I cried a river over you.

Not quite the same thing, re the emotions involved, but interesting - from The Art Newspaper:

The day my son smashed my Grayson Perry pot

Funerary Urn was broken into over 25 pieces by a bouncing ball

By Louisa Buck | Posted 30 November 2006


Funerary Urn in pieces

The sound of a Grayson Perry pot hitting quarry tiles is one that will remain with me forever. I have been friends with the artist for over 20 years and own a number of his works, but Funerary Urn was a particular favourite. I first spotted it across a seething private view at the now defunct Birch and Conran gallery in Soho in 1988, and knew that I had to have it. I loved its occult elegance and mischievous inscriptions, each of which seemed deliberately designed to deter any purchaser. One side declared that "in this urn are contained the ashes of potter Grayson Perry and his lifelong companion Claire", while the other delivered the disquieting news that "Grayson Perry made this urn to earn the money to buy the motorcycle on which he was killed". Defiantly ignoring any potential bad Karma,

I parted with the then (for me) considerable sum of £400, and the pot was mine.

Over the years, Funerary Urn survived three house moves, a multitude of drunken parties and one car crash. But it proved to be no match for two bored teenagers and a gym ball on a Saturday afternoon last year. I asked my son and his friend to stop bouncing the ball. They rolled their eyes. I even pointed to Funerary Urn, perched precariously on a nearby mantelpiece. As I left the room the bouncing started again. And then that unforgettable crash. At least the guilty pair had the decency to look appalled. Funerary Urn in smithereens was a terrible sight. Weeping, I collected the myriad pieces and carefully wrapped each shard in kitchen roll. I even preserved the pulverised dust. It felt as if I was laying out a corpse.

Still sniffing, I called Grayson, who sounded shocked. He couldn't fix it, but he knew a man who possibly could. He gave me the number of his conservator. The word struck doom in my heart. I had no insurance.

Reconstructed in the hands of conservator Bouke de Vries
I left a shaky message on an answering machine. Soon I was ­listening to the soothing tones of Bouke de Vries, for whom calming the agitated owners of smashed ceramics is obviously part of the job. He assured me that nothing was impossible, that things always seemed worse than they were, and asked me if I had picked up and wrapped all the pieces. I took Funerary Urn, now shrouded in its own coffin, to Bouke's studio in West London and hoped for the best.

I soon discovered that I was not alone.

Heavyweight contemporary art collector David Teiger, who is based in New York, told me how his three-year-old daughter had coloured in the Andy Warhol that he bought from the artist's first exhibition (Andy's response was apparently to declare, "Now you own a Teiger!"). Another major New York collector's eyes filled with tears as he recalled how a wall-mounted Rachel Whiteread bookcase sculpture crashed to the ground in a pile of pulverised plaster (the artist made him another one) and even the widely revered collector and patron Agnes Gund once discovered that her maid had thrown away the wrapping from a Christo piece and confessed that her cats had used part of a Mary Frank sculpture as a litter tray. All of which inspired me and my co-author Judith Greer (whose own son and friends had recently smashed the glass on a Hatakeyama photo piece) to call a section of our book, "Beware Animals and Children".

So what of Funerary Urn? For a while its future seemed in abeyance as it turned out to be rather more troublesome than Bouke had originally anticipated. Perhaps the spirit of Claire was making mischief after all (certainly, in the intervening time between the pot's purchase and its fall from grace, Perry's eponymous transvestite alter-ego had mutated from demure Camilla Parker Bowles look-alike into a demonic Little Bow Peep, who looked capable of a curse or two).

Apparently it wasn't the shattered shards that were causing the problem, but the surface. Having put the pot back together, Bouke had first of all filled the gaps with a special white filler which he then retouched to match the nebulously-coloured greenish-blue, grey-black glaze. But every mark showed up. As he explained, he could have made the joins invisible with an airbrush but this would have involved repainting the entire surface of the pot. So he took the pot back into pieces and mixed pigment into the filler which, after considerable effort, eventually matched the original colour. "I decided that the best approach with this object was to do as little as possible," he said, "because it is a pot made by an artist."

Doing as little as possible still meant doing a great deal. Yet at the same time as Bouke was brilliantly repairing Funerary Urn, he was also doing something else very important. By consciously deciding against a spurious perfection which would have involved him literally painting-out the memory of the mishap, he was allowing Funerary Urn to retain both its texture and its identity. If you look closely, you can still see traces of cracks and chips but you can also see Grayson's brushstrokes?-they are all part of the character of the piece, there for all to see.

Another passage in Owning Art sternly declares "Don't Buy Art to Make Money" and frowns on those who put financial considerations before those of the art itself. Yet while I never had?-nor have?-any intention of selling Funerary Urn, I was nonetheless curious to know whether its tumble from the mantelpiece had been accompanied by an equally devastating plummet in value. But the news from Katharine Burton, specialist in contemporary art at Christie's, was surprisingly good. "Obviously everything has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, but given the particular circumstances and given the provenance and the fact that the pot has been restored to museum standards by the artist's chosen conservator, there shouldn't be a huge depreciation in value," she told me. "We do have to allow a little bit for the condition issue, but assuming that the artist feels the condition of the piece doesn't detract from the quality of the work as he originally intended it, then there's no real reason why it should have a major impact on its sale."

Thankfully Grayson declares himself to be content with the current incarnation of Funerary Urn. "I think it's fine, in a way it adds another layer of history to it." He told me: " It's like the Ashes, the cricketing trophy which is also that shape.

The destruction and the creation are one, and I like that a lot." So now, Funerary Urn is back on my mantelpiece, but this time it is secured by a robust Perspex bracket screwed into the wall. All exercise balls, animals and children have been banned from its vicinity. Even though, all things considered, things turned out unexpectedly well, I never, ever, want to hear the sound of that terrible crash again.

Link to Source

I don't recall if actual tears fell over this, but I definitely felt overheated and hurt when my mother sold an old black velvet evening dress in a garage sale. It was my own fault, I had left it at their place and moved out years before. To me, the dress meant sexy, thin, young. When I learned it was gone, it felt like I could never be any of those things again. I will never be 26 again, that's an immutable fact. And I know I can be the others -- but dammit, it still hurt at the time.

There was the day not so long ago that I parted with my rust colored gabardine French-made suit, size 7. I was last size 7 in.... probably 1970. But, no tears, I gave it away myself.

I had a very small piece of blown glass.
It had 3 colors in it and I watched the guy start it, then stopped really frustrated with himself.

Apparently this piece started to cave in on itself and he could not correct it.
It looked like a doll house size kraft for orange juice.

I was at a crafts fair in Albq and I was about 23-24 years old.

This guy caught my eye the second I walked in.

He was tall and had soft brown hair and big blue eyes. When he stood up , he towered over me.. Oh how I love tall men and Oh lord.. he was sooo cute.

We started talking after I worked my way to his booth.

I found out he was single and lived in Colorado. He would travel to fairs in the surrounding cities, and that was how he made his living for the year. He started telling me about 'green living' waaaaay before it became so trendy.

Any how, he captivated me, and apparently I did the same to him.
4 hours later, my friends were mad and trying to pull me from his booth so they could go home.

He gave me that piece of glass and told me that I needed to hand on my gift to someone else. My gift according to him, was making people feel comfortable, confident and happy.

This was one of the first times in my life that someone complimented me on something other then my body, or face and I thought I was in love.

I spent many months thinking about that man so much that I even contemplated traveling to Denver to go to another branch of that crafts fair I thought he would be set up at.

That was almost 10 years ago

I had that piece until a year ago.

It was so thick, I didnt think it was that fragile. It traveled with me everywhere and never broke.

Until I had Jillian.

A part of me just died. I thought I had lost the one thing that was proof that I was more then just a pretty face to anyone... I thought no one else would ever pay attention to ME anymore. I mean. .. I could not pass on "" my gift"" if I didnt have proof it existed.
I cried for about 45 minutes in private in the shower . Even after that I was still devastated.

Then, later that night, Jillian crawled into bed with me and fell asleep in my arms, in my bed. Something she had never done.

Thanks guy , who ever you are.. but you have no idea what kind of a gift I truly have.

Ohhhh, yeaaaaaaaaah! (with some echoes).

That's a beautiful piece of writing, shewolf. Print that out and put it in your journal.

You DO keep a writing journal, I hope.


E(wait'll Joe Nation sees this!)va

My grandmother painted ceramics. She had a whole end of grandpa's Morton machine barn for her shop and hundreds of molds. She loved painting flowers, grapes, beautiful scenery.

One of her first pieces was a candy dish about 4 inches tall with a lid. It sat beside grandpa's chair in the living room for at least 15 years.

Grandpa and I share a sweet tooth. Grandma made sure the little candy dish always had Brachs cinnimon discs, butterscotches, root beer candy and other assorted individually wrapped goodies.

Even when we knew grandma was in the kitchen carefully preparing a nutritious and colorful meal, we couldn't resist dipping into the candy dish after a long day of putting up hay or rounding up cattle.

The little ceramic lid would sometimes clink if we weren't careful. From the kitchen, grandma would call out a stern warning.

"Frank."

Yes, Emma Jean?" He would respond.

"Now, Frank." She would call back a little irritated.

We knew she was warning us not to ruin our appetites. We knew she was letting us know she didn't appreciate us eating sweets when she was working so hard to prepare us a good meal. Grandpa and I would exchange a smile and gently, quietly unwrap our one piece of candy and replace the lid.

Grandma passed away in 1985. A year later Grandpa had a farm sale and sold off many of the things of my childhood. I asked for the candy jar and kept it filled next to my favorite chair in each place I called home.

When cub was 4, he threw something. And, from upstairs I heard the sound and knew immediately what had happened. The look on his face and that of his sister told me I was right. They knew the story of the candy jar. They knew what it meant to me and what it had come to mean to them as I had allowed them to savor it's contents only as a special treat.

I cried a good part of that day. Cub crawled on my lap and said he was sorry. Cubette shared her blankey with me. I went back and forth between crying and thinking how silly it was to be so upset when my grandparents were not in that jar.

Eventually, I asked them to help me throw it away and explained that some things have very deep meaning to us, and that's okay. As long as we remember to also carry those memories in our hearts, the loss of "things" won't hurt so much.

No one knows when they will meet a traveling mercy.
They arrive in the hands of travelers,
sometimes lovers,
sometimes no one is there at all,
it seems.

They take such odd and infinitely differing forms:
a bowl,
a piece of brown glass,
a long black dress forsaken, but not forgotten,
a collection of stones
brought together on summery early evenings
filled with grandmother smiles and cicada songs.

Not everyone realizes when they
are in the presence of,
or in possession of,
a mercy.

Flown in from the outer reachs of the universe
across a billion trillion miles to the hands of strangers,
and sometimes lovers,
reaching out to us in the plain and simple act of compassion,
of understanding,
of seeing the real you under and between all those layers.

They are hardly ever anything but ordinary,
for, in the rest of the universe,
mercy is the norm.
We here on earth are still works in progress
and tend to ignore the ordinary.

Which is why we sometimes lose our mercies.

Everyone realizes when a mercy is lost,
no one ever loses one without
a long and serious stretch of tears and grief.
We weep,
we cry,
we shake in mourning for
the lost love,
the lost time,
the lost vision of ourselves as something true
that was somehow contained in that little ordinary thing.

Then we go on
as if something has been left behind,
but,
if we know true mercy
down deep we know
that the power was never part
of the stones
or the glass
or the dress
or the bowl.
It was in the hearts and souls and memories
of those
who brought it to us
and those never leave us.
Never.

Out there in the universe beyond,
they fly circles waiting to zoom down to us,
just as we stumble,
just as we fall,
just as the words of hate strike us,
just as the doctor finishes his speech about cyto something or other,
just as we think the first thoughts about never finding love,
just as we think we are finished -
--they arrive.
You can hardly feel them,
they enter open eyes
and open hearts
and open minds
and take the form
of stones in a box,
or a long black dresses
or something as plain as a piece of brown glass.

All you can tell is the daylight seems sharper,
more in tune with the moment,
and so do you.

Joe(sometimes a traveler)Nation

Oh.

<silence>

Have mercy.

Thank you, Joe.

Beautiful.

Man makes me cry, no cry'in.

Joe is the best.

I've been telling him that for years.

So what's going on? does JN have a publisher?

I do, on another coast (not kidding, but I've not produced, long story; not a lame place either), but JN's writing is both baseline re the city and, oh for the word, pelliculite... re the stories he frames.

I've never read anybody quite like J.

I can't understand why there aren't books about his every breath.




But that would aggravate him.

You are all too kind.

Joe(tis true, I am easily aggravated)Nation

I am the same way. When there is a serious problem in my life, I can deal with it, well, almost dispassionately. If I watch a "four handkerchief" movie, I have been known to cry my eyes out.

I have often wondered as to why this happens with me. I suppose it is that
crying over something that has no real significance for me allows me to release the emotion in a way that is non-threatening.

A lawn.

Well, a piece of lawn.

When I first bought this house I had plans. Lots of plans.

A big part of the plans was what to do about the tiny front yard and small-but-comfortably-sized back yard.

The only thing I knew for sure was that the disgusting lawns had to go.

Go, damn lawns, go.

I spent weeks working up the plans. I spent weeks weeding the backyard in preparation for removing the lawn. hamburger came up and helped me dig up the lawn/flip the sod slabs/put down landscape fabric. I had a vision of islands of plantings surrounded by mulch, with rock pathways and stepping stones.

The landscape fabric was down, with nice plantings tucked into slits, the walkways were laid out, the mulch was on the islands, the pathway was bare dirt outlined in Toronto Brickwork bricks. I had the stepping stones ready, just needed to have the walkway rocks delivered.

I came home from work and there was fresh sod in the pathway.

What the ^*%*$*()*%^ ??

My contractor arrived. He'd brought the sod, and laid it, as his birthday present to me.

He knew what my plan was. He didn't like it.

After he left, I sat on the back step and sobbed for hours. Literally.

It wasn't the lawn. It was the loss of control, temporary loss of a vision - my first garden design.

The tiny plantings in the slits are lovely lush plants now. Big and healthy. The mulch needs to be refreshed after all these years. The grass finally gave up the ghost after several year of being peed on by Cleo (and not being watered, as I'm a xeriscaper).

The rocks go in next summer.

At last.

Good on ya, beth. A lawn is a blight, unless it springs up of its own accord.

I'd near kill that contractor! (easy to say that from this far away)

Thanks, Joe (poetry dude) Nation.