The Sign We've Been Waiting For
on making a future for ourselves
Once upon a time, Working Class Acupuncture had a beautiful clinic in the Lents neighborhood, with a beautiful community-funded mural on the side of the building, and a beautiful, custom-built, old-school neon sign on the front.
WCA Lents was our first experience with getting support from anyone other than our patients to make a clinic. Prosper Portland gave us funding to renovate the building, and then they gave us a $10,000 grant for the sign. We opened WCA Lents in 2012, and we held our first POCA Tech student clinics there in the fall of 2015. And then in November (during a student clinic shift, actually) the building suffered a two-alarm fire that probably started with the wiring in the ceiling, so by the time we realized there was a fire, it was already too late. It gutted the clinic. From that point on, all the mail we got from our insurance company came from their Catastrophic Losses Department (that was literally the return address).
Which is what it felt like.
We tried to re-open a clinic in the Lents neighborhood but we couldn’t find any suitable spaces, and so in 2016 we moved six miles east to Rockwood. The building where our clinic had been eventually got torn down. And the sign? We loved that sign and we couldn’t bear to see it scrapped, so the nice people at Ramsay Signs cleaned off the soot, built a big crate for it, and brought it to my garage. Where it sat in the dark for almost eight years, because it had nowhere else to go.
Until yesterday morning.
My partner Skip with the sign in the garage, right before Ramsay Signs came back with a crane and a winch on a truck.
This is not something you see every day on our street: a 500 pound, $10,000 sign floating through the air.
This is the sign securely strapped in for its journey back to Ramsay Signs’ workshop to replace the old phone number, before it goes back into use at our new clinic, WCA North.
It’s all Highly Symbolic.
WCA North represents a big transition for us; it’s the first WCA clinic opened by one of the next generation of community acupuncturists. Our beautiful sign now has somewhere to go, thanks to all the time and love and labor that Sara Biegelsen put into creating a clinic for her neighborhood.
We made an acupuncture school because we wanted to give community acupuncture (including, especially, WCA) a future. Having a school has felt like a heavy lift; it hasn’t been easy. A catastrophic fire in the student clinic was just one of the challenges. At times it’s felt like the universe was saying to us, “Making a future is an awful lot of trouble -- are you sure you want one?”
And it feels really good to respond, definitively, YES. Yes, we’re sure. Yes, we want a future.
Watching the WCA Lents sign levitate out of our driveway and glide through the air, on its way to becoming the WCA North sign, feels like the universe heard our YES. The future we wanted is happening! Stay tuned for photos of the sign in its new home — I can’t wait to see it light up.