toast

There are some days that feel impossible to get into. Today was starting out to be that day. Wandering around San Francisco’s Renegade Craft Fair, I didn’t have that happy inclination to meander, but more of mild urge to flee. Which is odd, as Renegade has all the components that I’m naturally drawn to – makers, the handmade, and craft, art and design all coming together.

Labeling itself as ‘a curated indie-craft marketplace showcasing the brightest talents in contemporary craft and design’, Renegade launched in Chicago in 2003. Its founders were looking for a new way to bring together the emerging community of DIY crafters and independent makers in a way that would appeal to a younger demographic than the typical craft fair. And they succeeded with very popular outings now in Austin, Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, here in San Francisco and back home in London (where Renegade launched in 2008 and 2011 respectively).

At 11am this morning there was a crowd outside Fort Mason waiting for the doors to open. And when they did, it wasn’t a Macy’s Sale rush, but a crowd curious and charmed. For a while I felt that too. I managed to make it down the three aisles of wares, and caught glimpses of stands and pieces that I liked, and thought I might make it back to.

Amongst these, the sheet dresses from reclaimed fabric by Oakland based Field Day and the gorgeous textiles of Jamie Lau Designs. There were Peg and Awl's curious objects and homewares made from reclaimed materials, and wonderful wooden frames from Young American Collective. Printed materials in abundance but those from design studios Honey and Bloom and Satchel and Sage stood out. And for whimsy and wit, of someone else’s The Poetry Store and your own, The Letter Writers Alliance.

But in spite of the finely curated creative talent and a buzzing atmosphere, I kept getting distracted by the exit, the Oracle team outside the windows of Fort Mason’s pier and that city by the bay. And I kept going back not to booths but that phrase that flies in the UK but definitely not in California: ‘I can’t be bothered.’ Which means, in a petulant teenager sort of way, I’m not in the mood.

I only realized quite how fast I’d negotiated the fair once I got back in my car and noticed that I still had money left on the meter. Always a surprise for someone who usually has to leg it back to the car in time. Maybe it was the long lingering summer fog; maybe just too much to see and too many stands; too many granular details in too large a space.

So how to recover the rest of the day? If I’m in the city, that usually means choosing a neighborhood and going for a wander, and today that involved heading to NOPA for crafts within a city context. Which meant starting with the classic store Rare Device for notebooks and newish store Magpie and Rye for browsing ecclectic accessories.

But if I’m honest the real reason I headed over to Divisadero was for the latest venture from Boor Bridges Architecture, The Mill. Last week, I’d made it over to another recent opening by this firm Equator's new coffee bar at Proof Lab Surf Shop; and an earlier venture Sightglass remains a favourite beacon on Seventh Street.

So, in spite of the concerns around gentrification (along with newly opened Bi-Rite), The Mill’s light-filled, and people filled, space started to still my beating heart. Sipping tea (I know coffee lovers), and eating toast, everything was back to being ok with the world.  As Nigel Slater would say: “It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you. ”

The day had taken a turn.

There are the things that people make, and then there are the situations that we craft. Sometimes it's just about working out how they fit together.  

storytelling

I have a high propensity for trying to make awful situations better. It’s the Ephron-Defence. In the screenwriter’s approach to life something painful can be made less so through telling a story. Whimsy or wit, sentiment or structure, can be imposed on something messy and complicated. Nora Ephron sums it up this way; in the eighties novel Heartburn, loosely based on the breakdown of her marriage, she has her narrator explain:

 "Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me.

Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much.

Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it."

And this:

 “She must be feeling better,” said Ellis. “She’s making jokes.”

“She makes jokes even when she’s feeling terrible,” said Vera. “Don’t let her fool you.”

“Why do you have to make everything into a joke?” asked Diana.

“I don’t have to make everything into a joke,” I said. “I have to make everything into a story. Remember?”

“How do you feel?” asked Eve.

“Hurt. Angry. Stupid. Miserable.” I thought for a minute. “And guilty.…It’s like a beautiful thing that suddenly turns out to be broken into hundreds of pieces, and even when you glue it back together it’s always going to have been horribly broken.”

I’ve thought about this a lot recently. I’m aware that I have a tendency to reconfigure the narrative in a more positive direction when writing Joe’s Daughter. It doesn’t mean there’s no grit, but it does mean that it won’t appear here as a subject (although it does appear here in The Independent and here on Good Therapy). Because it’s already there, always; it’s the reason this exists.

I know what it is to drop a parent off at a psychiatric ward two days before Christmas; of wondering this time when my mum says goodbye, whether it is for real and forever; of hanging up Skype with my dad, each week, guilty and upset because he is so, so tired and the only one still there; of driving a mother who is raving to a doctor’s appointment hopeful and expectant, and driving her home again afterwards frustrated and confused, with no plan and nothing changed; of loosing, slowly, by degrees, someone that I love, and being unable to recover her.

None of this is fine. None of it is ok. This isn’t what I want. But I do get to choose, not only how I define my relationship and my position to it, but also the story that I tell and the tone that it takes.

I know that I will always lean to the positive-side and I know that I will always try to fix something. So if I suggest a song or a movie trailer, a blog or a book, an artist or an article, that is designed to make you feel better, that might lighten the mood and amuse you, it's not because I don’t care or I don’t take it seriously. It’s because I do, and I do. I’d just rather we talk in that territory, that the vehicle for getting through is more beautiful, more hopeful, and more joyful, than the thing we’re trying to deal with.

In the domain of science, rather than rom-coms, the Wellness Consultant Taylor Ross has discussed this necessity of owning our own narrative. She posits that how we articulate the story of our lives, and how we narrate where we have come from and who were are, even if the content is bad, affects our stance on it.  Which means in effect that creating stories can help us become more confident with our own material.

And if we’re still thinking in the realm of the Ephron-Defense, then we’re thinking too about happy endings; it’s a non sequitur:

“It has a happy ending, but that’s because I insist on happy endings; I would insist on happy beginnings, too, but that’s not necessary because all beginnings are intrinsically happy, in my opinion. What about middles, you may ask. Middles are a problem. Middles are perhaps the major problem in contemporary life.”

So it’s not just how we tell our stories, the middles of our lives, but how we end them too, that matters. This time we can look to Dr Christine Carter for the ‘science of happy endings'. In Raising Happiness, she explains that how we end something impacts our entire experience of something; if we end something on a positive note, we’ll evaluate that whole thing more positively (the other factor is how we felt at the moment that our emotions peaked in intensity): “How long an event lasts doesn’t affect how we remember it. So getting over negative emotions quickly is not as important as ending on a positive note”. In short, happy endings can “diminish the effects of the negative experience.” How we end, as well as how we tell, our stories has an impact. 

And I know that I still believe, in spite of and not because of, in happy endings. Even if I don’t always get to choose what they are or when they happen, I can choose the story I tell you, as well as myself, those beginnings, middles and ends.

be local

My son and I have a tradition: once a week we don’t get in the car. I realize that depending on where you are reading this, that statement is either completely nonsensical or obvious. We live in a small town in northern California, and the car gets us places, to other places. Occasionally, though, we want to stay put.

Our day-about-town, otherwise known as ‘Neighborhood Day’, typically follows the same routine: We walk down the hill, we go to the playground, we have coffee at the roastery (well, he has hot chocolate), we play in the creek, and we walk up the hill again (with a picnic from the local bakery half way up).

I remember walking to the shops with my mum when I was a kid. I think all they had was a 7-11, a sweet shop, maybe a launderette. And the trip was all concrete, roads and pavement. But these slow days always felt like a treat. Maybe it had something to do with the conversations we had on the way over, her hand in mine.

But this week, when we got to the playground, the shape of our day went in a different direction. It was the annual maintenance day – all wheelbarrows and rakes to be borrowed, woodchips to be spread around, and old toys to be mended or thrown away. Sam and I jumped into the sand pit as is our habit, and then jumped into helping, which isn’t.

We spent an hour covered in dirt and dust, shoveling new sand on top of old, meeting parents we’d only made eye contact with, and kids who shared a similar interest as my son in tools and gardening equipment. Chatting about nothing at all, sharing a common purpose for a sliver of a day, developing a sense of belonging in a place we visit often enough that we should have one already.

Feeling part of something bigger than ourselves has an impact on how we feel about ourselves. And being with people not on a one-to-one level, but in a wider community sense can make us feel connected and, yes, more contented. In The Depression Cure, Stephen Ilardi writes that ‘Those lucky enough to find authentic community today are much happier (on average) than those who live in its absence.’

Given our hunter-gather background, our tribal ancestors, he argues that: ‘All of us are born to connect, hardwired to live in the company of those who know and love us. When we draw deep from the wells of social support—the care and concern of close friends, family and community—we’re more resilient to the slings and arrows of fortune, and we’re considerably less vulnerable to depression. Social connection helps push the brain in an antidepressant direction, turning down activity in stress circuitry, and boosting the activity of feel-good brain chemicals like dopamine and serotonin. That’s why it makes sense to swim hard against the tide of our “culture of isolation”…’

So, feeling good about ourselves, Sam and I left for our next stop, coffee, and stumbled on a new monthly flea market. Produced by a pop-up store – that itself is run by graphic designers, illustrators, and makers – temporary shops had been set up under tents and tarpaulin on the site of an old, disused garage. More wandering, more chatting. More conversations, this time about art colleges and adoption. Sam almost convinced me to take a dog home from the Milo Foundation taking advantage of my beatific mood, but we settled on an accordion instead.

Then it was time to go back up the hill, and more surprises. Not the dulcet tone of the accordion now accompanying our walk, nor that it didn’t annoy me in the way it usually would. No, this time it was ‘Gifts from the Street’. This is something I’ve only come to know in San Francisco. It makes my husband thrilled and makes me shiver. When people are done with something, if it's in good condition, they leave it on the street in front of their homes, and place a ‘free’ sign on it, for anyone to take. Walking around a neighborhood, you can find what is less attractively known as ‘salvage’—ranging from the icky such as towels and used coffee mugs to the, lets face it, rather spoiling—Camper shoes, in the right size and style. In my house, we have another rule, the husband can pick up stuff when I’m not with him. But that day, Sam and I walked by, and took home, a toy firetruck for him and a Le Creuset dish for me. Husband was oddly proud, I was oddly thrilled. Points for the street.

And I realized this is why we don’t get in the car, for the thing that we walk through, that is around us all the time. Not the air we breathe, but the community that surrounds us.

We’re taught to buy local, to eat local, but how about we be local? Actually live in the place that you live.

As a brit a long way from home, who has adopted this quirky small town, I realize the irony of this statement too. But if you can choose where you live, then do, and once you have, participate in that community; not in a running for councilor way, though that’s good too, but in an ego-less meandering and getting-to-know kind of way.

Writing in Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi got this sense of the smallness that can be our relationship to our community: ‘A community should be judged good not because it is technologically advanced, or swimming in material riches; it is good if it offers people a chance to enjoy as many aspects of their lives as possible, while allowing them to develop their potential in the pursuit of ever greater challenges’.

There’s an ice-cream store in town. When we lived in SF, we’d come here just for their salted caramel and honey lavender ice-cream. While waiting in line, I used to read the poster at the entrance, a list of all those things you can do to build a community. I’d think it was quaint. For all my adult life, I have lived in cities; now 8-months into living here, in small town America, I have not only a new home, but one of those things called community too.

Amongst the things the poster advises:

Turn off your tv; leave your house; look up when you are walking; use your library; fix it even if you didn’t break it; put up a swing; bake extra and share; open your shades; turn up the music; turn down the music; seek to understand;

and, my favourite, start a tradition.