What Good is a Glass Badger?

[akirlu]

I couldn't tell you, but I think I may want one. Though, yet more tempty would be this glass dinosaur, or a stand in, for the beloved glass moose that was lost in the Sierra Madre quake.

Since I was a small child, I was often fascinated with very small things. I remember having little white Michelin Man cast in hard plastic, probably a refugee from some long-lost key fob, maybe an inch long. I adored it, in part simply because it was such a perfectly formed and detailed little thing, and fit so snugly in my hand.

I don't remember, though I have been told the story many times, the incident of my horrified grandmother finding me playing with a millipede. "It could bite you," she said, trying to persuade me to set the thing down. I was not impressed. "Oh, but Grandma, it has such tiny teeth!"

When the family moved to Stockholm, one of the many wonders of the place was the habit of the touristy shops to carry tiny, tiny glass animals. Turtles and elephants and polar bears and swans and dolphins, any one of which could fit on a toddler's thumbnail. At that time, the elephants were always turquoise blue, for some reason. (Or perhaps it's just that my elephant was blue, and it has expanded in memory.) Naturally, I was totally enchanted.

Another of the marvels of Stockholm for me, at the mature and sophisticated age of four, was Djurgården and my very first true amusement park: Gröna Lund. And there, among the tivoli lights and flying carpet rides and carousel swings, tucked away among the vendors of gaudy pinwheels and funnel cakes and toy koalas-on-a-stick, was a glass artist. I mean an artist. He had a real eye for natural lines and animal gesture. He could actually capture the awkward grace and looming majesty of a moose in a 5" glass figure. His booth of utterly unaffordable things was near the entrance of the park, and so it was a herald of all the other wonderous things to come. He guarded the gateway to magic. And so was born a lifelong love affair with glass.

It's not one I've indulged as much as I might. When we moved to the States, all the glass blowers who sold at carnivals and fairs were hacks. They were all making the same clumsy, colorless, scribbly looking teddy bears and roses and carousels, and none of it looked other than cheap and awful. I was never even tempted. For a little while, I was finding fairly fine pieces in San Francisco China Town -- I wish I knew what had happened to the Peking glass Panda I spent nine whole dollars for. Later, there was a guy who showed up at Worldon and did really lovely work, dragons and fabulously sinuous cats, but I could never afford his work, and now I don't see him any more. But now I have found that a number of Russian glass artists are selling their work through eBay stores. Not all of it is brilliant, but every now and then, someone has the touch. This could be bad.