One is bound to break a few things over the course of a lifetime. If you’re as emotionally clumsy as some of us, you’re bound to break quite a bit more – hearts, heads, spirits – and only if you’re lucky and especially careful can you claim not to have a made such a mess at one point or another. I’ve made my share of messes, though these days the things I break are objects and bad habits – both of which can be mended or, better, dispensed with entirely.
Yet a few months ago, a mug I’ve managed to keep intact for almost two decades, and one of my favorite objects, fell from my hands onto the kitchen floor and immediately broke into several pieces. The curse of 2020, Mercury in Retrograde, and who knows what else conspired to take it from me, and I despondently picked up the pieces as best as I could, chucking some of the smaller shards to keep our feet safe. I took a few photos to document its demise, before Andy came out and said he could fix it.
Andy is quite good at mending things – usually all he needs is some glue, a baby screwdriver, or some spackle and sandpaper, but I didn’t have much faith because even if it went back together I would forever be fighting the mental image of my lips getting sliced by a sharp piece of broken cup. That said, I also had visions of ‘Kintsugi’ the Japanese art of mending broken pottery, so I wanted to see what Andy might manage.
Kintsugi traditionally employs a tree sap laquer laced with powdered metal – such as gold or platinum – instead of a clear glue, to fix a piece of broken pottery. The intent is to highlight and beautify the cracks and fissures, making them part of the art and history of a piece. I love that idea – the notion of taking our faults and literally turning them into gold, into beauty, into art. In some ways, that is the goal of so much of my life.
This was just a tea cup – a cheap one at that, originally procured on a whim from Marshall’s – and Andy was able to put it back together. That isn’t always the case, as we were immediately reminded a few weeks later: our furnace broke, after a three-day ordeal of fix-its and not-so-fix-its and it’s the sort of breakdown that can’t be fixed with pretty paint and golden veining. Rather than moan or lament our unlucky circumstance, we worked in tandem to figure out the best way to tackle the problem. Twenty-plus years into our relationship, we look in the same direction, seeking out the same goal, and a solution for when dilemmas arise, especially the unexpected ones.
