I arrived at the course on my bicycle mid-morning. I could see a group that looked like Hannah and company in a large tent structure. I walked around to one end and came in. Upon entering, I said hi to Deacon Derek, and then sat down and talked to Liam, Hannah’s husband. He asked about what else I was up to, and I talked a bit about the church where I was working, my dissertation, etc.
I would later learn that foster placements are exhibiting similar movement, largely because of housing affordability and space requirements.
I asked him what he’d been up to and he talked about his new job working for a dog-sitting company. He said the business is coming toward where they live, following the path of where people are moving to as they leave downtown for affordability. He then asked about how we’ve been liking our new city, and we talked about various perks. He mentioned he’s from Iowa originally and doesn’t really miss the snowy winters.
Introductions are an important relational practice in a networked community with lots of growth and also modest turnover. I almost always had to be introduced multiple times before people remembered me.
Others began to arrive, including Michael, whom Liam introduced me too. Michael came with Reggie, whom they introduced me to as well. I told him we’d met once or twice at other events. People started heading over in groups to get putters, etc. I asked Liam if I could join their group, which he said was fine. It ended up being us, Deacon Derek (their team’s facilitator), and Marie, their third mentor.
We picked different color golf balls at the counter, with the help of an attendant who had obviously been briefed that a large pre-paid group was onsite today. When we headed for the course, we saw that the first couple holes were pretty busy, so Liam suggested we play the “back nine” first. The golf course is very new, in what I think of as one of the city’s now “100% gentrified” areas of new development catering to highly paid young people.
Liam explained to me that the owner is a Tapestry donor whom they had known from their time in another city. I assumed this is the person whose family foundation is largely supporting Tapestry, but I didn’t check that out with Liam in the moment. I’ve since confirmed it via public philanthropy records. Liam told me about the various artists who were brought in to help design the course, and the way that the unfolding holes tell the story of the history of the region. Each hole had a plaque with some kind of explanation of the history. I don’t think we engaged with these plaques—except for sometimes pressing the buttons that played thematically appropriate sound effects.
The group’s attention is often on Reggie: he usually “teed off” first, got the most feedback and encouragement, etc. At the same time, I noticed again that sometimes all of the adults get talking to each other and so Reggie ends up on his own.
Reggie verbalized quite often in the beginning that others were doing better than him (“I’ve got the worst score”), even though that wasn’t true. I and others took opportunities to tell him that wasn’t true, and I noticed in myself that I tended to “ham it up” a little more when I was doing poorly, to emphasize that none of us is perfect.
Our group moved pretty slowly, and I once encouraged a single (child with mother) behind us to go ahead and skip us. After a few holes where it became clear we were keeping the people behind us waiting, a few of the adults (and sometimes me) took a little more initiative about trying to keep us moving along.
Noticing here that knowing the “rules” of mini-golf, sort of a ridiculous phrase already, is probably a marker of white, middle-class culture. Is this an example of Tapestry socializing these markers?
As we went along, I noticed Reggie not verbalizing so much about how he was doing, or not. He would sometimes take liberties, either giving up or moving the ball. At one point, Marie pointed out that if your ball was touching someone else’s or was too close to the edge, you could put it one club length away from the edge. Reggie said he didn’t know that. It made me wonder how I’d learned that. How do you learn the rules of mini-golf?
Toward the end of the back nine, Hannah came over and chatted with us a bit. She said she wanted to get our picture underneath a gate that was part of the course’s thematic design. We lined up and took one. And then Hannah asked Reggie to get out of the picture, which he didn’t hear at first so she had to ask again. She seemed to kind of lower her voice when she said “so I can put it on the Internet.”
Some other impressions of Reggie: He is quiet but not withdrawn. He smiles and laughs. When he initiates a conversation, he usually talks to himself rather than the other person, just kind of putting the comment out there. When he speaks to adults directly (or at least when he spoke to me), he was what seemed almost awkwardly polite, formal pleases and thank yous and whatnot.
During the hole acknowledging Indigenous history and experience in this region, Liam asked if anyone wanted some bottled water and went to get some for us. While he was gone, I noticed Reggie saying something to Marie in discrete tones with a posture removed from Michael and me. Marie later shared that Reggie had been up very late the night before, and she said she has noticed other times when Reggie came to events tired. It sounded like a neutral noticing on her part, not phrased as any kind of problem to be solved.
We skipped the 18th hole because Liam pointed out that, if we played it, it would take our ball. We then started back at the beginning with the hole that tried to honor the Indigenous history of this area.
Hole number 2 was a Western-style saloon, and Marie asked if I could take a picture of the team there. I said sure and suggested that the group stand on the “customer” side of the bar, which Liam said was a good idea. Someone asked if we could see the bartender in the photo in addition to all of them, with their backs to me. I said they could. Then I suggested they come around to the other side, and Reggie immediately put his head down on the bar. I think someone else said “No, you should be in this one, this will be just for us” or something like that. I sent the photos to Hannah.
Sometime shortly after this, Reggie left for a little while and came back with a catering tray sandwich in each hand (roast beef). We had to wait for him to finish one of them to start that hole. At one point Liam offered to hold his sandwich, which he accepted. Once he was down to just one, he continued to eat the sandwich and putt with just one hand.
When we finished the ninth hole, we walked back to play the 18th. Reggie said it was the easiest one. He hit it, and got a “2” because it didn’t go in the special rotating hole. When I started to go, he said “don’t try to time it out, just hit it.” And I did and got a hole in one.
Shortly thereafter the attendant from the registration booth appeared to ask who got the hole in one. Recognizable music played as well. She gave me a fortune on a little slip of paper (they’re supposed to be generated by a fortune-telling automaton, an artifact that has a special relationship with the city, I’ve since learned). The woman with the fortune also had a basket and held it out for me to choose something. That attracted a lot of kids’ attention, including Reggie’s. He grabbed a lollipop, like I did, and she didn’t hassle him and neither did I. She chose to hold the line with the group of younger kids (not with Tapestry) who arrived to try to do the same. She let them look but didn’t give anything.
We headed back. I think by then Hannah had arrived to usher us along, because either the birthday girl or the birthday cake maker wanted everyone to be there. We got back to the group’s area and everyone was hanging out, playing Uno, eating snacks, catching up. Hannah announced that we’d be singing happy birthday to the person whose birthday it was and whose it had just been, said their names, and then started the singing. I sat between a very small black boy, whom I had noticed was very quiet and not being interacted with by adults before we started the golf. Now he was talking to an adult, who I heard along the way was his mentor.
Perhaps due either to my framing or their interpretation, almost all of the conversations I have with mentors about my research end up focusing on the marketing and fundraising value of the digital stories as products.
On my other side was Marie, who I started chatting with. She was on not quite the first Tapestry team but a pretty early one, she said, and had been involved for like three years. She asked if I was going to be a mentor, and I started, for the first time, giving my spiel about how I was a researcher interested in digital storytelling. She said she didn’t remember the digital stories necessarily from the training, but she seemed to get the idea. She mentioned being in sales and thinking it was a really good idea for us to have some media that helped to explain what Tapestry teams were.
In the process, she told me about a racial and economic justice organization she is associated with and talked about how the attendant told her the owner would probably want to donates some free mini-golf and perhaps also some Giants tickets. I think her point was that people will support Tapestry if they know what it is. She also spoke passionately about how our culture has bifurcated life into “work” and “recreation” and so most people don’t think about any responsibilities they have to their community. Later, before we left, I asked her when the event was, and she told me she’d meant to give me a flyer. She said I could volunteer or I could contribute to the Go Fund Me and I told her I would (see notes on my encounter with her at the event).
We got pulled away from this conversation for a mentor picture. Hannah told me they were “making me a mentor.” She joked that it was all the male mentors we were waiting for for the picture. Once we got the mentors, Hannah said “OK, now time for the youth too,” but they had all kind of dispersed, five of them to a fussball table where Reggie was playing against a tall black girl with braids who I recognized from the Tapestry website or Instagram.
I ended up in a conversation with Michael and mentor Joey. They talked, with a brainstorming or supportive tone, about what they do on mentor outings, besides getting something to eat. Michael talked about going to a park because Reggie likes to be outside. Joey mentioned that once a quarter they (he said “he”) tried to arrange for something “out of the ordinary,” like going to a museum on MLK Day.
At some point he asked if I knew Sam (but of course he used his real name), and I blanked for a second and then Joey said he was a founder and I realized who he meant. I used that as an opportunity to raise with these two that I’m a researcher and I am use to referring to him as Sam. I told them I went to seminary with Hannah and studied media making and meaning making (dodging Michael’s “What’s your research question?” question, I think because I didn’t have concise articulations yet). I generally tried to emphasize “Don’t want to force anyone to do anything, but we’d love to have some media exploring what a Tapestry team is, possibly used in training, etc.”
At some point Hannah and Liam materialized, and then we were talking to a short woman in a t-shirt and baseball cap who introduced herself with a handshake and her full name and it became pretty clear that she was the owner. She said we were wise to come early because this would be the busiest day of the year (so far?) because of the great weather on a Saturday. Somehow the final hole came up, and she asked to see my fortune and explained some of the personalization on there. She held the floor for a while and then excused herself.
To comply with child protection policies, they must have dropped Reggie off first.
From here we began dispersing, Marie getting Reggie and Michael and heading for their car. I headed for the nearest coffee shop to write this, but it was in the adjacent “food cart park” which was closed for a private party. I biked to a restaurant on the water and wrote these notes on the porch.
Data collection
- Field notes?: Yes
- Audio recording?: No
- Photographs?: Yes
Significant observations
- Already I notice my awareness of the repertoire of representational practices coming into focus through the two incidents of taking photographs of Reggie and his team. I felt before I intellectually understood that these moments are markers both of the brokenness of the foster system and of the pragmatic, resilient adaptations youth and mentors make to redeem that brokenness.
Interpretive insights
- It occurred to me this time around on noticing the “adults talking to each other, not the youth” phenomenon that the All Tapestry dynamic was probably just hugely different from mentor team outings. I strongly suspected that the young people get more individual attention in their team-only time and that All Tapestry is a little bit more about the mentors and young people connecting to their peers, to the directors, to their teams’ facilitators, etc. My sense two years later is that this is true. The voice memo from my first All Tapestry is a good example of noticing an interesting pattern but jumping to incorrect conclusions about it. In this case, I assumed that the difficulty of centering individual youth within teams was part of why the directors are scheduling this style gathering less often. In fact, these gatherings are a chance to interrupt that dynamic with a different, larger sense of community. And scaling back on how often they convene these gatherings mostly has to do with the challenges of getting a large portion of the network together in a common location convenient for many teams.
Implications / reflections
- My notes recorded that I was thinking a lot during this gathering about a conversation with Sam and Hannah in which I learned that the Tapestry youth don’t all necessarily understand that everyone participating in the program has had entanglements with the foster system. It seems to be a cultural norm of this community, especially when gathered in All Tapestry mode, that we don’t explore this element of the group’s shared experience. Obviously, this pattern allows everyone to lean into the recreational and (unconditional) presence dimensions of the group’s work (Tapestry is a normalizing, mainly fun experience—not therapy) but I’ve wondered what limitations it might impose on the group’s collective meaning-making, and perhaps also sense of agency. To put a finer point on it in the form of a question I’m not sure it would be appropriate for me to ask youth directly: “What, if anything, do the youth think they all have in common?”