Nostalgia.  I am old.  I have been invited to muck about in a ceramics studio, which has got me pondering former days, and my decidedly envious nature.  I shall change the names:  Grace.  Grace was Rachel’s real best friend.  I was simply proximal.  We, Rachel and I, attended Galileo High School.  Grace went to the city’s public prep school, Lowell.  I was supposed to make an effort to get in, but my father taught there, and that’s a tale for another time.  So, Grace attended a tonier school than us, and she was connected.  We all pottered in our respective ceramics classes, but Grace developed an honest-to-god metier, an oeuvre:  color-washed stoneware creatures and bits of fanciful landscape of a gnome-like character.  Sculpted of a blend of clay and hard bits (grog, flint, and such like), and so having a nice stony texture, the figures were not glazed, but washed with coloring minerals in water, cobalt and iron and whatnot, as I recall anyway.

More, what’s 15 from 68?  Fifty-three years.  I’ve done a  “Google Earth”, and, astonishingly, it looks like the space still exists.  I may venture into the city this weekend to see if this is actually so.

The space was very small, under the stairs going down into a courtyard between The Cannery and the building to the north.  And there she sat, amongst all her creation, sculpting more of them for the entertainment of the tourists.. As I said:  Envy.  Screeching envy.

I myself also had a gig on Fisherman’s Wharf during my teens, but as a matter of artistic capability, development, and prestige, there was absolutely no comparison:  One of the counselors at Galileo High ran an employment office.  You want a teenager to work for you, you post your listing, and interview your candidates, and there you are.  I was introduced to a flight attendant, a male flight attendant, which was a thing in those days.  And while it’s quite usual for the male to collect vehicles, his was unusual.  He’d got his hand on, and restored himself, a turn-of-the 20th century popcorn wagon.  Originally pulled by a horse, and later fitted out with internal combustions engines, the Cretors Popcorn Wagon is still to be had.  A nicely restored version sells for between $25,000 and $35,000 dollars these days, and C. Cretors & Company is still in business producing popcorn wagons in Illinois, U.S.A., but not great big shiny red horse-drawn ones.

I only found all this out this morning, when I went looking for a picture of The Popcorn Wagon, as it was known, wherein I spent every afternoon and weekend for many months, until I was climbing the walls, and commenced to “job share” with Rachel.  We each manned the popcorn maker and soda machine, and sold not quite freshly roasted peanuts, every other day for a couple of years, as I remember, and made money, and The Popcorn Wagon was certainly cute.  But artisanal cache? … absolutely none.