Suki's Clay

When you leave home and make new friends later in life like I’ve been doing these last ten or twelve years, you don’t know much about the work they did before you knew them. You find out who they are now, but not much about who they were then. Some might say, you didn’t know them in the prime of their life, when they did their most meaningful or passionate work. I don’t see it that way so much, but I can see why others would.

Soon after I met my friend Suki five years ago, she told me she’d been a potter before she and her husband Bill took off in a camper to see America for a couple of years. They finally settled in Corvallis two blocks from where Brent and I live now. She also told me that when they left Virginia, she sold all her equipment: her kilns, her wheels, her tools, her clay, everything. All of it. Within two weeks, it was gone. After decades of making beautiful pots, mugs, sugar bowls, vases, pitchers, plates, and platters, she was done.

I was fascinated. How could she stop?

But the fact that she did, that she could just stop, kind of thrilled me too. It made me wonder if ditching my piano and my recording gear with its endless updates and glitches – not to mention all the questions I make myself crazy with, like who cares, what’s the point, why am I still doing this – would be a gigantic relief. Could I do it? Would I be okay with gardening for instance, or hiking with my pals, or reading and writing all day long? Would taking flower photographs instead be enough?

Well, I didn’t sell my stuff. But thinking about giving it up reminded me that needing to achieve something was making me nuts, not the music. All I had to do was sit at the piano to remember that. There’s nothing like playing something new that no one, not even me, has heard before, or playing a song I wrote a long time ago and still loving it for the part of me that it is. There’s no way I could give that up.

Today the plumber was here all morning fixing the pipe that burst last weekend as well as some other things that were suspicious. I played the piano most of the time he was here. Other than Brent, he’s the only person who’s heard me play live in a very long time. He didn’t say anything about it before he left, but I could tell by how quietly he worked that he was listening. I loved playing for him, and I was grateful not to need his response.

At a neighborhood gathering at Suki’s last weekend, the subject of her pottery came up. She had served cheese and grapes on a small platter she’d made thirty years ago, and we were all ogling it, wishing we had one of our own. Suki’s not a self-promoting person. If anything, she’s the opposite, but she said, ya know, you can find my pottery on eBay. Well…grabbing my phone was the obvious next step. Sure enough, there were several “Vintage Suki Meyer” pieces for sale. It took me about 30 seconds to own a 7-inch pitcher made by my new friend in the prime of her clay-turning life. The color, the shape, its usefulness, and then her teary smile when I told her I’d bought it, all of that told me a little bit more about who she was then and who she is now. The pitcher is her past, just as my songs are. But both say a lot about who we still are