Remembered Magic Trick I used to know a magic trick: how to open things that cannot be opened in particular dried watercolor paint tubes screw caps welded in place decades ago the interior contents long turned to jolly stones of brilliant color The trick still works: you light a match and slowly rotate the cap end like a chicken on a spit and in no time the heat loosens the cement that had frozen the cap into a permanently sealed condition the cap spins free and the pigments see the light of day I dip a saturated brush into the opened vault and a flood of Rip Van Winkle color awakens onto a new white sheet. Old magic tricks can still amaze me. Remember the vanishing birds? Let's see if the salt trick still works.

Reassembled Shards The imagery on the exterior is what most visitors to the Louvre look at Do they imagine these terracotta vases as a box of shards? The shattered remains of a three dimensional puzzle Lost fragments extrapolated That the conservators who restored the object left Fault lines and the craze of shatter points visible on the interior Gives me a thrill like being backstage To see the woman sawn in half

Two Campbell Soup Cans We sat in the cheap seats, way out in center field, in the peanut gallery. At least we could say we were at the game, although in order to have a sense of what was going on, we watched the scoreboard and cupped our ears to listen to the tinny sound of the play-by-play on a transistor radio in the hands of strangers seated nearby. Those same strangers wore proper baseball caps and, while they held their radios aloft to get the best reception, used field binoculars to view the ballplayer spitting tea color tobacco juice. I brought no radio or binoculars. I wore an old, too small, wool ball cap. In my hands I watched the distant action through two empty Campbell soup cans, glued together with baseball gum.

Left Handed Student The classroom was designed to hold 24 students. We don’t count the teacher or his desk, yes, his desk. He taught high school math. This was not the brainy class, just your basic, shall we call it math for non-math majors? Most of these young people would not be taking the SATs. They would find jobs, right after graduation. His job, as he saw it, was to help them balance a check book and plan to live on a budget. His classroom had 24 desks for 24 students. While at that time in history there was no particular sensitivity to what we call politically correct, the chairs seemed to be ahead of their time. They served all who would sit in them without bias. The only consideration that those who ordered student desks had was in having the correct percentage of left and right desks. It was a math problem. It was a real-life math problem. If the general population is half male and female and if a greater percentage of males are left hand dominant, how many l...