Sometimes the most memorable life lessons are learned in the randomest of places. This is one I picked up in pottery class about how sometimes perfection is overrated.
My newest ceramic creation is sitting on the dusty top of my studio desk. My pottery teacher is standing next to me with her arms folded and we're both scrutinizing the jug that we'd just unloaded from the kiln.
It's slightly lopsided and the lip rises up slightly right before a gentle dent pushes down.
"The glaze job is magnificent," she says. "You need to find out what you did wrong with the recipe so we can recreate that."
"I thought I followed the recipe exactly," I told her.
I looked over at the half-filled bucket where the rest of my glaze mixture was stored under the table. It had a masking tape label pasted on top with thick black marker that read "Straw 125 blooper," because it was supposed to be "Straw 125" but I'd messed up somehow.
But then I thought about all the measuring and the ingredients and the mathematical conversions involved in glaze mixing and realized that it wasn't all that surprising that I'd messed it up.
"Well whatever you did, it made it better," she said, picking up the jug. "Look how the glaze turns bright green here as it gathers inside the lip."
"It's crooked," I tell her.
"It's beautiful," she says, turning the jug in her hands. She flipped it upside down, examining the sculpted foot that propped it up.
"The foot is nicely trimmed," she added.
The jug was straw colored, a clear, clean yellow-green at the top that changed, as it ran over the billowy middle, darkening and resting heavily upon the shaped foot. The thickened glaze near the bottom created a brown shimmery glitz that hid and peeked out only when it was moved. The foot was a rich buttery caramel.
"It has almost a musical look that animates it."
She never likes my pots and so I can't believe that she's saying this.
"But your clay wasn't exactly centered on the wheel, and that's why it leans."
"I need to practice centering," I said.
"No it's perfect, we should enter it in the show instead of your old man sculpture," she tells me.
"Really?!"
"Centered pots are boring, the fact that this one isn't makes it interesting," she says, "Also the glaze job is beautiful and the jug is clean looking. It looks like you tipped it on purpose."
She passed the jug to me and I held it, smoothing my hands over the grooves on the outside, lining up my fingertips with the ridges that they'd etched when the clay was still soft and wet on the wheel.
"It's whimsical," she said.
I didn't believe her.
She entered my jug into the art show anyway, naming it "The musical pot." It was going to be a juried show where people could purchase the displayed art. The proceeds were all going to charity and the show was a few weeks away.
For weeks after that jug, I'd focused intently on centering, determined never to create another "musical" piece of pottery.
I spent hours on the kick wheel, throwing, centering, pulling, and shaping ball clay until my hands were callused from manipulating the gritty material.
I produced massive amounts of teacups, jugs, pots and bowls-- all of them perfectly centered. I could practically center a mound of clay with my eyes closed and in fact, I got to the point where I couldn't even make a "musical" pot if I had tried.
Once you know how to center, it comes so naturally that you forget how you ever messed it up.
"Straw 125 blooper" was a hit in the studio and the other students, seeing the interesting glaze job on my jug, raided the bucket until it was completely gone. I couldn't recreate it because I had no idea what I had done to mess up the recipe.
That's the thing about mixing glazes, every time you make a batch, it's different, even when you don't mess up.
I had stopped thinking about the show because I really only care about things like that if I'm going to make money on them and this wasn't the case, so... I was surprised when my teacher breezily mentioned that my piece had won third place and that the dean of the art dept. had purchased it.
"He paid $50 for it?" I said in amazement.
"Yes," she said smugly, "And he wants you to make him six matching teacups with saucers so he can have a set."
"No way," I said.
"And he wants the cups to be tilted the same way that the jug is," she said. "Same colors too, do you have any of your 'Straw blooper' left?"