Week Two, No Bowl, Full Attendance

April tenth. The thing nobody tells you about pottery is that the second class is somehow harder to walk into than the first, because by the second class you know what's coming. The wheel. The centering. The specific humiliation of watching someone else's clay rise like it has somewhere to be while yours just sort of lists to one side and gives up.

Simone and I went back anyway. We had signed up, so we went, which is, I've noticed, the actual mechanism behind most things I've learned. Not enthusiasm, just the prior commitment doing the work. The instructor moved through the room with that unhurried competence that still makes the whole process look like a language I've almost heard before. I got my hands on the clay. The clay had opinions. We negotiated.

What I made was not a bowl. What Simone made was also not a bowl, though hers at least had an ambition toward symmetry that mine quietly abandoned somewhere in the second minute. We stood over them at the end of class, these two objects, damp and definite, and had a very short conversation consisting mostly of her looking at them and me starting to laugh.

The face of someone who has made peace with the outcome.

It was one of those moments that doesn't need anything added to it.

I've been thinking about Carol's email since I set my phone down on the table two weeks ago. I haven't written back yet. I don't know what I want to say about a second photograph, or whether I want to say anything at all right now, and I've learned, slowly, that that's not the same as not caring. It's just not being ready. The bowl will come or it won't. The reply will come or it will. I showed up to the class. That's the part I can control.

Two objects. No bowls. Still showed up.