"...But I Know What I Like"

She was the first vegetarian I had ever met. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure I had even heard of a vegetarian before that.

She was Karla, my uncle’s girlfriend, and when I was in high school she lived with my family for a few weeks until she found a place on campus. She was a grad student, studying art. Hence the vegetarianism, I guess.

In those days Jan, my step-mom, regularly made a side dish of sautéed green beans with little flecks of bacon. Karla would eat the beans, but slide the little bacon bits off to the side in a pile. I’m sure that if she had a choice, she would much rather have not had the bacon in her dish, but I suspect she was trying to be polite. I thought Karla was very cool, but could not grasp this dietary behavior.

Years later, when I left for Europe and came home a vegetarian, I refused anything that had even a hint of flesh in it. Jan would assure me that it, whatever the questionable dish was, just had a tiny bit of meat in it.

“You can’t even taste it,” she’d say.

“Then why did you even bother to put it in there?” I’d reply. And around and around it would go.

But that, as you can imagine, is another story.

About a month after she moved out, Karla phoned and said she was coming by with a gift. A thank-you for letting her stay with us. Since she was working in ceramics, my parents probably assumed that it would be coffee cups with their names scratched in them. Or an ashtray.

But it wasn’t.

It was a piece of her art.

OK, picture four slabs of clay rolled up into four separate tubes, each one about three feet long, fired and glazed. Now lash them together in a tic-tac-toe configuration, or, since I actually have this on my keyboard, a:
“#”

Around this forty-pound tic-tac-toe pattern was wrapped gauze. The gauze was spattered with various kinds of glazes. Not enough to obscure, but just enough to give a sense of mystery.

It was very nice of my parents to open their home to this girl, who was really quite strange by their standards. And it was thoughtful of Karla to give a piece of her art as a gift. But as I stood in the kitchen watching the exchange go down, I knew that I was seeing two very different worlds trying their best to find some common ground.

“I think that what’s going on back here is really exciting,” said Karla, pointing through the gauze in the front to the gauze in the back, a few inches away.

“Yes. I see what you mean,” Jan said. “Very provocative. It’s as if the empty space between these layers exudes a deep yearning. And this is magnified - no, amplified - by the hollowness of the clay tubes.”

“Indeed,” my father added. “Within the hollowness is an echo. Like the echo of the moment of creation, filled with the knowledge of its own eventual demise. Very powerful piece, Karla.”

No. Not really. Conversations such as these did not take place in my household. Once, when my dad asked if it was me who forgot to flush the toilet, I answered, “perhaps.” WRONG choice of words. The use of such big, fancy words was considered “philosophizin’,” an activity strongly frowned upon while growing up. So, for that matter, was forgetting to flush the toilet.

No, here’s what really happened: Karla set the piece down, talked about how exciting certain parts of it were to her, and my parents stared silently at it, then at each other.

My parent’s taste in art is from a different camp. Both products of the Deep South, they resonate a little more with Graceland than with the Louvre. Their current walls display renderings of both Elvis and John Wayne. Karla’s art was painfully neither.

“Thank you, Karla,” one of them must have said eventually. “That’s real, real cute.”

Then added: “Hey, could you make me a coffee cup that has ‘I Hate Mondays’ and a little frowny face scratched into it? I’ll pay you for it, of course.”

The art sat propped in the corner for a few weeks, the gauze collecting dust (which, in a way, added to the mystery.) On week three a friend came over and fell sincerely and genuinely in love with it.

My dad graciously helped him carry it to his car.

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