What a perfect time and place to be writing this blog. 5:00 AM on January first. So quiet. The loudest sound is the clock ticking in the kitchen. Here in the living room, the Christmas tree is still looking robust and proud of itself. The strings of lights are unplugged but each of the fifty or so ornaments shines with its own unique significance. Oddly, these treasures include five old Thanksgiving turkey wishbones somehow saved in the box of Christmas decorations. Perfect! It’s a tree of metaphor – celebration, gratitude, memory, pride and continuation. It helps me arrange my inTACT reflections from 2014.
There’s so much to celebrate. A stranger returning to our space after a year’s absence would be struck by one big change (not just one hundred square feet of new office space. ). Products! A year ago, most conversations with consumers felt like this.
Them: “When?”
Us: “Soon”.
Now the shelves are loaded to capacity with labeled boxes of parts and materials and an inventory of inTACT Sketchpads and Erasers and packages of drawing sheets ready to ship. These past s many months the conversations have felt more like this:
Customer: “We’d like to order”.
Us: “How many?”
Customer: “two of each”.
Us: “We’ll ship Tuesday”.
So much to be grateful for, most of all the blind individuals and organizations – maybe a hundred for each of the twelve days of Christmas – who confirmed with their words and their purchases that the need and the drive to draw is not limited to people with sight. So many parents and teachers to thank for deciding that the skills and creative outlet offered by tactile drawing are too important for their kids to miss. And considering my E.A.S.Y. colleagues , I’m so glad Josh and Pohan (the youth caucus) ignored my doubts about the value of “all this social media crap”. The work they have invested in our web site and Facebook page and tweets and podcasts has brought us “likes” and “followers” and sales (no quotation marks necessary) – in short, survival and growth as a business. And then there’s Mike C., the other grownup among our founders, whose creative post-midnight procrastinations keep uncovering unexpected new materials, tools and tricks for making tactile drawings in service of art and STEM. And then there’s our Maryland family at NFB , especially Al and Mark, always behind us with support and sage advice, always in front of us with insights and activism.
And despite the friendly ridicule for geriatric memory glitches I tolerate from my inTACT colleagues, I do in fact have dozens of recollections from the year just past. There’s the marvelous young woman who always passes time at our booth at the NFB Convention and has fashioned enough tactile art to decorate our office walls. There’s the single mom of a sighted tot who bought a Sketchpad so she could teach him the alphabet. I’ll never forget the shout-out we got from outgoing NFB President Mark Maurer, remarking to a blind architect in General Session 2014 that inTACT drawing tools already offers what he dreams of. Or the email from a young woman inspired to begin drawing by our products, a message that began with “E.A.S.Y. is A.W.E.S.O.M.E. “
The ornaments on the inTACT 2014 Christmas tree do inspire gratitude, celebration and prideful recollection. But as the warm hangover (an oxymoron but the best I can do at the moment) dissipates with the early daylight of January 1, I’m compelled to look at what’s ahead of us. There’s so much engineering to do to bring the next inTACT products to market, and so much marketing to do to make the engineering worthwhile. We’ve made many promises in many places. There are presents to prepare for people we’ve come to care about, way before next Christmas. Can we really do all that? Of course! But first I need to get some sleep and take down the tree.