"Today," it started off with - always beginning with today. It was as if (for him) these interactions were not a conversational mode of engagement, but a place for one-way divulgences, a dear diary online.
"Today," he had written, "I got to use the wheel again in ceramics, used it for the first time in a long time."
I pictured the wheel in his ceramics class, in the heartland of Midwest America. Was the wheel small and resting on a table? Or much larger, on the ground? I decided it was the kind of thing you straddled, thick and grey between your legs. After throwing a moist heap to the batter-board, you would sit on a plastic stool and bend downward as the damp, crystalline structure spun through half cupped palms. In that small town class, there would be four or five students. Sitting quietly. All spinning clay.
"It blew my mind, the wheel," he said. "I would like to show you how."
Later, I presumed, he would ready up a pencil end for incised decoration. Square sort of patterns - that was very Romanesque. He was a son of the classics, he was straight-laced schooling. Post-modernism or the post-post or the new way, was too far from these smooth clay forms, from the Romans and their Greek antecedents.
The talk between us was faded out, it was old news; it was dead. I wondered now, almost a full year past, if it was graduation season in Iowa, or if the ceramics classes were still on.
