The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein by J. Michael Orenduff Read Free Book Online Page A

it straight from the can. I always pour mine into a glass.
    After a few minutes, he said, “People who collect old pots are strange.”
    “Including me?”
    “Especially you. Of course you got some reason to do it – this trading post.”
    I chuckled at him calling my shop a trading post, but I guess it is in a way.
    “My people believe the four elements are earth, air, fire, and water.”
    “Just like the ancient Greeks,” I noted.
    “We made a little progress since them. We divide each of those into four subcategories.” The leaves rustled and he tilted his head skyward.
    “And those subcategories are?”
    “The four kinds of earth are sand, clay, rock, and another word that I guess would translate as soil. It’s what you can grow things in.” He ate a chip – no salsa – and sipped some beer.
    “I just know there’s a reason you’re telling me this.”
    “There are also four types of clay,” he continued. “My uncle taught me. White clay, changing clay, shrinking clay, and hot-fire clay. Even though you’re a yellow-haired devil, you probably know this stuff.”
    “Correction. I’m a brown-haired devil.”
    “Yellow-haired has a better ring to it.”
    “It does,” I agreed. “The white clay is kaolin, no doubt about that one. The ‘changing clay’ is probably what we call fire clay because its plasticity can change like crazy. Shrinking clay would be ball clay because that shrinks a lot during firing, and-hot fire clay is probably plain old earthenware clay because it does require a high temperature to fire properly, although so does kaolin. Why are we talking about this?”
    “I’m making a point about pot collectors.”
    “I think I missed it.”
    “That’s because I haven’t made it yet.”
    “Ah,” I said and drank some Tecate.
    “Pot collectors don’t know anything about clay. They don’t know about firing. They don’t know the true meanings of the designs. Why do they want the pots?”
    “Because as Shelly said, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’.”
    “That was Keats,” he corrected.
    “I was just testing you.”
    “I don’t think they collect pots because they’re beautiful. I think they collect them because they’re rare.”
    “Actually, I agree. The rarer your collection the better. Look at the most desired collectibles of all time – the 1943 copper penny, the 1918 stamp with the plane upside-down – the thing they have in common is not their beauty or historical significance or anything like that. It’s just that they are rare.”
    “One of those ‘inverted jenny’ stamps sold for over half a million a couple of years ago,” he noted.
    “So you’re saying that pot collectors are weird because they buy pots just because there aren’t many of them to be bought.”
    “I guess the same could be said of all collectors.”
    It was right after he made that statement that the dog fell out of the sky.

8
     
     
    The next morning I drove down the South Valley along old Highway 85, avoiding the Interstate. Friday had been a scorcher, ninety-eight degrees, but I’d slept with a light blanket. The dry air cools quickly when the sun goes down, and you feel the effects of being a mile above sea level.
    I wore chinos and a hyphenated shirt – light-blue, button-down, and long-sleeved. The sky was cerulean blue, lit indirectly by the sun which had not yet cleared the Sandias. The Bronco filled with the scent of alfalfa.
    I turned west on an unnamed dirt road alongside an irrigation canal lined with cottonwoods and followed it to the modest adobe that Emilio and Consuela Sanchez call home.
    It’s like home to me as well. Consuela was my nanny, arriving at the tender age of sixteen when I was born. My mother was a wonderful woman who never quite felt at home in what she regarded as the rather untamed wilderness to which her husband had brought her shortly after their marriage. But she used to say you have to “bloom where you’re planted,” and she set