I had started a pottery class at the Thendara train station in 1975 and was making some great works of art.
The class was filled with young boys and girls who I had never met but would some day become my high school classmates.
Each session was filled with children chattering and lumps of clay squishing through fingertips.
None of my small ceramic artworks survived to adulthood.
I’m not sure my parents wanted a Jolly Green Giant-sized ashtray, or the lopsided pie plate with a fall leaf print and stick figure animal hieroglyphics etched all over the surface.
Not to mention my poor color choice—a brown muddy mustard glaze that made the appearance less attractive than an early morning fur ball coughed up by our cat Blackie.
I didn’t care what the objects looked like when finished. I just liked the feel of the wet gooey clay as these things started to take shape.
As I pulled and pressed and rolled each handful to get the air out, I found images of animals appear in my very hands.
While most of my classmates were making snakes I was making dragons, dinosaurs and elephants.
Each animal now needed some Items from its home to make it happy. So for the elephant I made a Sultan’s covered chair complete with three riders.
For the dragon I decided on a group of knights with swords, and for the T-rex I sculpted some smaller beasts for him to chase and eat.
I molded a new world in clay.
My life is like that to this day. I am still letting things take shape, molding a new world in ink pen with my own graphic flair.
I am still just as excited to watch things take shape and am as inventive as I was in 1975.
Every time I see the leaves fall I think about those days in the train station and the creative moments I was able to partake in as things took shape.
Mitch Lee, Adirondack native & storyteller,
lives at Inlet. ltmitch3rdny@aol.com