I ripped the sock back on Saturday, ripped it back to about an inch and a half from the ribbing at the top. I knew I had dropped a stitch, and was holding it with a marker. But at some point after the heel I discovered that I had dropped another stitch on the foot, and a I tinked back I also discovered that there were other errors. I am not a perfectionist. One error I can live with, but this was too many.
The sock is not done. But I will be much happier with it, having accepted my mistakes and started over.
Saturday night I went to a “Pottery Indulgence” party/workshop at Arrowmont School of Craft in nearby Gatlinburg. I had never made anything out of clay before, I was a bit nervous, and my bowl is a bit rough, but I had a lot of fun.
First we played with texture on a sample slab, then we applied the texture and cut out our bowl shape, refining the edges, smoothing and beveling, and finally folding it up and forming it into a bowl. I had a little trouble with the seams, but I got them together. My thumb, index and middle fingers are the ones most plagued by arthritis, but I managed. Somehow, while I was trying to form my bowl without simultaneously deform it, I was reminded of childhood, of making mud pies with my friend Ginny, and the perfect little turkeys she would mold from the mud.
Perhaps I am not a natural at clay. But I would like to play some more. The “handles” on my bowl were a last-minute whim. I had planned to leave the top plain, but then started drawing free-form leaf shapes in my practice clay. They may be the best thing I did. They may prove to be a disaster. As you can tell, it was time to walk away.
Friday night was symphony night, and I took the family. Grandson O is very interested in percussion, and one of the works on the program was a fabulous percussion concerto, Spices, Perfumes, Toxins! by Avner Dorman. The percussionists were two members of Nief Norf, a contemporary music group based in Knoxville (which I adore), Andrew Bliss and Mike Truesdell. The performance was energetic and dynamic, a conversation really between these fabulous musicians and the orchestra itself, almost a marathon given the huge number of percussion instruments the two men played, including marimbas, vibraphones, tom-toms, bells, bongos, drum sets and things I can’t identify. They brought both power and subtlety to the performance: from the complex tapestry of sounds that was the first movement (spices), through the often delicate lyricism of the middle section and into the dynamic combativeness and melding together of the closing, feeling very redolent of the complexities of modern life. I was awed, amazed and enlightened.
The concert ended with Beethoven’s 7th symphony, a piece that revolves more around rhythmic passages than around complex melodies, and it was heavenly, perhaps the finest Beethoven I have heard this orchestra perform. It seems that I am becoming boringly repetitive in that I keep saying that the orchestra has never sounded better, and they haven’t. It is true. The performance was held lightly, buoyant even, the orchestra seeming to achieve a kind of relational nuance that I tend to associate with fine chamber groups, even if on a larger scale. The music was crisp, conversational, happy even, as tensions that arose and resolved, like an evening spent with the best of friends. As I sat listening, my fingers and toes dancing to the music, O’s head resting on my shoulder, I could think of few things more magical.
