When I was in the seventh grade, we had an art class assignment to make a small sculpture out of clay. It could be anything we wanted. I was fascinated by fighter jets at the time, partly inspired by the recent movie Independence Day, so I decided to make an F-16. We had art class one day a week, so I molded the clay over several weeks into a fighter jet about the size of my hand. Once it was hardened I painted it. After the paint dried, my work of art was completed and ready to be taken home.
Most of the other kids in class gave the assignment barely any effort, creating blobs of ceramic that they couldn’t care less about. But I used careful precision to craft my ceramic jet and was proud of the final product. Upon seeing my clay fighter jet, several classmates congratulated me, saying my creation was the best in class by far. I couldn’t wait to display my handmade jet on a shelf in my bedroom, planning to keep it there forever.
It was the end of the school day, and I was sitting at my desk, waiting for my bus to be called to go home. A few of the other boys in my class were fooling around playing catch, and one boy bumped into my desk, knocking the ceramic jet to the floor. It shattered into pieces.
I started crying, devastated to see my work of art broken before I even had a chance to fully admire it. All the time and effort I put into making it was gone in an instant.
The boy who broke it immediately apologized. It was a complete accident and he was genuinely sorry. But that didn’t change the fact that my ceramic jet was broken and could never be fixed.
I suppose I could have made another ceramic jet, if not in art class, then gotten the supplies to make one at home. But I never did. It didn’t seem worth it to spend additional hours rebuilding something that I’d already built, when it could just as easily be broken again. Perhaps I was right, perhaps I was wrong.
Looking back these years later, I don’t know what to make of the incident. Did it have some greater meaning about the fragility of life, the inevitability of death, and the randomness of it all? Or was I just an artistic kid who really loved airplanes? I don’t know. But I’ll never forget the shock at seeing that fighter jet fly off my desk and shatter on the floor—then, with saddened tears in my eyes, bending down to pick up the pieces.
I brought the broken jet home that day anyway and displayed the wreckage in my room for years. I don’t know where the jet is today—probably buried in a dump somewhere1—but the memory of it is still fresh in my mind. Of all the things that happened to me throughout grade school, good and bad, “the ceramic jet” is one of the memories that sticks with me most, though I’m not entirely sure why.
T.Z. Barry 