Pleasant Plum #10

First hour is Art class, and I’ve convinced the teacher to let me do pottery. I can’t draw worth shit after all, and I love working with clay. The smooth, calming feel of it through my hands is nice ease into the school day. Hey, it’s better than Calc. right off the bat, that for sure! The clay’s got a texture all its own, smooth and malleable, but once fired, tough, durable, and permanent. Until an accident shatters your creation it’s good to go forever.

The firing period is the most delicate where you have the least control. Screw up the pot, and it will explode inside the kiln, leaving nothing but pieces of a lost idea. Glaze that looks horribly ugly wet can become a vivid metallic raku after the intense temperature of the kiln. It’s like magic: pop it in as an ugly, un-solidified object and it comes out as an almost permanent piece of art.

Another reason I like pottery more than anything else is that the potter’s wheel is stuck in the back of the room by the window. I can watch the leaves fall as my foot pumps the pedal to keep the wheel spinning. It needs a constant rate, to slow and it’ll be uneven, to fast and the clay will fly.

The leaves remind me of a project we had to do, a portrait of a “natural process” art mirroring life and all that bull. It seemed super antithetical to me, it looks to me that life is a gradual process. Art, once your done creating, it’s done. Nothing is supposed to change. If paint fades-it is retouched. If ceramics chip, it’s mended to an original form.

At least my friends seem to change gradually. Jill seems to change her mind constantly about Clark College or Mt. Holyoke. Meredith says she “grows out of her boyfriends”--whatever that means. And it seems that I’m changing too…I need to go to college, I need a degree, I want to graduate. All this seems like sequential steps to a goal. It’s not very definitive. We are searching for a authoritive statement of who we are--and can’t find it.

At the end of first hour we all have to watch Channel One. It’s a High School News show that’s supposed to dumb down current events for our tiny brains, at least that’s probably what the network thinks. Anyway, we get free TV’s in the classroom because of the program.

But today, were not watching Channel One. The Art Teacher, Mrs. O has got it on CNN. My classmates’ faces are slowly turning from boredom to rapture. I want to know what’s going on too, and turn to the TV as I put my new sculpture into the klin. Wolf Biltzer is showing footage of New York City, and I’m told that the smoldering buildings are something called the “Twin Towers”.

In the back of the room, I can hear the muffled explosion as my ceramics burst in the kiln. Moments later another, more important sculpture collapses. Like a tall vase whose walls are too thick, one of the towers collapses on itself, sending a wall of what seemed like powdered clay out towards the cameras.

That memory is set permanent and immobile in the recesses of my brain. It’s an unyielding image in the aftermath and pressure of that year.

I figure that defining moments do occur after all, and that the firing process can be painful--especially for the Class of 2002 in the wake of a September day.