Slightly Off Center

I never know what to expect on Oregon Country Fair weekend. On the one hand, a lot of vendors, both art and food, are out in Veneta. So theoretically, that's fewer folks to split the sales pie. On the other hand, the customers may also be out there as well--or they may be all here at Market because the crowds (and the hippies) are all gone. It's a toss-up. I've had really good days and really terrible ones. The only way to find out which is to show up.

So this sunny sunflowery Saturday found me, slightly bleary and only a little late, setting up my booth on the Park Blocks. Lots of empty spaces, including the one right beside my. Lots of new vendors, too. You're guaranteed a space this weekend.

My first sale comes at 9 am, as I'm preparing to leave for Farmer's Market; second one is a quarter to 10 after I get back. She asks whether it's okay to sell before official opening--it isn't at Farmer's Market. I explain that they've had issues with people coming earlier and earlier to get first dibs on fresh produce, to the point that it was interfering with vendors' ability to get set up. So they have a hard start time, and you can get written up for selling early. Here on our side of the street, things are more relaxed. As long as you're ready to sell, you can be open whenever.

At least one of my customers says she comes down specifically to avoid the usual crowds. Several recognize my work from Tsunami Bookstore. One lady spots the animal banks, tells her companions that she bought them for her grandkids nearly 30 years ago. Then proceeds to buy a brontosaur and stegosaur for her great grandkids.

My friend Carleen comes in with a sad story--one of the plates from their anniversary set cracked. Can't figure out why, unless it's because the bottom is a little too thick. I happen to have one in exactly that size and pattern in the restock box, so replace it free of charge. (I stand behind my work.) And then the friend that came down to Market with her decides to buy her husband a cereal bowl, and maybe one for herself, and by the time she's finished, she has a set of four plus a salmon painted mug.

Had a nice talk on my glazing process with a young woman who goes on to tell me she's the studio tech for the community college in Coos Bay. I give her my card and call her attention to all the resources on this blog. (If you're reading this, Hi! I didn't get your name...)

A woman introduces herself as the daughter of Mildred Wasserman, a potter I knew from my Craft Center days. She was a retired nurse from Alabama who eventually set up a studio in her basement, even sold at Market for a year or two with Kathy Lee, who went on to share her booth with me when Mildred opted out. They're both passed away now; it was lovely to call them to mind. Daughter is there with her son, who says he remembers me too--he used to come in to the Center with grandma when he was six or seven, to play in the clay.

Talked with people from all over the country: Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, New Jersey, two different folks from Virginia. Some of them are trusting to their carry-on bags to get their pottery home, others take a card with my website, and the assurance that I'd be happy to ship their pots to them.

I turn the second page of my sale book just before 3 pm, but don't make any sales on page 3. Doesn't matter, we're still over $900 for the day. And I didn't have to drive to Veneta.

Last two days of Holiday Market still continue strong. My potter friend Cheri jokes about being a "thousandaire" on good days, and Thursday still made the grade. Noticing a lot of Christmas sweaters this time. Thursday it seems the geeks have taken over the form. Darth Vader sweater saying "Merry Sithmas." Black-and-white sweater featuring Jack Skellington, another with skeletal reindeer. A more traditional red-and-green one, Mandalorian themed, "What Child is This," with, you know, The Child.

Weather has been making Denise's knee go ballistic, and I end up driving her home early Thursday, doing Friday solo. It's pretty quiet, a lot of empty spaces, but still last-minute (and last-last-minute, while packing up) sales. A couple of friends from grad school days stop in and visit, which is nice. Less nice, the wife of longtime friend-and-patron Jamie Alden stops in to tell me she died on the 23rd. We'd seen her earlier in the season, traded hugs, and it's weird to think I'll never see her again.

Market closed at 4 pm, and all product has to leave the building, though we have the option of returning Monday between 10 and 3 to get the booth. Weather is predicting snow Sunday and Monday, though, and since the pots are all boxed by 4:45, I decide to power through and take the booth down as well. Because we've been keeping a lean booth, no extra boxes of stock out in the van, there's room for everything in one trip (though there are a couple of boxes on the passenger seat). Everything's cleared out by 7 pm, and I come home to a meal of leftover fried rice and Christmas cookies.

And so to bed.

When I moved my blog over to Dreamwidth from LiveJournal, I had a few followers who hadn't made the transition yet. Since I didn't want to lose them--there's few enough of yez--I set up to automatically crosspost there whenever I put up something new here. Tonight I was poking around in my DW inbox, and found a whole bunch of "crosspost failed" messages. going back to April 7. When I try to visit the page, I find this message:

Suspended Journal
This journal has been suspended. Its contents are no longer publicly visible. LiveJournal cannot discuss the reasons for a journal suspension with anyone except the journal owner.

There's also a whole bunch of messages in the inbox there that I can't access, so I have no idea what happened. I suspect the account was hacked, as happened to some inactive accounts here a Dreamwidth last winter, but have no way of knowing. 

At this point, I'm trying to decide if I still care. I'm pretty sure everyone has made the jump at this point, and while I'm curious what happened, I'm not sure I'm that curious. Do I really want to deal with sysadmins in Moscow? Since whatever happened is hidden behind the digital curtain of their suspension page, it's not likely to cause me any grief.

I've shut off crossposting here, and am waving goodbye. Goodbye, LiveJournal. You were fun, back before you became evil...

I'm not entirely sure we ever met. I think he came to my Saturday Market booth once, visiting with friends in Eugene. It's also possible that friends in Eugene sent him that first, fateful pot without him ever visiting in person. In any event, that pot started something.

The next I knew, I got a phone call from this fellow in California, who collected animal art, specifically fishing bears, and could I make a table setting for him? All the same pattern: black bear with a salmon in its mouth.

I said, Sure, and that was the start of my long relationship with Paul Eilert.

I made him oh-so-many bear pots over the years: that initial set, with dinner and dessert plates, soup bowls and mugs. Later, servers, toddler bowls (I added a bear cub behind the mama, in keeping with my "baby animals" theme), smaller plates, stews and dinner salads too, I think. A couple of sculpture bears sized to fit over the necks of wine bottles. The occasional order of replacements for dishes that hadn't survived his grand-kids. He once sent me a picture of his table set up for a big family gathering, with all the dishes, service wear, and carved wooden sculptures of black bears with dangling wooden salmon on chains. I saw it on my desk not that long ago; if I find it, I want to scan it and share it.

I took his last order this spring--more mugs, bowls, dessert plates. Unbeknownst to me, he was building up his table service to the point that he could divide it into two complete settings for his daughters to inherit; family heirlooms, in a word. When I shipped them off to California last month, I got a phone call from his daughter, Leslie. He'd died of cancer just a week before.

I'm still a little stunned. It's hard to believe I won't hear that dry, twangy voice anymore. I've taken one last commission for him, through his daughter: a set of three funerary urns in which his kids will share his ashes. I just glazed them yesterday.

Fishing bear pattern, of course.

This is Denise's mother, Mary Desens, sometime around 1993.

She was perennially cheerful, methodical and organized, energetic. She struggled with arthritis most of her life, but still exercised regularly in the warm water pool at the Y, attended Bible studies and Sunday services at Church, visited her hairdresser, Kathy, twice a week. Living alone at age 84, she had systems in place for her safety: a phone at the bottom of the basement stairs, with the neighbor's phone numbers next to it. A desk chair to read in while doing laundry, so she only had to traverse the stairs once, backwards so she could rest the basket on each step. After a lifetime of backing down their long driveway, she saw me doing a Y-turn with the rental car to go down frontwards and immediately adopted the technique.

A seamstress for years, until her arthritis interfered, she appreciated and supported me in my pottery craft. She hated cooking, lived on frozen dinners, fruit and Ensure. And baked goods; "tea and treats" was a daily afternoon ritual. She loved it when we came to visit, and I loved cooking for her. I tried to make some simple, manageable dishes that she could try, and she did, a few. She liked apple pie, so I mailed her one for her birthday in September, made two more when we visited in October, one the night before we left that she could share with her Bible group. Though she initially felt tied down by the house after her husband Del died, as Denise and I continued to clear out the basement and help her organize the ground floor, she felt better able to manage it. She looked at assisted living situations, but decided she'd rather stay at home until she couldn't anymore, or until they took her out, toes first.

She died Christmas morning, fifteen months after Del.

We're still shocked. She was in good health and good spirits the day before, drove to Christmas Eve service at church. She was excited to ring the bells on Christmas, a Brookfield Lutheran tradition, and then ride with her nephew Jim down to Chicago for family dinner at his brother Bill's house.

It was Jim who found her in the morning when he came to get her for church. She took notes of health and habits, and so we know she got up at 12:03 am to use the bathroom, and never came back to bed. The medical examiner said it was quick and painless, and nobody could have done anything for her. Denise thinks Jesus asked, "Mary, are you ready?" and she answered "Yes."

Denise and I went back the day after New Years to make arrangements; she's still there, dealing with the estate. Mary helped: she'd told her pastor what music she'd like at her funeral, and talked to me about what she wanted painted on her urn. Cardinals, from the back yard, and the grey squirrel that used to visit the birdbath by her front window. She and Del had set up a family trust nearly twenty years ago, but she made sure everything was included, everything was in order, to make things simple for her only daughter.

I'm going to miss her; I'll miss the reports from the weekly phone calls to Denise, miss making her pie, miss being able to do little things that she appreciated so much. Hanging a curtain rod. Putting pavers on the front porch, to make each step shorter. Getting a new TV for her when the old Trinitron bit it, then figuring out how to connect the antenna and wiring so she could watch it. She loved the old westerns of her younger days, and had a regular date with Chuck Connors--The Rifleman--and her tea and treats.

I made her a teddy bear, years ago, in blue and silver grizzly fur--her favorite colors. Boo Bear had pride of place on the sofa until just this Tuesday, when I brought her back to Oregon to be with the rest of her bear family. Didn't want her to be lonely.

I think I need to go give her a hug now.

Been thinking about Will Mattox today. He's responsible, as much as anyone on this random walk my life's taken, for the fact that I'm a potter today.

You see, I thought I was going to be a professor.

I'd been a hobby potter after college--bought a used wheel and electric kiln, traded glaze mixing and recycling for studio time and gas firing at Viterbo. Ceramics rapidly took over all my attention and all my free time. Eventually, when my day job--graphic artist at a printing company--started getting in the way of my hobby, I decided it had to go. I applied to graduate schools for ceramics, was eventually accepted to the University of Oregon. I planned to get my MFA and teach, like my professor before me, like pretty much every other potter I knew in Wisconsin. I didn't know there was any other option.

And I did teach, for 10 years, part-time as resident potter at the UO Craft Center. I sent out a zillion résumés and slide sheets, applied for teaching positions all over the country. I even interviewed for a couple of jobs, flew out to Nebraska for one. But full-time teaching remained elusive.

And a part-time salary just didn't cut it. So I washed dishes. Answered phones during Christmas rush for Harry and David. Then a former student of mine, Becky Bruecker, introduced me to Will.

He had a studio, Slippery Bank Pottery, out in the woods west of Junction City. Five employees, all women, who slip cast and loaded kilns and glazed for him. He did the designs, the throwing, and decorating the more elaborate patterns. Sold retail at craft fairs, wholesale as well. He'd just signed a deal with a mail-order catalog to supply hummingbird feeders, and the demand was more than he could handle solo, so he needed someone to throw for him.

Becky had done a few, but didn't enjoy the work, or the volume, so she recommended me.

There's something to be said for on-the-job training. Will paid 75¢ for feeders good enough to sell at home, 90¢ for catalog-ready. I very quickly got them all to first quality. Then I learned how to scribe and inlay the hummingbird pattern and deliver them bisqued, doubling the price to $1.80. Then I learned to throw them fast enough to leave time for my own work--and teaching--as well.

Nine dozen hummingbird feeders a week was about what I needed to make up the gap between my bills and my Craft Center salary. When he had enough hummingbird feeders, I made mugs. French butter dishes, egg separators, mini-pies, spoon rests. I designed and threw a new form for holding margarine tubs, and spent a winter recasting all his plaster casserole molds.

Then, at the end of December 1992, he laid me off.

The back room at Slippery Bank was full of bisque. Every 2-lb. and under pot in his line was well-stocked. I could have kept working if I was willing to drive out to Cheshire and throw plates, but I couldn't see doing that. Instead, I spent the rest of the winter working on my own pots, and in April 1993, opened Off Center Ceramics.

So I owe a lot to Will. While I learned to throw at Viterbo, I learned to be fast, efficient and consistent working for him. But I learned more.

When I got out of college, pottery was a hobby. In grad school, it became a discipline. Will taught me it could be a business.

I didn't follow in his footsteps. A lot of my early pots were in reaction to his work as much as influenced by it. I learned a bunch about being professional from him, but even more making my own mistakes with Market, with galleries, craft fairs. When Will retired from pottery in the mid-1990s, he tried to interest me in buying Slippery Bank, but I didn't want to go that direction. I'm still a one-man shop. But I don't think I'd be supporting myself with ceramics at all if it hadn't been for his example.

Tomorrow would have been Will's 65th birthday; he died of cancer November 6. Oddly enough, I don't have any of his pots; just a ton of memories.