On the Miracle of Glass

I love glass.

I don't have normal Canadian flotsam/jetsam in my house. This is entirely fitting, since I am probably not a normal Canadian girl. Or a normal anything, for that matter, except history proves I can be normal when it counts.

I am a dust-prone, trinket-averse housekeeper. HA! First quadruple compound adjective in the English language! If this is not true or even grammatically correct, keep it to yourself. I'm recovering from a terror-riddled (but altogether successful) surgery and I've put in a full day at work and am rather fragile.

As I was saying, I am not a collector of stuff, even stuff that one probably/possibly should/could collect. I travel a lot. I have ample opportunities to bring home stuffage. What I bring home instead is images and the memory of the people I met along the way. Both will be easily displayed/dispersed/dismissed/ when I shake off these mortal coils. (Note to future biographers: the world heard it here first. "Walk softly and carry a small camera." I'm paraphrasing an old movie line, but if you aren't from that generation, it won't mean anything to you anyway. In fact, by now, you'll already have buggered off to see what's the latest video response on YouTube to Miss South Carolina's on-air debacle, God bless her poor numbed parents....)

Where was I?

Ah yes... glass. And why glass, today? Because my dear husband spent a painful portion of this aptly named Labour Day week-end putting in a line of glass blocks in my house for my aesthetic appreciation. Yes, the spelling of "labour" is Canadian. Look it up in your own well-thumbed version of the Canadian Oxford English Dictionary.

Why this fondness for glass? I don't know... Because I've always loved glass? Because it's a medium designed to transfer light? For the last 25 years or so, I resonate with that. To greater and WAY lesser degrees of success, I have discovered to my astonishment that I myself am a vessel designed to transmit light. The technical explanation goes on to say that ".... we [BTW, that's me, in between the "w" and the "e"] shine like stars in the universe as we hold out the Word of light in a dark and exceedingly sad and panicky generation...." I'm paraphrasing the Bible here, but hey! I know a few Greek words too, ya know.

Glass also appreciates the crushing pressure involved in transformation. What is glass, really, except the end result of silicon finally understanding that, under duress, stress, and a great deal of sweat on one's upper lip, that under intense pressure, one has been "sanctified" (set apart) to become something greater than oneself? And then becomes beautiful, and practical, and life changing? Think greenhouses, the miracle of microscopes, the pyramid in the Louvre...

Flashback: at nine years old, I stood in the smoke and darkness in a small building on an island off the coast of Venice. I watched men of immense lung capacity swoop globs of glowing molten silicon and breathe, fling and twist them into life. Bowls for grapes and strawberries, exotic fish escaping prey, and ashtrays for what was then still an acceptable form of social interaction, cigarette smoking. Could they have known that a skinny little Canadian kid who had traveled from Tanzania, with no volume control--or even on/off button--would remember this moment in her life? Probably not. And today, what little kid's life did you accidentally impact, forever?

Thanks, Dear Spousal Unit, for literally cementing a small portion of signature glass in to our home this week-end. Every time I look at it, I will understand it as a labour of understanding, and love.