For 2022, wisdom from San Diegans who made the best of a hard year
Should the whiplashing year that was 2021 be forgot and never brought to mind ever again? Fine by me. But not before we remember the San Diegans who made the best of a hard time with the things they created, the risks they took, and the dreams they shared.
Here’s to some of my favorite column subjects of 2021, and to the wisdom we can all take into the New Year.
Tell your truth
For La Mesa author Chris Baron, it was channeling his memories of being a shy, overweight kid into “The Magical Imperfect,” a middlegrade novel that transformed its outcast protagonists into empathetic everyday heroes.
For recent UC San Diego graduate Kevin Vincent, it was using rope, tree trunks, childhood memories and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 to create “Material Memory,” his beautiful and visceral exhibition at the Oceanside Museum of Art.
Whether it was members of the San Diego Memoir Writers Association taking on their great unknowns with the pieces featured in the group’s “Shaking the Tree 3: I Didn’t See That One Coming” collection, or poet Lora Mathis providing new context for her soul-bearing poems in the updated version of her 2015 collection, “The Women Widowed to Themselves,” San Diego’s creators made 2021 better by sharing the stories they needed to tell and we needed to hear.
Live your dream
Danielle Nicki didn’t give her screenwriting hopes a shot until 2013, when she was a working mom with a job at an insurance company.
Eight years later, the former South Bay resident was one of eight emerging writers chosen for a career-boosting accelerator program sponsored by the New Yorkbased Women’s Weekend Film Challenge.
Almost 30 years after an epileptic seizure forced Richard Farrell to forget his dreams of being a pilot, the Point Loma resident was celebrating the paperback release of “The Falling Woman,” his debut thriller involving one plane crash and multiple epiphanies.
And in February, choreographer and arts administrator Anjanette Maraya-Ramey triumphed over a cancer diagnosis and the challenges of the COVID-19 stay-tohome order to open the multicultural, multigenerational Maraya Performing Arts Center in Chula Vista. “I have fought through so many hardships before,” MarayaRamey said. “I just thought, ‘I will find a way.’ ”
Express yourself
How do you make sense of (another) crazy year?
If you’re the creative type, you make art. Lots of it.
In 2021, Sara Watkins, the fiddle-playing cofounder of San Diego’s Nickel Creek, soothed our collective nerves with “Under the Pepper Tree,” a lockdown-inspired collection of hushed lullabies and glowing campfire classics. Rancho Bernardo fabric artist Gloria Hazel used her downtime to expand her quilting skills and tap into the therapeutic power of turning scraps into art. The stunning results were on display in “Expressive Liberations,” an exhibit of fabric art from the San Diego People of Color Quilt Guild held in the fall of 2021 at the Visions Art Museum in Liberty Station.
And for Switchfoot singer and songwriter Jon Foreman, the stresses of 2020 were the inspiration for 2021’s “Departures,” a solo album whose songs of fortifying resilience and hard-won joy were both a reflection of the chaos and a manual for surviving it.
“For me, music has always been part of this larger conversation where the most important parts of my life are challenged and maybe transformed,” Foreman said in February. “I’m hoping this album will continue the conversation which has brought me here.” We’re still listening.
Have faith
When this old world starts getting you down, think of Sapphire the half-blind and partially paralyzed loggerhead sea turtle.
Sapphire’s life at the Living Coast Discovery Center in Chula Vista was improved considerably this year, thanks the special free-of-charge wetsuit created for her by the humans at O’Neill Wetsuits in Santa Cruz.
The wetsuit helped solve the buoyancy issues that made it hard for Sapphire to eat and sleep, and she is back to being the serene star of Living Coast’s Shark & Ray Experience.
If you are wallowing in bad vibes, you could also think about Jess Baron, founder and executive director of the San Diegobased Guitars and Ukes in the Classroom.
After a May column, in which Baron shared the challenges and rewards of bringing music education to kids during the pandemic, readers flooded her with offers of guitars, ukuleles and financial support.
If you need further boosting, consider the story of Run for Cover bookstore owner Marianne Reiner.
When Reiner had to close her Ocean Beach oasis in July of 2020, friends and loyal customers helped Reiner start an Adopt-A-Reader program, which ended up providing at least one new book a month to 25 sixthgrade students at Ira Harbison Elementary School in National City. In May of 2021, Reiner and I chatted about her postCOVID chapter and her dream of adding a second class to the program.
The response from readers was so enthusiastic, she is now sending a monthly shipment of new books to 130 students at schools in Barrio Logan and City Heights.
As we all contemplate the clean slate of the year 2022 and how we might want to make our mark, it helps to remember that there are many wonderful people out there doing wonderful things. And that we can always be one of them.
“These books are changing lives, and you are all a part of it,” Reiner wrote on Facebook after meeting with some “Adopt-A-Reader” recipients at Horace Mann Middle School earlier this month.
“Thank you.”