I recently joked with a friend that amid such a sense of societal, and perhaps personal, unravel, we needed to "ravel." It feels true to our prevailing clusterfuck that I soon learned that "unravel" and "ravel" have the same meaning. So I'll instead opt for a different pair of words. In contrast to my feeling of being unmoored, I've, in part, been mooring myself to things. I have felt more drawn to objects and their physical presence recently, in opposition to our ethereal fog of doom. But rather than some kind of maximalist or consumerist call to invest in stuff over relationships, I've been looking at how different objects manifest ideas, represent community networks, and bring values into the public realm. This includes picking up a writing project on public drop boxes (more on this soon, hopefully) and an attempt to create an object of a very particular variety: an heirloom.

My personal brief didn't start with such hubris. In pandemic times, I'd gotten acquainted with the idea of a perpetual calendar—one that could be used year after year thanks to its focus on day of the month at the exclusion of day of the week and year—and set out to make one. It could have been easy, but my scope quickly ballooned: I would have one 3 1/2" x 4 7/8" card for each day, and I would hand-print the day at the top of all 365. That would necessitate type: letters and numbers with which to print, which I added to my project. I drew a font to fit the card, and I began to carve it from a linoleum block. The cards could carry birthdays, death-days, anniversaries, the like, which would accrete overtime, and past mine. Where would I put these cards? The vessel also felt key, and we had some wood left over from another project that I needed to cut down before a move anyway; I aimed to repurpose it into a simple box. You may not be surprised to hear that this project started in 2021 and is today very much unfinished. Even accounting for the 2.5 years where its pieces sat in storage while we lived in Nairobi, it's been a lengthy undertaking.

The project is demanding enough and, by its nature, theoretically timeless that the allure of the calendar becoming an heirloom entered my head long before a single date had been printed or two slats glued together. My immediate reaction to this aspiration was to laugh at myself. I was reminded of my sister's college graduation. Her southern university, steeped in lore and pageantry, had advertised the tagline "Make a New Tradition Today" from every signpost. I, all of 14, found this ridiculous. A tradition, I posited, could not be termed one until it had been repeated. It needed time to mature, to become ingrained in a community's life. "New tradition," my slightly wayward though adamant teen logic went, was a contradiction in terms. I feel similarly about heirlooms. One cannot be created, because it lacks the meaning imbued within one by people over time—meaning that transforms a mere object into something more. For a tradition or heirloom to come into being, it has to meet time on its own terms, to weather life and all its interruptions to see what sticks or what disrupts. Then one can ask if they endure and judge if they meet the standard. 

As I picked up the project on our return stateside, I subconsciously started to fill this hole in qualifications by layering a different patina of meaning onto the calendar, one that it had not yet earned through use. First, there were the errors. I'd largely done the design pre-Nairobi, and now I was often left befuddled and frustrated with my own plans. In one of many post-rationalizations of a screw-up into a design element, I'd made a type set with only one of every letter, which meant I couldn't print the full name of multiple months. Fine! SEPTEMBER would be SEPT MB R. How unique. I assembled the wood slats I'd cut for the box incorrectly, which required a pivot on how the cards would be stored. As minor mishaps started to feel a feature rather than a bug of the project, I took a hard line on embracing them: I would get only one shot at printing each card for each day of the year, no matter if that print also sported an ink smudge or the unintended serif of a carved glyph needful of refinement. 

A kind of happenstance, too, became a trend behind the materials I put into the calendar. There was the wood for the box to begin with, to which I added some metal handles laying around from a dresser refurb project never realized. I aimed to smooth the rough edges of the box by covering them with paint left over from a patio furniture sprucing project just concluded. In keeping with the little errors, neither addition fully came off: I installed some of the handles opposite to my intention, and in flipping them left errant holes behind (no hard line there). Three coats of paint later, the edges were still rough and the slats now featured a bit of bleed. I started to call it the Box of Errors and Happenstance.

 

As it were, both gave me fodder for my heirloom aspirations. The materials brought some pre-history to the ultimate form while the errors could be recast as marks of reality, an unearned sense of passed time, and bits of myself injected into the final form. An heirloom needs a story, and I was (am now) building one. Sure, that story might be "my uncle built this weird calendar box thing out of random stuff that was lying around," but it's a story nonetheless.

I marked up the first card with an event when my sister's birthday came back around in June, and despite all the unravel, the days have kept coming and going, often outpacing my attempt to stay a bit ahead of the actual day. This, despite all the unravel or ravel, has kept me moored, a physical embodiment that despite the horror, the days will go on and with them, the opportunity to bring about better ones.  

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As they do, I'll look forward to your company. Some upcoming things: I'll be talking about co-ops on a great panel hosted by House the Future on August 24th, on the social housing panel at the Yimbytown conference on September 16th, and about Homes for Living in a rescheduled event at NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge in October (more to come). I'm also excited to have been named a Next City Vanguard and am looking forward to learning in Philly with that crew in early October. Don't hesitate to look me up if you're coming through the militarized zone of Washington, D.C. in the meantime.