The Reality of Physics

It was going too well. Everything looked great. I was putting mosaics together like a professional. And then Physics happened.

Damned stuff made the wood contract, warp, and then, POP!, tiles everywhere they weren't supposed to be. Beauty was fractured, ego's were deflated, and my stool looked like a true ancient piece of artwork. Half the tiles were missing and the other half were still on the stool top.

My analysis: Not enough cement adhesive, too much grout on the back of the tiles, and humidity fluctuations. They conspired against me and now I have to go back to the drawing board.

Diversions

I made some trivets. Actually, a trivet is either
A metal stand with short feet, used under a hot dish on a table or a three-legged stand made of metal, used for supporting cooking vessels in a hearth. But in our house we call trivets the things you set on tables to protect the wood from wet drinks. These represent my second attempt. The first one was horrible and not fit for public consumption.

My uncle, a retired professor of British Literature, writes poetry. As a diversion, I thought I'd post one of his poems. I hope you enjoy it.

MY FATHER’S GLOVES

by Larson Bowker


You’d take them off in the kitchen and toss them
on the stand by the door, bone yellow leather keeping
the shape of your hands, palms rough and black with
holes where the fingers bend. You rolled the tops
down one cocky inch I admired as I pulled them on
and off, mimicing the way you snugged your hands
into gloves you bought slightly too small. And sometimes,
for shadowed moments, my child’s heart, breathing
in your prairie wind and light, became your work-
thickened fingers with mashed fingernails that grew
back rippled wedges of fungus, gnarled roots above
knobbed joints you hid when you could, vain about
your hands. There was mystery in your hands, a
strangeness that set you apart, an inside river running
between narrow bands of trees, hands that in the lash
and slant of failure harnessed a young man’s river-
dreams, held back summer lightning while you repaired
transformers ninety feet above the earth, dandled
seven babies on your knee, worked days for a living
and evenings in your shop under a mulberry tree in
the backyard, where people brought you broken things
you brought back to life, always working in solitude
as deep and as ancient as the sea.


In your favorite chair, your gloves sitting on the stand
beside you–your wife in the kitchen cooking pork chops
in raisin-apple sauce, telling you how good the apples
were this year and how much she’d like to visit her sister
in Oregon once more–you slipped away on that cloud
that separates earth from sky, as easy as your voice when
you’d ask us to “slip out” of your favorite chair next to
the radio, a command sounding like a request to let go
something we’d rather have kept. They folded your hands,
the deep brown gaze of you, one into the other, and after
seventy seasons, they still looked less cautious than mine.
I live in the mountains now, where kestrels hover above
fugitive shadows chasing down the sun, listening to
the murmur of your gloves, falling like breath upon my skin.

A derriare two

Here's another nice place for your tooshie. Created with ceramic tiles and vitreous glass. My wife took this one with her to school (she's a teacher). Its an abstract design.

I like the constrast between the Opus Regulatum (tessalatum) and Opus Palladianum. You say, "What?" I answer, Regulatum verses Palladianum - the regular verses the "crazy paving."

In the crazy paving I've run a grout river or two, which are curved and mimic or mirror the curves of the regulatum tiles. I like the effect.