Take Care

My grandpa helped me buy my first car: a 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme with red velour bench seats and the gear shifter on the steering column. I loved that car! He taught me when to have the oil changed and when to rotate the tires. He told me, “If you take care of your car, your car will take care of you.”

That car brought me to high school every day, to my first afterschool job at the grocery store, and saw me safely through four years of college. I kissed a boy in that car, I drove my friends to concerts, squashed in like sardines, and I took care of her. I changed the spark plugs when I noticed an odd sound in the engine - it wasn’t even that hard! All it took was the time to notice the crackling sound and see the jumping spark.

When anthropologists dig up civilizations and they find pottery used to prepare meals, they learn so much about a culture and how the people cared for each other. What will future anthropologists find out about us? Plastic clothes from our Shein hauls? Did we care about who made those clothes we wore once and threw away? Or will they find the bones of my Oldsmobile? A well-loved pair of denim jeans, repeatedly repaired with whimsical designs and colors?

The repair was what we would call “visible mending” – an obvious patch, made to highlight the flaw as a feature, like kintsugi repairs using gold on broken ceramic. The gold highlights the break in a way that honors the journey of the bowl.

I thought about the futon’s possible alternate fate of being hauled out of his home and left on the curb, in the rain, waiting for the dump truck to pick it up. Now imagine that he watched his favorite movie on that futon, or that there was a particular spot where his dog liked to sleep on it. Then one day, it’s dragged outside and left amongst the trash. It’s too sad to consider, and I hurt my own feelings just thinking about it!

Instead, it now has a beautiful, hand-sewn patch, with careful sashiko stitches, true to its Japanese style, proudly showing its age, its rips and tears that tell a story. The futon had taken care of the man, and the man had taken care of it in return.

The labor of maintenance is an act of love and revolution. The things we use to take care of ourselves, to clothe ourselves, to prepare our meals, while they are objects, are also deeply human. To treat them with respect is humane, and somehow, doesn’t that reinforce our own humanity?

That’s the end of my story, but it’s also the beginning. This is why I’m calling my quarterly newsletter a Care Package. I love the idea of care packages sent to friends and family (balikbayan boxes for my fellow pinoys), boxes of cookies sent to your dorm room, or soups and cozy things sent to you when you’re sick.

I’m going to keep an archive of the Care Packages here, so if you ever need to clean out your inbox, go right ahead!

And here are the surprises I’ve collected for you!

• This dog and his monkey friend who bless my FYP

• Tom and his love for pigeons

• This celebration of gray hair

• The magic spells we cast to rid ourselves of hiccups

• Being in a secret club! (I’m in the Treasure Club and Decoder Club - shhhhh!)

If you want to catch me in the real world, you can always join me for an embroidery workshop - I would love to see your smiling face! I have a new Embroidery on Clothing class and some new locations in Oakland and San Francisco.