In 2019 the New York Jets updated their logo and uniforms for the first time since 1998. Their fanbase had clamored for a change and were hoping to bring back the badass logo/uniforms of the 1980s Sack Exchange-era. What the team ended up releasing was an abomination and slap in the face to every poor bastard Jet fan in existence. The only thing worse than the uniforms was the coach who was picked to oversee the players donning them: Adam Gase.
This week the New York Jets updated their uniforms, five years too late, to the ones fans had been hoping for back in 2019, wiping away the stench of the Gase uniforms and hopefully bringing a new beginning to the team.
I bring this up because, like the Jets, we’ve recently changed our logo.
Here at Thinking Man, we like to keep full disclosure with our dear readers. We’re like a family here on Substack, after all. For those of you that have been here a while—hi and thanks for the support, it means a lot. To newcomers who have subscribed since the advent of our new fig and mushroom logo, we hope we’ve been everything you hoped we’d be and more.
April 2024 marked a new age and beginning for our publication. When Melissa first conceived the idea for Thinking Man, the logo she chose to welcome this work was inspired by Rodin’s The Thinker. It was a good logo and served the publication well.
Then one day, everything changed.
Growing up, figs (fico in Sicilian, which I had only known the fruit as until I got to college) were a staple in my life. My Nonno Sal had a beautiful fig tree in his concrete enclosed garden in Queens since the 70s. The tree supplied plump, sweet green figs to my family ever since he first planted it.
When Nonno passed in 2022, something told me I needed to take up his mantle. It’s been a task I’ve failed miserably in attempting ever since, given that he was a shoemaker and spent his life working with his hands. Everything in my grandparents’ house had been built or repaired by him, so me filling those shoes was basically off the table.
His other field of expertise was gardening. The 6x8 garden he built in the alleyway behind his home produced vegetables for our dinners at least six months out of the year. My undertaking of gardening was also a bust. Overplanting resulted in massive crowding that ate up a bunch of my free time and bore little fruit—literally.
I was at a loss. With his audience looking down at me from the sky above, I needed to act fast. I couldn’t afford to fail at everything I had apprenticed under him my entire childhood. There was one thing left to try: I was going to plant my own fig tree.
The investment was minimal. A big pot, filled with compost, would house the little sapling. Unlike my gardening, I decided to research the ever-living hell out of how to actually make this work. This time, I was certain to have gotten it right. Once finished, I set the pot up on my parents’ brick porch, and the soon-to-be tree was left to do the rest of the work itself. Shortly thereafter Melissa aptly named the tree Sal, after my grandfather.
One morning, over a year after its initial planting, something caught my eye as I glanced over at the tree before leaving the house. A mushroom had sprouted up from Sal’s pot. I was floored. There the pot was, sitting all by itself up on the porch. Somehow a mushroom spore was able to float its way there, taking up shop in Sal’s home. It was beautiful.
When you see a mushroom, you may not realize that it’s the fruiting body of mycelium—which is basically the fungus’s roots. Mycelium does some pretty amazing things. In forests they act as a network, connecting trees to one another—helping them share water between each other and forming a means of communication amongst the forest. In essence, they help the trees grow.
In conversation with Melissa and myself when discussing how to move forward with Thinking Man, we decided a new logo would go well with the new structure of the publication. Figuring out what the new logo would be had been difficult, until it hit me.
Like the potted fig tree named Sal, people grow. We act and learn and live life, expecting to grow—in this case, into a regular old fig tree. Until one day a spore—an idea—comes floating your way. Suddenly that idea plants itself inside of you and takes you on a very different path. The roots may take hold, connecting you to others and opening you up to new things you may have never considered. You’re still the same you, but you have a new idea—a new thought that wasn’t there before. It may not change the way you look or act, but it could change the way you think, just from being there.
That’s us. We’re the spore. Hopefully we can help each other grow, too. Thanks for supporting.
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Great idea, love the story about the mushroom. A tree hugger here!!
Sweet! : )