Mosaic

I lie in the hotel bed. It is 3.30 am. I am exhausted but sleep eludes me. Tomorrow I teach ‘Working With Ceramic Tableware’. I will be in the classroom at 6.45am. We start at 8.00. Twenty trusting faces look up at me and … what?

I think about my preparations of the previous day. ‘Chris can fix everything’, says Dawnmarie. ‘He’s the motor of Chicago SAMA Conference’.

‘I hate driving’ he says, as we get into her car.

‘Oh’ I say. Will that affect our journey? I wonder.

‘And these bellmen are driving me crazy. They’re useless.’

We drive to the Chicago Mosaic School and load the car with china.

‘Do you want any white plates?’ asks Chris.

‘Lovely!’ I say, and his eyes narrow slightly, as if examining a strange foreign being, which I am, in fact.

‘I have more if you like them’ he says. Perhaps he wonders if I meant it.

‘No, that will be perfect’ I say. ‘But could I have these?’ I ask, pulling out brighter, dustier boxes of fragments.

‘Really?’ he says, in a tone that hints I have overdone it.  ‘Perhaps I won’t need them’ I say, pushing them back under the shelves.

‘Do you have any masks?’ we ask the shop assistant. I’ve told Chris they’re essential, and he’s made a diversion to Home Depot to help me. ‘We shouldn’t cut china without them.’ We stand in front of expensive double-vented filtering masks. ‘Do you have cheap ones in a box?’ Chris asks.

The assistant is irritated. ‘You asked for a mask, not for masks. That’s why I brought you here.’

‘Ah’ says Chris, politely under the circumstances. He is patient and tolerant. I suppose he’s had practice.

I toss and turn in the bed.  Have I overdone the material?   Or will we run out. Forty students over two days. Their expectations haunt me, with innocent faces looking up enquiringly, preventing sleep. I’m going to watch a DVD to calm myself down — ‘Gomorrah’ or ‘La Haine’? ‘Gomorrah’ might do the trick. Violence might deafen the turmoil of anxiety.

Gangsters are being shot in the solarium, assassinated while they have manicures. I relax into reveries of old Italy.

Scene from ‘Gomorrah’. Living on the edge in Italy, an alternative to the insanity of insomnia.

Posted under: Mosaic by Emma Biggs | Tags: anxiety > Chicago Mosaic School > Chris Forillo > Dawnmarie Zimmerman > Emma Biggs teaching > insomnia > mosaic with pottery > SAMA Conference > Thank you Chris!