The Stories Sher Shares: Malleable Blobs

I was sick of Bangkok. Don't get me wrong, Bangkok has its special joys: savory, spicy street food on every corner, towering shopping malls just a BTS stop away, and strange people to observe everywhere you look. But the hot weather- stuffy air-pollution-and-sweat-infested- people- and-pollution-and- traffic-and-dirty-broken-sidewalks-and pollution can get rather old after awhile. That is why I was delighted when Dominic answered my plea for asylum from Bangkok.

Dominic lives about 30 minutes outside main Bangkok in a suburb called Pakret. Just a motorbike ride away from his apartment is a pier by the river where one can hop a 2-minute ferry ride across to the Mun village pottery makers community, Ko Kret.

I must say the definition of Ko Kret is quaint. That pretty much sums up the winding maze of paved bicycle/motorbike/pedestrian paths that wind through the island full of tropical fruit trees, stilted wooden river houses, and even a blossoming, peaceful flower garden where Dominic and I toured on two rented, rattly bicycles.

The peaceful pottery community was warm to us--not whining at us to buy or look at their pottery like most touristy vendors do in Bangkok. The smiling workers ushered us into their "factory" with a wave of their clay-smeared tan hands.

Three potters were hard at work in the center of an open-air building bulging with recently formed pots waiting to go in the kiln. I could have stood there for hours, gawking at the mesmerizing masterpieces being formed right before my very eyes.

I was most impressed by one man. He had one huge, clay water container-whose height looked to be almost as tall as the man's sitting down- molded already on a plank of wood next to him. But I was still a bit worried for the sad, blob of square, gray, ooshiness sitting before his potter's wheel. How could that goo ever become that pot?

But I need not to have been worried. The potter placed the overly moist Play-Dough on the wheel and with a slight grin behind his dark eyes he set to work. He smushed it down and pulled it up as the wheel spinned rhythmically to a rhythm only he was the master of. He pulled and pulled and swirled his hands around it gently and sweetly like a father caressing the cheek of his child. He patted and pushed a little here and a little there.

I had no clue what was going on of course. It seemed like he was playing some sort of game that I was too slow to catch onto the rules of. So alas, I didn't figure out how he did it, but in the end a huge, water clay pot was before him, being placed next to his other pot.

But the pot wasn't done yet. Dominic and I rode around to the other parts of the island to see the rest of the pottery process. We saw the etchers making minute marks in the softened clay, then the kilners pulling red-brown pots out of the fire and putting gray ones in. Then we bought cute little clay trinkets at many of the pottery shops along the paths.

But in the midst of all this I kept thinking of the mysterious little potter man. He knew exactly what he was doing, and the clay could care less about "helping out the potter". It just did its job by being a malleable blob. Because only by doing its job could it become what it was meant to be.