Holy Stitch! A Serra Mesa Pastor’s Unlikely Hobby

There’s the old adage that says “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” For Serra Mesa resident Mark Perry, learning to crochet kept both his hands and mind busy and helped him stay sober for the last 20 years.

Looking at Mark, you’d never guess him to be a guy who crochets. He comes across as a man’s man, with a bald head, a salt-and-pepper beard, and a lilting South African accent. He’s nearly obsessed with fishing and lobster hooping.

But sobriety often cracks open new corners of life, and for Mark, that meant picking up crochet hooks and yarn. Now, he’s crocheted more beanies than he can count, turning strangers into friends with one handmade hat at a time.

How It Began

Mark grew up in South Africa, and he and his sister ventured to the United States to attend college when he was 19. He went to a small religious college in Philadelphia. It was there that he learned about two things he’d never heard of before: ice hockey and beanies.

While walking to his first hockey game, Mark was bundled up in more layers than an onion, but with nothing on his head.

“Someone said, ‘You need a beanie,'” recalled Mark. But he didn’t know what a beanie was. At first, he was perplexed by the knit cap his friend told him to put on his head, but he was immediately grateful for the warmth it brought.

“I had such gratitude for that stupid beanie because there’s nothing in South Africa that got us prepared for the northeast in December.”

The beanie confusion escalated into even more confusion once Mark reached the hockey rink, expecting to see a field hockey game. “Where are the fields?” he asked his friends. “There are no fields. What the heck are you talking about? This is ice hockey,” his friends responded.

He had never heard of or seen the sport before, but he was instantly hooked. He got a job at a nearby ice rink as an ice monitor, where he learned how to skate from five and six-year-old hockey players, racking up a few stitch-worthy scars along the way. Within a year, he was playing hockey for his college.

After college, Mark lived in Atlanta for nine years and also got married. Alcoholism had crept its way into his life, yet in 2001, he was still presented with an opportunity to become the pastor of a church in the Birdland area of Serra Mesa. So he seized the opportunity, taking a job he jokes he probably shouldn’t have gotten and moved to San Diego, a place that reminded him of his home country.

Mark says of the San Diego New Church, “They were hiring a nut job. They just didn’t know it. It was near the end of my heavy drinking.” Despite the grip of alcohol on Mark, the church threw their support behind him. “They said, ‘Look, you’re a good guy. We like you. But you’ve got to do something about your drinking.”

And shortly thereafter, he did. And he remains the pastor of that very church today, still married to his wife, and with four adult children.

From Booze to Beanies

Always one with a need to stay busy, Mark fills his time fishing and tinkering with reels. After he quit drinking, there was more time to fill, and he’d eventually do that with crocheting.

The inspiration for Mark’s foray into the world of yarn began after friends of his stayed in San Diego one summer and left him a thank-you gift. That gift was a tote bag crocheted from plarn, or yarn made from local grocery store plastic bags. It was a utilitarian work of art, and it fascinated Mark.

Mark asked his friend for the pattern and coaxed his wife to teach him to crochet so he could make bags of his own as upcycled gifts. Mark made quite a few bags, but his hopes of crocheting as a diversion while in a meeting were crushed because, well, plastic is noisy.

“It doesn’t lend itself to a meeting,” Mark noted of the plastic bag crocheting. “It just annoys people. It’s noisy crocheting, so it’s not something I could do.”

Nonetheless, Mark was crocheting one of those very bags while sitting in an airport, and a burly Texas cowboy sat next to him. Expecting to be poked fun at, the man instead asked Mark what he was crocheting. Mark explained crocheting with plarn, and the gentleman told him that his wife crocheted chemo caps for the oncology unit of a hospital in Houston.

Mark was instantly inspired, thinking of Sharp Hospital, which is essentially a stone’s throw from his home. He got the crochet pattern from the Texan’s wife and got to work. First, he just wanted to see if he could make a beanie for himself to wear. Then he continued practicing until he had a stockpile of about 20 beanies.

He had a friend who’d recently been diagnosed with leukemia, so he’d begun to spend some time in the oncology unit and got to know the lead social worker.

“I called her up one day and said, ‘You know, this is going to sound weird, but I crochet and I’ve made all these hats. Where do I donate them for the chemo caps project?” he asked, referring to the program he’d learned about from the man he’d met at the airport.

The social worker was unaware of any such project at Sharp, so she and Mark initiated it together roughly 10 years ago. Mark spoke humbly of the gratitude the project had brought him, noting that patients or their loved ones would sometimes send him letters. Those letters were pure joy for him.

“Every once in a while, I would get a letter from the person or a spouse that would thank me and show a picture of the person [wearing the beanie]. It meant a lot to me to be able to do that,” said Mark.

The Current Crochet Situation

Since that time, Mark has further honed his skills with the crochet hooks, and now he can crochet with his eyes closed. He crochets at home, on planes, in meetings—nearly everywhere. It takes him just under three hours to crochet a beanie, and he uses them as a form of goodwill, paying it forward by giving his creations away.

Mark gives his beanies to flight attendants on his flights, to passengers and their babies, to co-workers, and to family and friends around the world. Mark also volunteers with incarcerated individuals and spearheaded a program that allows them to knit beanies using donated yarn.

At the end of it all, Mark is a man filled with gratitude. His hands stay busy, and he brings joy to others in a simple, but beautiful way.

“I tell people all the time, for an ordinary guy, I live an absolutely extraordinary life.”

Got spare yarn (soft, washable) or a group that could use a batch of beanies? Interested in learning to crochet beanies? Shoot me a note and I’ll connect you with Mark.