“Why?”
Aiden shrugged. He was up on his feet now, one hand submerged into the cavity of the clay, the other guiding it from the outside. The inside was getting wider and wider by the second. It looked like a vase, but I knew that with just a slight shift of his hand, it could turn into anything.
“I think a lot of artists are like that,” he said. “My mom had a friend who was an author. Hell of a good writer. I read all his stuff, and I’m not even a reader. Anyway, we had him over for dinner one night and he told us that he’s never read one of his books all the way through. Not one. When I asked him why, he said he just couldn’t bring himself to do it; that he knew he’d find a million spots in the book where he should’ve done this or should’ve said that. It’d drive him crazy to see all the mistakes he’d made, mistakes that he couldn’t do anything about anymore.” He shrugged. “I think Mom was the same way.”
“Wow,” I said softly. “If I was that good at something, I can’t imagine never wanting to look at it again.”
“Well, that’s what happens when you’re a perfectionist, I guess,” Aiden said. “Nothing’s ever really good enough. And if nothing’s ever good enough, then what’s the point of looking at it, right?”
I kept my eyes on the vase—or pot, or whatever it was. The piece was much bigger than I originally thought it would be. Aiden had started off with a lump of clay the size of a fist, but it had transformed into nearly double its size. “She was really fun too,” he said suddenly. “She had this weird kind of laugh—sort of like a giggle that would go up real high and then come back down again. It made you laugh, just hearing it.”
“Did you guys do things together? Just you and her?”
He nodded. “She loved the quad. When I was little, she took me all over the place on it. Then when I learned how to drive it, I’d take her. She’d put her arms around me and hold on real tight and say, ‘Take us to the moon, Aiden. Go on, take us to the moon.’”
“The moon?”
He smiled. “It was just her way of telling me to go wherever I wanted. As far as I wanted.”
“Did you ever get lost?”
He nodded. “God, lots of times. That was the best part.”
“Why?”
He sat back down slowly, still angling his fingers along the inside of the piece. “Who wants to know where they’re going all the time? That’s boring. When you get lost, you see things you never knew were there in the first place.”
The wheel was slowing down. Aiden’s fingers slowed with it, tapping the sides gently until it came to a complete stop. My eyes widened as I stared at the perfect little bowl—no bigger around than an orange. “It’s so cute!” I said. “But what’re you going to eat out of that? It’s so small!”
“It’s not for eating,” Aiden said. “It’s a different kind of bowl. For something else.”
“Like what?”
“You’ll see.” He looked at it for a moment, and then leaned in and touched the rim again, very lightly, with the pad of his index finger. “There,” he said. “Perfect.”
Aiden put the tiny bowl on a shelf next to another bowl and a small vase. “This is where I leave everything to dry,” he explained. “It takes a few days.” He walked over to what looked like a large black canister in the corner of the patio and checked a tiny thermometer attached to one side. “This is the kiln. There’s a vase in there I’m firing.” He picked up a small bowl and dipped his fingers into it. “And now that it’s reached 1660 degrees, I can salt glaze it.”
“What’s that?”
Aiden held up the bowl. “Watch.” He pinched a small amount of salt between his fingers and deposited it through a hole at the top of the kiln. There were actually many holes along the rim, tiny rectangular openings, and Aiden moved from one to the next, sprinkling fingerfuls of salt through them. “Salt does amazing things to clay,” he said. “The crystals actually explode when they hit the heat, and then turn into a vapor. It’s the vapor that transforms the look of the clay.”
“How?” I asked. “What’s it do?”
“It makes the clay glossy, and the surface gets this sort of orange-peel texture. But the really cool thing about salt glazing is that no two pieces ever look the same. Each one is completely unique, depending on how much or how little salt you use.”
“Who taught you how to do all this?” I asked.
Aiden shrugged. “My mom got me lessons when I was about twelve. That was where I learned all the basics.”
“So…” I paused. “I mean, did they tell you you should be a potter?”
Aiden looked at me curiously. “Tell me to be a potter?”