficulty of staying important and current, not just to make my own adjustments to fit the conditions, but to join with others, to fight for her. And him, of course.
I'm not a visionary, but I also tend to not dissove in fear of the future. 3-D printers will change everything, just like computers and cell phones did, but I don't fear that. Small factories are a common and adaptive reponse to the marketplace, and I don't fear them, but I have to take a stance against that erosion of the hand and heart connection of the artist with the appreciator, through the fingerprints of the artist on the object and the face-to-face interaction between the two. I have to be willing to draw some lines and stand on one side of them. I wouldn't be able to do it alone. Thankfully, the nature of my membership organizations is that we all care so deeply about this and the related issues, that there are plenty of other members willing to stand with me.
What makes it hard is when people take aim before they take the time to see what we are so passionate about. To the small factory owner, who is still passionately involved with their objects and has not changed their own heart connection, it's hard to see the shifts and why they matter. I've been there, I've had employees and moved more to management and done less production and felt that discomfort. To be honest, I still feel like I am in a grey area of the crafts world with my decoration of commercially produced items, be it as it may that I do the handwork necessary to qualify and my objects are certainly crafts. Now that the little factory is long gone for me I can see the contradictions better than when I was creating the contradictions.
But the issue remains that the craft artist is up against a world that could cease to value her. Spending low-paid hours to take pains to perfect objects of sometimes limited utility with relatively high prices is counter to the way the world markets are going, and that is perfectly evident everywhere. Doing it without employees at a volume necessary to survive in this world is not only difficult but might become impossible. We could be a dying part of the art world, but I am convinced that we are not. I'll die, of course, and join the crafts fair in the sky where we just get to sit there and collect good feelings instead of dollars, and make only what we want instead of what will sell, but art will never die. No commercially manufactured object, no matter how complex, is going to affect a person the same as a handmade one. People will still seek those out and marvel at that transformation. And to quote one of the songs I'm valiantly practicing this week to stand up in front of strangers and perform art through: "tell me love and hope never die."
Love and hope never die. Craft will survive the present challenges, and I will survive whatever confrontations come my way just as I will survive the two performances I have gotten my chicken self into (thank goodness for costumes.) Challenge is just as much a creative process as handwork. You dig in, you gain skills, you use those skills to gain broader skills, you pay attention, you learn from the work of others, and you pitch in and do what presents itself to the best of your abilities. You use your creative abilities in every way you can. And you try to leave your anger and irrational attacks on others out. You try to learn to ask the cops what you can do to find common ground rather than getting mad and calling them pigs, or whatever mistake that young couple made yesterday.
My very first thought, when I saw the couple with their blanket, and I was going to a product screening for the Saturday Market, was to invite them to come along. I wish I had. I didn't take the time, and was involved in my own work. I saw the buds, but I didn't see the frost that was coming for them. I hope someone at the police station told them about Saturday Market. I hope they told them that you can pay your membership fee in installments, and that you can join one of the most benevolent, easy-entry, loving and caring networks in the known world. Love and hope never die, friends.
And just to end with that irony that we all love so much, the guy who did some the most virulent gay-hating in our times just died, and though I really don't believe in heaven and hell, I wonder what he might be experiencing as he left his realm of hate and moved to another. I'm guessing either it was over, and that was it, or he opened into the greatest space of love and hope we could possibly imagine in the most creative moment we ever had. I have a friend who tells me that we do not die. I won't try to explain that, but just imagine it and how that might work. If there is anger and hate there, in that dimension, seems like we would all be able to see it in the most transparent way. We might even laugh at it. We might be wise enough to see it as a tool we do not need, one that hurts, not only those that it is directed at, but our own selves.
If you are angry, that means you care and you need something more. Figure out what it is, and how to get it without hurting anyone else. Don't be a bully. Demands separate us. Join, somehow, the other caring people and find the common ground. Persistence is a good quality when used in good ways, but sometimes you can't have what you want. I'm haunted by the downcast look of the young woman who sat handcuffed with her necklaces while the second officer negotiated with her partner. She was compliant, yes, but ashamed and bereft. She got damaged there. That shouldn't have happened, and I'm not faulting the police either, or the laws. It just was an ugly bit of jeopardy, not caused by art, but in the interface of art and society.
Next time I want to know what to do and do it. Love and hope will keep me growing, keep me helping, keep me living while I am here. Let's focus on that this spring, the season of opening and beauty. Did you know this is apparently the International Day of Happiness? I'm celebrating.
A few years ago I noticed that the maple tree I can see from my kitchen goes through a pink flush when the buds appear with the leaves inside. It's subtle, and the first year I noticed it I was astonished, as I have been looking out that window for many years. This year it lasted for over a week, here and there on the tree at first, and then quite evident, but not so much when the sky was cloudy, gloriously against the intense blue we had for several days last week. Every time I go outside I notice things that I have not remarked upon to myself, even though I must have seen them in passing for years, even decades. I think this close observation developed from my house research, as I have learned to look at the physical presentation of something, a house or a person, or a news article or an object, and try to see the story behind it. It's a deep observation that is gratifying, and I'm happy to be developing it, even though it makes me sad for all the things I have missed before. When it comes to people, I've been extremely saddened by the deaths of people I really should have paid more attention to, in a more focused and personal way, and that is a particularly important lesson in being here, now, and alert. I hope I learn it well.What was I so afraid of? It seems so trivial.
I've been doing a lot of business writing in my roles with OCF and the Market, which I enjoy but also makes me nervous sometimes. I've observed that close scrutiny has worked for me here, too. The minutes-taking is so very detail-oriented, even when I am supported by the voice recorder, and it can be crucial that the intent of words be transmitted as well as the words. It's really a skill-set that goes way beyond spelling and grammar, and it also is satisfying to be able to serve my organizational families in this way, but there is the risk part too. I can't make up or reveal intent that I might see but is not really in the words; I can't use my knowledge of the person or outside factors that weren't actually stated at the meetings. It can be really hard to just stick to the slippery type of facts in discussions. Even when things are said with conviction, they may not be factual, and I can misinterpret just as quickly as the next person. Some things are crucial, although most are not, and all of the minutes are reviewed by the groups before being adopted into the public record, but still, they have to be right.
I don't feel that as pressure most times, though I do get overly conscientious and pedantic about some things. I like motions to be in formal language, and I dislike using people's names, not wanting to set anyone up to be a target for something they said in a semi-public meeting. People say the most shocking things as jokes, and I have to know when they are kidding. It's usually not that difficult, but I get frustrated with too much flippancy. Anger and confrontation, of course, really derail the meetings, and damage everyone there. When those come up, everyone thinks about quitting and never attending another meeting.
There's one kind of knotty aspect I worry about: the recordings. They are actually not the public record, as only the approved minutes are. The recordings should probably be discarded, although back when we used the little cassettes we saved them all, and occasionally someone had the need to listen to the original discussions for some fine point. Lots of fine points are left out of the minutes, as well as who expressed them, so there is some value in the original recordings, and I also take detailed notes which often include names, but those are also my interpretations. So the recordings are valuable, but again, I don't want to be a party to making anyone a target. Interesting that when I listen to the recordings, if there is anger or confrontation, it is never as shocking as it was when I was in the room. At that distance, I can hear behind the anger.
You wouldn't think I would have to worry about targets in these very human organizations, but irrational and angry people are everywhere and hippies don't have a corner on human understanding. Everyone is capable of going instantly to a defensive stance over any issue and often that is the default, before they even consider the other aspects or ask for clarification. Close observation, mostly learned from co-counselling, has increased my ability to see through these defensive patterns, to a degree, but if I am attacked, I can go into altered states of intense anxiety, so I'm pretty protective about interactions with angry people. A lot of my avoidance patterns are simply to keep myself safe from the anger of others. I quail and am useless in person, but in the safety of my kitchen, I find I can do written analysis fairly well and respond to it in a fairly helpful way, if I take the time to make sure my thoughts are clear and get over feeling irrationally targeted.
It's kind of simple sometimes, just asking the question "Is that me?" In other words, am I coming from my own defensive stance, or an irrational place of my own? Again, very subtle stuff at times, and often about deep fears and what is called occluded material, things you are yourself not really able to be aware of or access rational thought around. Deep, deep stuff like trauma and loss, separation and fear.
So writing letters concerning kicking people out of places they love is really hard. I merely walked by a young couple last night who were blanket-vending downtown, and being arrested at that moment, and my heart sank. I wondered all the way home why things had progressed to arrest. The police seemed nice enough, but they were charged with enforcing the rules, and the couple had no doubt been warned. I had seen them in another spot before the meeting and guessed that they were doing that shuffle of desperation when you move across the street or down the block and set up again, thinking maybe you won't be noticed, will wear the authorities out, or somehow escape the fate you probably don't believe is coming. That couple probably did not believe arrest and an expensive ticket would add to their problems, and they surely had some problems if they were trying to sell jewelry from a blanket on the sidewalk. It was just sad, and I wanted to save them, but of course I just walked over to the Kiva and then home so I wouldn't miss Jeopardy. Oh, the irony of it all.
The concept of jeopardy has been on my mind, as over the last two months we (the RadarAngels) wrote the show for the Jell-O Art Show performance, a parody of the TV show which will of course be hilarious, to us at least, and we hope to our audience. Early on I felt that everyone in the place should experience some subtle type of jeopardy that they could easily overcome, a symbolic growth pushed by art, in particular Jell-O art, kind of like the unfolding maple buds which made it through the snow and pinked up anyway, and the loved ones who lived their lives and then found the lives over, as we all will. Deep stuff about safety, risk, our short lives, our world of things, houses, craft objects, and all around the circle the way things always go, but made light of through music and fun, and resolved in a positive manner so we all could leave feeling safe.
So to go on just a bit more before everyone gets tired of reading, I have to use all the skills I've got to do difficult things sometimes, but with support, I can do them, and it gets easier all the time. When I first started to volunteer for OCF, there were a lot of major shifts in my thinking as I joined with thousands of people to not just experience the event, not just participate in it on my level of using it as a part of my income stream, but to deepen my commitment to making it work well for not just me, but others like me, and even others who were not like me. I felt compelled to speak from my experience for the mutual understanding of others with different experiences. I was a lot more selfish at first. Gradually I have started to join those who are caring for the event/organization long past our individual lives, way outside our own country fair. (You know the way there are thousands of different country fairs going on at once out there, simultaneously.) I certainly am not at the decision-making level on any big scale, and don't want to be, but in the craft realm I have begun to be able to take a stand and have some clear convictions. It's not easy! It's way easier to reserve judgement, continue observing, and allow, than it is to take action and make something change.
The current struggle, which is not a new one, is at the core one of the survival of the craftsperson. To continue to thrive making things by hand, one at a time, out of the impossibly vague recesses of our individual creativity, taking raw materials and ending up with an object of beauty and utility--this is a delicate and tenuous thing. Jell-O Art in it's gorgeous impracticality shines an important light on this, but you'll have to read about that in the other blog (Gelatinaceae.blogspot.com). To cut to the chase, I have begun to fight for the survival of the handcrafted artist. Not just to fear for her. Not just to observe the increasing difficulty of staying important and current, not just to make my own adjustments to fit the conditions, but to join with others, to fight for her. And him, of course.
I'm not a visionary, but I also tend to not dissove in fear of the future. 3-D printers will change everything, just like computers and cell phones did, but I don't fear that. Small factories are a common and adaptive reponse to the marketplace, and I don't fear them, but I have to take a stance against that erosion of the hand and heart connection of the artist with the appreciator, through the fingerprints of the artist on the object and the face-to-face interaction between the two. I have to be willing to draw some lines and stand on one side of them. I wouldn't be able to do it alone. Thankfully, the nature of my membership organizations is that we all care so deeply about this and the related issues, that there are plenty of other members willing to stand with me.
What makes it hard is when people take aim before they take the time to see what we are so passionate about. To the small factory owner, who is still passionately involved with their objects and has not changed their own heart connection, it's hard to see the shifts and why they matter. I've been there, I've had employees and moved more to management and done less production and felt that discomfort. To be honest, I still feel like I am in a grey area of the crafts world with my decoration of commercially produced items, be it as it may that I do the handwork necessary to qualify and my objects are certainly crafts. Now that the little factory is long gone for me I can see the contradictions better than when I was creating the contradictions.
But the issue remains that the craft artist is up against a world that could cease to value her. Spending low-paid hours to take pains to perfect objects of sometimes limited utility with relatively high prices is counter to the way the world markets are going, and that is perfectly evident everywhere. Doing it without employees at a volume necessary to survive in this world is not only difficult but might become impossible. We could be a dying part of the art world, but I am convinced that we are not. I'll die, of course, and join the crafts fair in the sky where we just get to sit there and collect good feelings instead of dollars, and make only what we want instead of what will sell, but art will never die. No commercially manufactured object, no matter how complex, is going to affect a person the same as a handmade one. People will still seek those out and marvel at that transformation. And to quote one of the songs I'm valiantly practicing this week to stand up in front of strangers and perform art through: "tell me love and hope never die."
Love and hope never die. Craft will survive the present challenges, and I will survive whatever confrontations come my way just as I will survive the two performances I have gotten my chicken self into (thank goodness for costumes.) Challenge is just as much a creative process as handwork. You dig in, you gain skills, you use those skills to gain broader skills, you pay attention, you learn from the work of others, and you pitch in and do what presents itself to the best of your abilities. You use your creative abilities in every way you can. And you try to leave your anger and irrational attacks on others out. You try to learn to ask the cops what you can do to find common ground rather than getting mad and calling them pigs, or whatever mistake that young couple made yesterday.
My very first thought, when I saw the couple with their blanket, and I was going to a product screening for the Saturday Market, was to invite them to come along. I wish I had. I didn't take the time, and was involved in my own work. I saw the buds, but I didn't see the frost that was coming for them. I hope someone at the police station told them about Saturday Market. I hope they told them that you can pay your membership fee in installments, and that you can join one of the most benevolent, easy-entry, loving and caring networks in the known world. Love and hope never die, friends.
And just to end with that irony that we all love so much, the guy who did some the most virulent gay-hating in our times just died, and though I really don't believe in heaven and hell, I wonder what he might be experiencing as he left his realm of hate and moved to another. I'm guessing either it was over, and that was it, or he opened into the greatest space of love and hope we could possibly imagine in the most creative moment we ever had. I have a friend who tells me that we do not die. I won't try to explain that, but just imagine it and how that might work. If there is anger and hate there, in that dimension, seems like we would all be able to see it in the most transparent way. We might even laugh at it. We might be wise enough to see it as a tool we do not need, one that hurts, not only those that it is directed at, but our own selves.
If you are angry, that means you care and you need something more. Figure out what it is, and how to get it without hurting anyone else. Don't be a bully. Demands separate us. Join, somehow, the other caring people and find the common ground. Persistence is a good quality when used in good ways, but sometimes you can't have what you want. I'm haunted by the downcast look of the young woman who sat handcuffed with her necklaces while the second officer negotiated with her partner. She was compliant, yes, but ashamed and bereft. She got damaged there. That shouldn't have happened, and I'm not faulting the police either, or the laws. It just was an ugly bit of jeopardy, not caused by art, but in the interface of art and society.
Next time I want to know what to do and do it. Love and hope will keep me growing, keep me helping, keep me living while I am here. Let's focus on that this spring, the season of opening and beauty. Did you know this is apparently the International Day of Happiness? I'm celebrating.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Sisters and Photos
It's my little sister's birthday tomorrow, so I was trying to remember what might have been going through my head at the time. I was just about to turn six myself, and was the second of three girls at that point. I was comfy in that spot, I believe, at that age, though the previous Thanksgiving must have been the one when I got scarlet fever and an intense dislike for turkey and hospitals. Maybe Mom was pregnant, and that was why they put me in the hospital. Don't remember much except vivid memories of the separation and the shots. This was undoubtedly the first time I was really apart from my siblings and parents, in my conscious memory anyway.
But Paula was not in the famous picture I have of the three of us in our matching Easter dresses in 1955, a year before she arrived. My grandmother made us new dresses every Easter, and I so loved those dresses. When I asked Mom about that time, she told me that they had searched for a house throughout that pregnancy (we were living in a semi-row in downtown Wilmington, across from a park and in front of a gas station.) When we moved it was into the country. (Of course it isn't the country now.)
She said they stumbled upon the house, selling by the owner, and it cost $22,500, which was their budget at the time. The house wasn't that special but the yard was divine. And the yard was always my favorite part, for sure.
But we moved that July, right after Paula was born, and right after a vacation at a lake which was probably just another bunch of work for Mom, but a change of places to play for us. I was a big explorer/scientist so was happy in nature anywhere. I'm so glad Mom chose that yard, though. It had a huge effect on me. It was practically a farm. The last photo shows Paula and the sister formally known as "Butterball" (drat that yellow dress) on her first birthday, on the front porch of our new house.
Most of the pictures from that era were of Mom sailing our Lightning, which we did every summer weekend. Imagine that with four little girls. Mom at the tiller was a strong childhood image, even more precious now. My mom was amazing, and she still is, inspiring and supportive and practical and strong. And Paula has grown up to be that way, too.
She runs marathons, even 50-mile races! She fronted bands and did a lot more with her musical abilities than any of us, and still sings wonderful harmony. She is a kick-ass Mom and hard worker and so very dedicated. She can do things that would make me a quivering mess. So it's her birthday, and this isn't a proper shout-out, but I love these photos and thought they would be fun to share. I love my family!
Friday, February 14, 2014
Tension as Divination
I named this blog after a concept I wasn't sure I understood, but felt: being on a tight line of a spiderweb, riding that thin edge of thought, when the pitfalls of taking a stand for a sentence or opinion seem to make the whole web quiver with danger. I felt I often had to take time to ponder the concept, while standing on that line, trying not to fall off of it either way, trying to reach the far, other side, where certainty might live.
Life rarely seems certain; more often we have to continue edging along the line, hoping the fog will clear before we make an irrevocable choice. Mostly the process is messy and the progress is hard to mark. Mostly I sit full with feelings, to which I must apply my powers of organization and articulation. In other words, I work through my dilemmas by writing, and this seemed like the place I would take a moment to look around and find my direction.
Today's subject is the life of a craftsperson at the OCF. The word *life* is the operating one here. I want to try to point out a few of the issues that continue to make trouble in the greater Fair community, from the perspective of someone who has invested my life in it.
I know all Fair Family tend to think we have invested our lives in Fair, at least during the event each year, but it's tough to value that investment in equal terms over all the roles. Each individual has a scale for that, and there is a time for each when they weigh up, maybe many times. Some people weigh up and leave the community, or at least the role they are presently playing. They lose the magic, or they change the role, or they find the balance won't hold and they quit. There is an occasional craftsperson who quits, finding the family isn't interested, the crafts don't sell, the nights are too loud or the times too changed. Mostly we don't quit.
We evolve. It might be difficult to imagine a life where creative decisions are routinely made, many in a day, and *things* are made from nothing over and over and over. Different each time, perhaps, or within a formula that works, but always adapting the current skills and materials to the current conditions and culture. We get a nice space in OCF to bring traditional crafts that may be found in only a few other places, maybe things we have made for decades, or lost skills that aren't economically or culturally that valuable outside the alternative culture. We have carved out a space for handcrafted items that is precious, diminishing in the world, and still vibrant in our corner. It hasn't been luck.
We've invested our lives, and the point of today is that this is indeed different in some vital ways from the ways volunteers have invested their lives. It's not about money. It's not about time on site. It's not about age, or skill level, or love, or fun, either. Everybody involved holds OCF in our hearts. There are significant ways that we do not differ. We all love it, and hate it, and work on it, and keep that weekend and the weeks and months surrounding it protected so that we can attend. We have a lot of common ground emotionally as well as physically.
Probably every crew has a person or two who are seen as elements who could be pruned out. They aren't reliable enough, they don't pull their weight, but they might be fun or nice or for some reason not easy to take out of the picture. They don't go away, they don't retire to the Elders, they keep showing up, and bringing with them what is viewed as inadequate, troublesome, or in the way of what is seen as necessary to thrive.
Every year they get their pass, and eventually most of them get moved out in some way or another, but there isn't a clear way within policy to ask them to step up or leave. Probably on crews this is handled however well or badly by the coordinators, and by circumstance. It's subjective.
Craftspeople, however, apply and pay, are juried if they are new, or might be grandfathered if they are not. There is some scrutiny by Craft Inventory each open morning, but CI has been pressured to be kind and gentle and artisans have been awarded more flexibility within their craft categories, so largely they feel respected and welcomed each year, and as long as they can come up with the fees, they come *home* to their space, where they might have spent thousands of dollars over the years to meet the demands of the event. They feel a lot of ownership, but more is centered on a small piece of ground and not as much on the whole site. All Fair family feel ownership. That's why we care so much and work so hard.
Longterm booth people put in their money, year after year, and are rewarded with the opportunity to work at Fair for the weekend. We're not invited to stay for a month, even if we have work to do, and we feel largely left out of the family events, which are usually held on weekends, by necessity, when we are, by necessity, retailing. We certainly are Family, we certainly play an essential part, but we definitely feel of a different status. We can be seen as opportunists by some: we drop in, collect our cash, and walk away.
Of course the reality is far from that, from my perspective. I produce massive amounts of stock, of which some 80% is there to support the 20% that might sell. I continually invest in materials, tools, skill-building, production efficiency and adaptation to physical needs, so that in fact my entire life is invested in those items you pick through, to love or reject. A bad Fair could quite literally ruin me.
Plus I have to haul enough stuff out there to set up a complete shop, home, and home for my workers and their families. I spend around a thousand bucks each year assuring access and comfort and a healthy and safe experience for those I need to bring with me to meet the demands of what has become a giant Fair. It has gotten harder and more expensive every year, just like everything else in life. I observe that the organizational direction is to continue to grow, so I don't see my investment getting any smaller, or my job any easier.
As I age I have to dial things in or I will be overcome. We all have to do this, streamline our expenses and possessions and options so that we will be able to continue. Any kind of retirement plan, health plan, or random plan is generated by me. Noone else is in place to do it. I am on my own.
I chose it, I will do it, but it comes with me to Fair. I bring my whole life there: my vulnerability, my health, my ability to progress, and my stuff, which represents my life investment. It's as if I bring my whole life there, rest it in place for a weekend, and then haul it all home. My image is of a snail with a shell that is large, awkward, and in danger of being crushed.
I might appear slow, with one foot still in my hippie past. I might not appear as vulnerable as I feel, with my big showy shell. I might be defensive if things start to move more quickly than I can go, which of course they do.
So whenever the concept of *revitalizing* the crafts at Fair comes up, I feel the danger. I don't hear this coming from my fellow craftspeople, who are in the continual process of revitalizing, every day, but from observers who see artisans who don't excite them. This veers into the subjective right away, and I could write many blogs about leather belts and the market for them, types of pottery, shirts people like or don't wear anymore, and on and on. For every booth at Fair there is a roster of fans and detractors. It's a messy concept, evaluating others.
Those who want to explore it struggle for respectful phrases, and at core the desire is to ensure that the life of the handcrafting artisan is protected, as well as the life of our event. The public can be fickle. If the public gets tired of what the event offers, they won't buy their tickets. Talk about investment! While I have my little life invested, the collective investment, with our tracts of land, our vehicles and buildings, our paid staff, our insurance bills, our legal issues, and so on, the Fair Family does have a deep collective vulnerability.
Every piece of that vulnerability needs to be examined, and there are those who work hard on visions for keeping us thriving and important enough to keep it all alive. I'm not so much a visionary, but more of one of those who hang on, resisting change, until it is apparent I have to give something up. Without some other people having visions, I wouldn't have made it, because it does take more than determination and hard work to succeed in the larger realms.
But I'm willing to do the hard work, so I started volunteering, on Scribe Tribe and Craft Committee. Immediately as I start to work together with these other hard workers, with those who are visionary and those who need some enlightenment, with those who have wide, or limited ranges of skills, I see that there is far more commonality than difference among us. It's usually only one or two steps back from our positions to see our commonality.
So in this discussion of revitalizing, or more correctly, continuing to be vital, since we never stopped, we have to step back time and time again to our commonality. We all love the Fair, and in that, we all feel a terrible vulnerability. We all fear we could lose what we have built, or watch it erode.
So the creative problem-solvers look to fix something, something that isn't working as well as it possibly could. There are a small number of booths, fewer than ten, in which the craftsperson, for many reasons, appears to not be doing all that they might to ensure this vital event. They're not keeping up, or they're using the Fair for selfish goals without giving enough back, in the perception of some observer. Possibly many observers.
We've all heard this, about Fair and Saturday Market as well, that the offerings are boring and nothing ever changes. I submit, that whomever the observer who is saying this is, THEY ARE WRONG.
Or at least there is enough doubt in the situation, enough subjectivity, that we can't act on it. Just as Joe Schmoe can't be kicked off Traffic because he is always ten minutes late (Fair time, heh heh) for his shifts, there just isn't enough information available to "weed out" a craftsperson who looks like an opportunist. As an observer you just have no idea what the reasons are for what the person offers at Fair. All you can do is make sure they follow the Fair guidelines, encourage (maybe with your dollars) those you observe doing things your "Fair way," or figure out why you are bored with the lives of these members of your community.
I constantly hear volunteers who brag about staying out of the eight completely, yet the eight is where the whole Fair exists, for me, so I feel rejected. My life expression is boring? I was taught that if you are bored, it is your problem. Look within. If I'm defensive, it is because you are actually attacking me? Are you being defensive because of your own vulnerability? Is there a different way to have the conversation to get around opening up these pools of fears?
The messiness is ours, and we have to work through it. Together. We have to articulate our fears so we can get around them. We absolutely have to understand each other's experiences. We have to stand on our common ground.
So step back, and move more slowly for us snail people. The giant spinning peach is heavy and we are already carrying a huge load. When the fears come up, even if they come up masked in anger, we have to address them.
This has gotten too long and I am still on the wire, not having reached clarity, and not feeling like I've even taken a step forward. What can the Fair organization do to keep the crafts vital and relevant? Is there a way to have evaluation without vulnerability? No, I don't think so.
However, there is a way to work through it. Policy is our protection, guidelines are our tools. Standards have to be spelled out in words; measurement and evaluation have to have concrete metrics. Let's acknowledge our fears, get our vulnerabilities on the table long enough to set them aside, and work together on our common goals. It's a huge and messy task, so we're going to have to do it in little but coherent pieces. We have to have the discussions, but the little hurts and the big fears they bring up don't have to defeat us.
We are stronger than we think. Let's continue to try to do our best, with every piece of stuff we make, every policy we try to craft, every letter we try to write. We have an excellent record, so there is no reason to think we will not find the elegant solutions.
Life rarely seems certain; more often we have to continue edging along the line, hoping the fog will clear before we make an irrevocable choice. Mostly the process is messy and the progress is hard to mark. Mostly I sit full with feelings, to which I must apply my powers of organization and articulation. In other words, I work through my dilemmas by writing, and this seemed like the place I would take a moment to look around and find my direction.
Today's subject is the life of a craftsperson at the OCF. The word *life* is the operating one here. I want to try to point out a few of the issues that continue to make trouble in the greater Fair community, from the perspective of someone who has invested my life in it.
I know all Fair Family tend to think we have invested our lives in Fair, at least during the event each year, but it's tough to value that investment in equal terms over all the roles. Each individual has a scale for that, and there is a time for each when they weigh up, maybe many times. Some people weigh up and leave the community, or at least the role they are presently playing. They lose the magic, or they change the role, or they find the balance won't hold and they quit. There is an occasional craftsperson who quits, finding the family isn't interested, the crafts don't sell, the nights are too loud or the times too changed. Mostly we don't quit.
We evolve. It might be difficult to imagine a life where creative decisions are routinely made, many in a day, and *things* are made from nothing over and over and over. Different each time, perhaps, or within a formula that works, but always adapting the current skills and materials to the current conditions and culture. We get a nice space in OCF to bring traditional crafts that may be found in only a few other places, maybe things we have made for decades, or lost skills that aren't economically or culturally that valuable outside the alternative culture. We have carved out a space for handcrafted items that is precious, diminishing in the world, and still vibrant in our corner. It hasn't been luck.
We've invested our lives, and the point of today is that this is indeed different in some vital ways from the ways volunteers have invested their lives. It's not about money. It's not about time on site. It's not about age, or skill level, or love, or fun, either. Everybody involved holds OCF in our hearts. There are significant ways that we do not differ. We all love it, and hate it, and work on it, and keep that weekend and the weeks and months surrounding it protected so that we can attend. We have a lot of common ground emotionally as well as physically.
Probably every crew has a person or two who are seen as elements who could be pruned out. They aren't reliable enough, they don't pull their weight, but they might be fun or nice or for some reason not easy to take out of the picture. They don't go away, they don't retire to the Elders, they keep showing up, and bringing with them what is viewed as inadequate, troublesome, or in the way of what is seen as necessary to thrive.
Every year they get their pass, and eventually most of them get moved out in some way or another, but there isn't a clear way within policy to ask them to step up or leave. Probably on crews this is handled however well or badly by the coordinators, and by circumstance. It's subjective.
Craftspeople, however, apply and pay, are juried if they are new, or might be grandfathered if they are not. There is some scrutiny by Craft Inventory each open morning, but CI has been pressured to be kind and gentle and artisans have been awarded more flexibility within their craft categories, so largely they feel respected and welcomed each year, and as long as they can come up with the fees, they come *home* to their space, where they might have spent thousands of dollars over the years to meet the demands of the event. They feel a lot of ownership, but more is centered on a small piece of ground and not as much on the whole site. All Fair family feel ownership. That's why we care so much and work so hard.
Longterm booth people put in their money, year after year, and are rewarded with the opportunity to work at Fair for the weekend. We're not invited to stay for a month, even if we have work to do, and we feel largely left out of the family events, which are usually held on weekends, by necessity, when we are, by necessity, retailing. We certainly are Family, we certainly play an essential part, but we definitely feel of a different status. We can be seen as opportunists by some: we drop in, collect our cash, and walk away.
Of course the reality is far from that, from my perspective. I produce massive amounts of stock, of which some 80% is there to support the 20% that might sell. I continually invest in materials, tools, skill-building, production efficiency and adaptation to physical needs, so that in fact my entire life is invested in those items you pick through, to love or reject. A bad Fair could quite literally ruin me.
Plus I have to haul enough stuff out there to set up a complete shop, home, and home for my workers and their families. I spend around a thousand bucks each year assuring access and comfort and a healthy and safe experience for those I need to bring with me to meet the demands of what has become a giant Fair. It has gotten harder and more expensive every year, just like everything else in life. I observe that the organizational direction is to continue to grow, so I don't see my investment getting any smaller, or my job any easier.
As I age I have to dial things in or I will be overcome. We all have to do this, streamline our expenses and possessions and options so that we will be able to continue. Any kind of retirement plan, health plan, or random plan is generated by me. Noone else is in place to do it. I am on my own.
I chose it, I will do it, but it comes with me to Fair. I bring my whole life there: my vulnerability, my health, my ability to progress, and my stuff, which represents my life investment. It's as if I bring my whole life there, rest it in place for a weekend, and then haul it all home. My image is of a snail with a shell that is large, awkward, and in danger of being crushed.
I might appear slow, with one foot still in my hippie past. I might not appear as vulnerable as I feel, with my big showy shell. I might be defensive if things start to move more quickly than I can go, which of course they do.
So whenever the concept of *revitalizing* the crafts at Fair comes up, I feel the danger. I don't hear this coming from my fellow craftspeople, who are in the continual process of revitalizing, every day, but from observers who see artisans who don't excite them. This veers into the subjective right away, and I could write many blogs about leather belts and the market for them, types of pottery, shirts people like or don't wear anymore, and on and on. For every booth at Fair there is a roster of fans and detractors. It's a messy concept, evaluating others.
Those who want to explore it struggle for respectful phrases, and at core the desire is to ensure that the life of the handcrafting artisan is protected, as well as the life of our event. The public can be fickle. If the public gets tired of what the event offers, they won't buy their tickets. Talk about investment! While I have my little life invested, the collective investment, with our tracts of land, our vehicles and buildings, our paid staff, our insurance bills, our legal issues, and so on, the Fair Family does have a deep collective vulnerability.
Every piece of that vulnerability needs to be examined, and there are those who work hard on visions for keeping us thriving and important enough to keep it all alive. I'm not so much a visionary, but more of one of those who hang on, resisting change, until it is apparent I have to give something up. Without some other people having visions, I wouldn't have made it, because it does take more than determination and hard work to succeed in the larger realms.
But I'm willing to do the hard work, so I started volunteering, on Scribe Tribe and Craft Committee. Immediately as I start to work together with these other hard workers, with those who are visionary and those who need some enlightenment, with those who have wide, or limited ranges of skills, I see that there is far more commonality than difference among us. It's usually only one or two steps back from our positions to see our commonality.
So in this discussion of revitalizing, or more correctly, continuing to be vital, since we never stopped, we have to step back time and time again to our commonality. We all love the Fair, and in that, we all feel a terrible vulnerability. We all fear we could lose what we have built, or watch it erode.
So the creative problem-solvers look to fix something, something that isn't working as well as it possibly could. There are a small number of booths, fewer than ten, in which the craftsperson, for many reasons, appears to not be doing all that they might to ensure this vital event. They're not keeping up, or they're using the Fair for selfish goals without giving enough back, in the perception of some observer. Possibly many observers.
We've all heard this, about Fair and Saturday Market as well, that the offerings are boring and nothing ever changes. I submit, that whomever the observer who is saying this is, THEY ARE WRONG.
Or at least there is enough doubt in the situation, enough subjectivity, that we can't act on it. Just as Joe Schmoe can't be kicked off Traffic because he is always ten minutes late (Fair time, heh heh) for his shifts, there just isn't enough information available to "weed out" a craftsperson who looks like an opportunist. As an observer you just have no idea what the reasons are for what the person offers at Fair. All you can do is make sure they follow the Fair guidelines, encourage (maybe with your dollars) those you observe doing things your "Fair way," or figure out why you are bored with the lives of these members of your community.
I constantly hear volunteers who brag about staying out of the eight completely, yet the eight is where the whole Fair exists, for me, so I feel rejected. My life expression is boring? I was taught that if you are bored, it is your problem. Look within. If I'm defensive, it is because you are actually attacking me? Are you being defensive because of your own vulnerability? Is there a different way to have the conversation to get around opening up these pools of fears?
The messiness is ours, and we have to work through it. Together. We have to articulate our fears so we can get around them. We absolutely have to understand each other's experiences. We have to stand on our common ground.
So step back, and move more slowly for us snail people. The giant spinning peach is heavy and we are already carrying a huge load. When the fears come up, even if they come up masked in anger, we have to address them.
This has gotten too long and I am still on the wire, not having reached clarity, and not feeling like I've even taken a step forward. What can the Fair organization do to keep the crafts vital and relevant? Is there a way to have evaluation without vulnerability? No, I don't think so.
However, there is a way to work through it. Policy is our protection, guidelines are our tools. Standards have to be spelled out in words; measurement and evaluation have to have concrete metrics. Let's acknowledge our fears, get our vulnerabilities on the table long enough to set them aside, and work together on our common goals. It's a huge and messy task, so we're going to have to do it in little but coherent pieces. We have to have the discussions, but the little hurts and the big fears they bring up don't have to defeat us.
We are stronger than we think. Let's continue to try to do our best, with every piece of stuff we make, every policy we try to craft, every letter we try to write. We have an excellent record, so there is no reason to think we will not find the elegant solutions.
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Silver Thaw
The skylight has been covered for days and the dim light is different...we had about a foot of snow complicated by several layers of icy drizzle. I shoveled the walks the first few times until the ice coated the bottom layer and made it easier just to walk on the snow. It just kept coming down. Seems like the drizzle last night finished it off but it may continue today.
Got out my cross country skiis and cruised around the neighborhood a bit; the powder was perfect for it on the first day, but it might be too slippery this morning. I may go try again anyway. It's so rare to be able to ski off the back porch, and pretty darned fun. What I really should do is get the snow off the shop roof before it starts to leak but that would be far too dangerous. Every little thing, including my ladder, is covered with a sheet of ice that will remain until it melts.
Eugene is barely moving this morning, everything cancelled and everyone snowed in. I've been so immersed in the time of the pioneers this seems normal, except being able to walk down to the library and store yesterday before it got too bad. You wouldn't walk far in snow in pioneer days, without knowing a forecast, without the kind of snow gear we now have, unless you had to, or unless you got used to it. I know my Mom walked and rode horses to school in snow in Nebraska, many times, even though one of her actual relatives was lost in a blizzard in 1888. You would certainly rely on the weather knowledge of the old folks, who would know what stage of a storm you were in, and what was likely to come. My young relative and his parents apparently were too new to the country to understand that balminess and sunny weather often foretell a productive storm approaching from the south.
So maybe this thaw we are having means more snow. And this, friends of the Market, is why we don't sell in the winter months. The Fairgrounds has been closed up (tried to ski over there, but no) so not the mess of slipping vehicles and joyriders we had in December. Presumably most of them have tried heading up the mountains.
The pioneers would likely have been more worried about what will happen when all of this snow thaws. The rivers and creeks often overflowed and carried away bridges, houses, livestock, and people, who had of course settled down right next to the waterways for transportation and water supply. It took awhile to get used to the patterns of the landscape. The Davises took claims right along the Willamette, between it and the River Road, which was one of the few trails that were well-used then. That and the County Road, which is now 8th St and heads off on Blair to the northwest, which Huddleston settled on. His property went from the County Road to the Amazon canal, so he had transport on one side and water on the other. Ideal piece of land. One wonders if he knew how valuable it would become as the town was settled. Probably that was what he hoped. I don't think he was really a farmer at heart.
F.G. Vaughan was a farmer though. One of the only newspaper mentions I can find of him is that he brought some watermelons to the newspaper office one day in 1880, and one of them weighed 39 pounds. That's some good farming. James Huddleston was famous for his shooting, though. He was a member of the Eugene Sportsmen Club and they had matches with each other and the Creswell club fairly often. He shot a hawk and some ducks in one. You got points for each type of game you killed, from eagles to cougars to swans, and most animals were fair game. He was later interested in a bill passed by the legislature establishing hunting seasons, according to a letter in his file. Hard to say whether he was a conservationist or interested in it because it might restrict his activities.
There were quite a few mentions of Huddleston in the paper. I think we have some class differences in these people I'm studying, and still more to find out about the stories behind their mentions. Samantha Davis Huddleston left her fortune to the WCTU Children's Home in Corvallis, and it amounted to somewhere between $20-70,000. One of the Evans kid contested her will, so there may have been some public embarrassment surrounding her death. I think she was one of the oldest original pioneers in 1927, and I don't know who was helping her at the end, if anyone. Her son died a year before she did, so that must have been a hard year for her.
F.G. Vaughan died the same year as she did. Instead of my original thought that these people did not know each other, because of their political and class differences, I now think they all knew each other, at least nominally. When Huddleston ran the trading post in the early 1850's, everyone in the area would have stopped in there, including the Vaughans, who were out in Coburg then. I think nearly all of the first transactions of my property were between contemporaries who knew each other, and were sometimes connected by family ties.
And why not? Land transfers were mostly handled within families if possible, to keep the wealth close. I think the Vaughans used the gold they brought back from California to buy land, and that was how they got these west-side properties, farms for the sons who couldn't make it on the one section the father claimed. The Vaughans and the Davises took up adjacent claims with their brothers and sons. They also would have followed the population and the resources. The original Vaughan claims were on land that is now being mined for sand and gravel, and they were farmers, so they would have traded up for better farmland. When F.G. started the dairy, he may not have expected the town to grow up around it so quickly. I haven't yet pinned down the years of his dairy farm at 12th and Van Buren, but by the time my piece was purchased, in 1908, it was probably looking like farming was over in this part of town. Even though streets weren't paved here, it must have been apparent that streets would be coming soon as people flocked to Eugene City to make money. Between 1900 and 1910 the population tripled.
I think both Floyd's dairy farm and Henry Huddleston's bike shop (around 1902) were part of this transition period, when the early residents were trying to keep their footing in the rapid growth of the town, trying to stay alive surrounded by later opportunists, keen to catch some of the riches divided up by the earlier opportunists.
But class issues, racism, and carpet-bagging are probably not going to be themes I will be able to explore in my book. Framing things from our perspective isn't really that fair, which is one reason I'm trying to read a lot of newspapers and primary source material from the time. I think the "characters" did evolve over time (they are characters to me, since they have been gone so long) and I think the combination of Samantha, coming from her Quaker parents Benjamin and Catherine, who seemed to be revered, and James, who came from Virginia, seemed to be comfortable with wealth, and was probably an early racist, is intriguing. I'm fascinated with the items that survived from their lives, each one with some reason for being saved from the scrap pile. Now I wonder if her nephew Evans could have been the person who saved and donated the items. More research!
I didn't get the grant I applied for, which is okay, since I am not that close to publication and it wasn't a polished application with solid theories yet. I am enjoying the research so much I don't care about the eventual publication of it. I stumbled on the concepts of my target audience and the relevance of the research to local history. There could be reasons these folks were somewhat forgotten--maybe I am digging up things that shouldn't see that much light. However, I am persistent, and will keep digging. I have begun looking back at my many journals on the building project, and that is some historical research too.
So let it snow. I have plenty to keep me occupied until I can get back over to the UO to look at the newspapers that aren't online. Have some great books to read on other subjects, too. The stories in The Moth (from the radio program) and in the book We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler are wonderfully compelling. Juggling that great writing with the scrawlings of the diaries from the Meek cutoff wagon train and the letters in the Huddleston file makes me glad I live in a time of excellent writing. I think I would have made a terrible Victorian.
However, I think I would have made a fantastic pioneer. I probably would have been one of those who dressed as a man and kept my secret until they went to bury me. Call me Dan.
Got out my cross country skiis and cruised around the neighborhood a bit; the powder was perfect for it on the first day, but it might be too slippery this morning. I may go try again anyway. It's so rare to be able to ski off the back porch, and pretty darned fun. What I really should do is get the snow off the shop roof before it starts to leak but that would be far too dangerous. Every little thing, including my ladder, is covered with a sheet of ice that will remain until it melts.
Eugene is barely moving this morning, everything cancelled and everyone snowed in. I've been so immersed in the time of the pioneers this seems normal, except being able to walk down to the library and store yesterday before it got too bad. You wouldn't walk far in snow in pioneer days, without knowing a forecast, without the kind of snow gear we now have, unless you had to, or unless you got used to it. I know my Mom walked and rode horses to school in snow in Nebraska, many times, even though one of her actual relatives was lost in a blizzard in 1888. You would certainly rely on the weather knowledge of the old folks, who would know what stage of a storm you were in, and what was likely to come. My young relative and his parents apparently were too new to the country to understand that balminess and sunny weather often foretell a productive storm approaching from the south.
So maybe this thaw we are having means more snow. And this, friends of the Market, is why we don't sell in the winter months. The Fairgrounds has been closed up (tried to ski over there, but no) so not the mess of slipping vehicles and joyriders we had in December. Presumably most of them have tried heading up the mountains.
The pioneers would likely have been more worried about what will happen when all of this snow thaws. The rivers and creeks often overflowed and carried away bridges, houses, livestock, and people, who had of course settled down right next to the waterways for transportation and water supply. It took awhile to get used to the patterns of the landscape. The Davises took claims right along the Willamette, between it and the River Road, which was one of the few trails that were well-used then. That and the County Road, which is now 8th St and heads off on Blair to the northwest, which Huddleston settled on. His property went from the County Road to the Amazon canal, so he had transport on one side and water on the other. Ideal piece of land. One wonders if he knew how valuable it would become as the town was settled. Probably that was what he hoped. I don't think he was really a farmer at heart.
F.G. Vaughan was a farmer though. One of the only newspaper mentions I can find of him is that he brought some watermelons to the newspaper office one day in 1880, and one of them weighed 39 pounds. That's some good farming. James Huddleston was famous for his shooting, though. He was a member of the Eugene Sportsmen Club and they had matches with each other and the Creswell club fairly often. He shot a hawk and some ducks in one. You got points for each type of game you killed, from eagles to cougars to swans, and most animals were fair game. He was later interested in a bill passed by the legislature establishing hunting seasons, according to a letter in his file. Hard to say whether he was a conservationist or interested in it because it might restrict his activities.
There were quite a few mentions of Huddleston in the paper. I think we have some class differences in these people I'm studying, and still more to find out about the stories behind their mentions. Samantha Davis Huddleston left her fortune to the WCTU Children's Home in Corvallis, and it amounted to somewhere between $20-70,000. One of the Evans kid contested her will, so there may have been some public embarrassment surrounding her death. I think she was one of the oldest original pioneers in 1927, and I don't know who was helping her at the end, if anyone. Her son died a year before she did, so that must have been a hard year for her.
F.G. Vaughan died the same year as she did. Instead of my original thought that these people did not know each other, because of their political and class differences, I now think they all knew each other, at least nominally. When Huddleston ran the trading post in the early 1850's, everyone in the area would have stopped in there, including the Vaughans, who were out in Coburg then. I think nearly all of the first transactions of my property were between contemporaries who knew each other, and were sometimes connected by family ties.
And why not? Land transfers were mostly handled within families if possible, to keep the wealth close. I think the Vaughans used the gold they brought back from California to buy land, and that was how they got these west-side properties, farms for the sons who couldn't make it on the one section the father claimed. The Vaughans and the Davises took up adjacent claims with their brothers and sons. They also would have followed the population and the resources. The original Vaughan claims were on land that is now being mined for sand and gravel, and they were farmers, so they would have traded up for better farmland. When F.G. started the dairy, he may not have expected the town to grow up around it so quickly. I haven't yet pinned down the years of his dairy farm at 12th and Van Buren, but by the time my piece was purchased, in 1908, it was probably looking like farming was over in this part of town. Even though streets weren't paved here, it must have been apparent that streets would be coming soon as people flocked to Eugene City to make money. Between 1900 and 1910 the population tripled.
I think both Floyd's dairy farm and Henry Huddleston's bike shop (around 1902) were part of this transition period, when the early residents were trying to keep their footing in the rapid growth of the town, trying to stay alive surrounded by later opportunists, keen to catch some of the riches divided up by the earlier opportunists.
But class issues, racism, and carpet-bagging are probably not going to be themes I will be able to explore in my book. Framing things from our perspective isn't really that fair, which is one reason I'm trying to read a lot of newspapers and primary source material from the time. I think the "characters" did evolve over time (they are characters to me, since they have been gone so long) and I think the combination of Samantha, coming from her Quaker parents Benjamin and Catherine, who seemed to be revered, and James, who came from Virginia, seemed to be comfortable with wealth, and was probably an early racist, is intriguing. I'm fascinated with the items that survived from their lives, each one with some reason for being saved from the scrap pile. Now I wonder if her nephew Evans could have been the person who saved and donated the items. More research!
I didn't get the grant I applied for, which is okay, since I am not that close to publication and it wasn't a polished application with solid theories yet. I am enjoying the research so much I don't care about the eventual publication of it. I stumbled on the concepts of my target audience and the relevance of the research to local history. There could be reasons these folks were somewhat forgotten--maybe I am digging up things that shouldn't see that much light. However, I am persistent, and will keep digging. I have begun looking back at my many journals on the building project, and that is some historical research too.
So let it snow. I have plenty to keep me occupied until I can get back over to the UO to look at the newspapers that aren't online. Have some great books to read on other subjects, too. The stories in The Moth (from the radio program) and in the book We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler are wonderfully compelling. Juggling that great writing with the scrawlings of the diaries from the Meek cutoff wagon train and the letters in the Huddleston file makes me glad I live in a time of excellent writing. I think I would have made a terrible Victorian.
However, I think I would have made a fantastic pioneer. I probably would have been one of those who dressed as a man and kept my secret until they went to bury me. Call me Dan.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Imagining Myself as a Pioneer
Finally got some rain again, and of course today was the day I had set aside for errands, so I had to suit up and do them in the wet, but that wasn't so bad. Have to remember not to let my pant legs hang out below the rain pants...but thank goodness for rain gear. Those pioneers just got wet.
I spent the entire last three days cleaning and painting the bathroom. It hadn't really been painted properly when we moved in what must be ten years ago now, or almost. I even did a little sanding, though never enough. It was a year ago when I had to finally put down my cat after a messy illness with which he finally ended up in the bathroom, liking the cool of the tile or the warmth of the water heater, not sure which. I had to clean every surface, and I thought I had cleaned them all, but I'm talking door frames, behind the water heater, all of it. I was happy to do it in service to Jake, whom I miss. Hard to believe a year went by, but they do. Fresh white paint on everything is a treat.
The tile floor is particularly satisfying because I scrubbed the grout with cleanser and thought it would never look clean, but it does. I sealed the tile again just in case. It's like having a new bathroom, and I haven't cluttered it up yet with all of my favorite pictures and things. Small pleasures.
I took a break from my research to do that. Reading the Huddleston stuff in the UO Special Collections was just amazing and I made lots of copies of pages and letters and got a few ideas for further research. It was poignant, thinking what Samantha would have thought worthy of saving, and whether she did it shortly after her husband's death or many years later. She outlived him by over thirty years, even outliving her son at the end.
My writing group gave me some good feedback and suggested that I imagine myself as these women (and men) I'm writing about and get some details like the weather on certain days, and I have been reading a lot of context for the settlement and early town era in Eugene and the frontier in general. It's not too hard to imagine their lives but I think they were tougher and more spare than I can even surmise. The journal books James Huddleston left are filled with transactions for the items he sold in his store, and he probably sold just about everything that was available to sell. His future father-in-law, Benjamin Davis, paid in wheat. They had no money, but wheat grew well here so it was the first crop everyone got in, since you could live on it if you had to. You could even feed your animals boiled wheat if you had no hay. As a storekeeper I had assumed Huddleston was relatively wealthy but I don't think he was immediately.
When the gold started to come back with the miners who left their families here while they went off to strike it rich, he must have taken a fair amount of gold dust in trade, but maybe there was a bank for that. I'll have to do a lot more searching, now that I found these lively, amazing details. There was a letter from Catherine Davis to her children, in her own hand. That was thrilling. I can't quite figure out what Samantha's handwriting looks like, but now I know her husband's and her mother's, so I might be able to separate hers out too. Her son Henry has a few items in the files, seemingly from his childhood, which makes me think she put the collection together rather than Henry. He had used some of the space in the journal books (which were tiny, about 4x6 and smaller) to practice writing signatures, his and his father's I think.
The most compelling item is a page from Jim Huddleston's diary, one which notes Benjamin Davis's death and burial "in the garden." Although the Huddlestons were living on 8th Ave at the time, I think the garden they buried him in was most likely his own, out on River Road where the Davis DLC's were located. He is apparently buried in the Masonic Cemetery now, but was likely moved there when the cemetery was formed. Davis died in 1858, at only 50 years old, and his wife Catherine outlived him for a very long time, too.
I could go on, but I'm hungry. I've fallen in love with the multigrain sourdough from Eugene City Bakery, and I have a fresh loaf just calling my name. Bread and cheese is my go-to comfort food but I'm trying hard to eat vegetables more than bread and nuts more than cheese, and succeeding somewhat. Just the little bit of biking I did today reminds me that I love it and don't even care if it's raining.Riding the stationary bike and looking out the windows is just not as good- I really don't have to make the kind of effort I do outside- I get lazy. I even read while I'm on it. Oh well, scrubbing the floor and painting the ceiling were exercise. Maybe I should start on another room.
Or sit on the exercise ball when I am typing. Too wet to prune any trees today. Saw the bushtits all lined up under the eaves on the clothesline I put up when I had the broken foot, so cute. I know we're not allowed to complain about the rain yet, we have to just enjoy it.
I spent the entire last three days cleaning and painting the bathroom. It hadn't really been painted properly when we moved in what must be ten years ago now, or almost. I even did a little sanding, though never enough. It was a year ago when I had to finally put down my cat after a messy illness with which he finally ended up in the bathroom, liking the cool of the tile or the warmth of the water heater, not sure which. I had to clean every surface, and I thought I had cleaned them all, but I'm talking door frames, behind the water heater, all of it. I was happy to do it in service to Jake, whom I miss. Hard to believe a year went by, but they do. Fresh white paint on everything is a treat.
The tile floor is particularly satisfying because I scrubbed the grout with cleanser and thought it would never look clean, but it does. I sealed the tile again just in case. It's like having a new bathroom, and I haven't cluttered it up yet with all of my favorite pictures and things. Small pleasures.
I took a break from my research to do that. Reading the Huddleston stuff in the UO Special Collections was just amazing and I made lots of copies of pages and letters and got a few ideas for further research. It was poignant, thinking what Samantha would have thought worthy of saving, and whether she did it shortly after her husband's death or many years later. She outlived him by over thirty years, even outliving her son at the end.
My writing group gave me some good feedback and suggested that I imagine myself as these women (and men) I'm writing about and get some details like the weather on certain days, and I have been reading a lot of context for the settlement and early town era in Eugene and the frontier in general. It's not too hard to imagine their lives but I think they were tougher and more spare than I can even surmise. The journal books James Huddleston left are filled with transactions for the items he sold in his store, and he probably sold just about everything that was available to sell. His future father-in-law, Benjamin Davis, paid in wheat. They had no money, but wheat grew well here so it was the first crop everyone got in, since you could live on it if you had to. You could even feed your animals boiled wheat if you had no hay. As a storekeeper I had assumed Huddleston was relatively wealthy but I don't think he was immediately.
When the gold started to come back with the miners who left their families here while they went off to strike it rich, he must have taken a fair amount of gold dust in trade, but maybe there was a bank for that. I'll have to do a lot more searching, now that I found these lively, amazing details. There was a letter from Catherine Davis to her children, in her own hand. That was thrilling. I can't quite figure out what Samantha's handwriting looks like, but now I know her husband's and her mother's, so I might be able to separate hers out too. Her son Henry has a few items in the files, seemingly from his childhood, which makes me think she put the collection together rather than Henry. He had used some of the space in the journal books (which were tiny, about 4x6 and smaller) to practice writing signatures, his and his father's I think.
The most compelling item is a page from Jim Huddleston's diary, one which notes Benjamin Davis's death and burial "in the garden." Although the Huddlestons were living on 8th Ave at the time, I think the garden they buried him in was most likely his own, out on River Road where the Davis DLC's were located. He is apparently buried in the Masonic Cemetery now, but was likely moved there when the cemetery was formed. Davis died in 1858, at only 50 years old, and his wife Catherine outlived him for a very long time, too.
I could go on, but I'm hungry. I've fallen in love with the multigrain sourdough from Eugene City Bakery, and I have a fresh loaf just calling my name. Bread and cheese is my go-to comfort food but I'm trying hard to eat vegetables more than bread and nuts more than cheese, and succeeding somewhat. Just the little bit of biking I did today reminds me that I love it and don't even care if it's raining.Riding the stationary bike and looking out the windows is just not as good- I really don't have to make the kind of effort I do outside- I get lazy. I even read while I'm on it. Oh well, scrubbing the floor and painting the ceiling were exercise. Maybe I should start on another room.
Or sit on the exercise ball when I am typing. Too wet to prune any trees today. Saw the bushtits all lined up under the eaves on the clothesline I put up when I had the broken foot, so cute. I know we're not allowed to complain about the rain yet, we have to just enjoy it.
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