copyright © 2004
by Robert L. Blau
Porcelain Planet had been my dream since I was
boy. It was going to be the best and biggest porcelain emporium
in the civilized world. It was going to have the largest
selection of porcelain artifacts in history, from ancient to new, from
hard paste to soft, from Bone China to Parian statuary. It was
going to run the geographic gamut from China to England, from Russia to
Italy. It was going to span the centuries from Han to Qing to the
present day.
So it was a momentous day when the doors of
Porcelain Planet actually opened. It occupied an entire city
block and was everything I had hoped it would be. My partners in
this undertaking were my wife Jessie and our friends Ken and
Madge. All of them were as excited as I myself, and the
enterprise was an immediate and smashing success.
Yes, a ... smashing success. That brings me to
that first fateful day. Porcelain Planet had been thriving for
several years, when someone forgot to close a door at quitting
time. When we arrived at the store in the morning, we found that
a large bull had wandered in and was placidly pacing up and down the
corridors of priceless merchandise. Several shelves full of
highly breakable goods already lay in pieces on the floor.
We were shocked! We were appalled! How
could this have happened? More to the point, how were we to get
the beast out of the store before it destroyed more - or even all - of
our beautiful porcelain? For days, we tried to corner the
heedless animal, and each day, more priceless artifacts crashed to the
floor.
Then came the second fateful day. Finally, the
moment was upon us. We had cornered the bull. We had
tranquilizer guns loaded and aimed. The bull was in our sights,
and the range was point blank.
And then Ken lowered his gun, and Madge deflected
mine upwards. The bull roared by in a fury, rapidly destroying
the merchandise it hadn't gotten to before.
"Good grief!" I cried. "What on earth are you doing? We had him! We had him!"
"What Madge and I realized," said Ken, "is that the
bull is good for business. We feel safer with the bull in the
store. It keeps the burglars out."
I looked at the endless shards of porcelain that
covered the floor of our beautiful store. The bull got in by
accident. It's early ravages were not our fault. Now, we
are complicit in our own demise.
Reflections on Kristalltag, November
2, 2004, when the shards on the ground were not broken glass, but
fragments of a republic.