Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 104081 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 520(@200wpm)___ 416(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104081 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 520(@200wpm)___ 416(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, exactly, but it likely involved women and drugs and spending money like it would never run out. I definitely hadn’t expected him to be so focused on the season, to work on his body and his mind, to stick to a routine that would help him recover from the games this past week while also gearing up for the ones to come.
There was a reason he was one of the best rookies in the league. Maybe luck and talent had something to do with it, but this? His dedication to what he did? That played a part, too.
I thought I’d be ignored until I excused myself from his apartment, but when the afternoon bled into evening, and the sun began to sink over the city skyline, Vince grabbed two local IPAs out of his fridge. He cracked the top on one of them before arching a brow at me to ask if I wanted the second one.
And usually, I was not a beer girl.
But I thought what the hell — part of the experience, right? and nodded.
“Is it Netflix time?” I asked him as I took the first sip.
He smiled the way the Cheshire cat would, rounding the kitchen island and walking past me and across the room.
“Not quite,” he said.
And he placed his beer on the end table by his pottery wheel.
“Wait,” I said excitedly, hopping off my barstool and all but skipping over to him. “Am I going to get backstage access to the making of a Vince Tanev ceramic masterpiece?”
“I can’t tell if you’re being sincere or sarcastic.”
“A bit of both.” I grabbed one of the spare rolling stools in the area and took a seat, wheeling up to where he was. “So what are you doing? What are you making? Tell me everything.”
I couldn’t explain it, but Vince was the most relaxed I’d seen him all day when he stepped into that little corner of his home. It was like watching someone kick their shoes off after a long, hard day.
“This guy is going into the kiln because it’s finally dry enough,” he said, picking up a wide, shallow bowl. It was sage green and looked like one you might use for pasta or a salad. “And I’m going to fuck around with some designs on these guys,” he said, motioning to a set of tiny glasses.
“What are those, anyway?”
“I had Japanese teacups in mind when I made them,” he said. “Mainly for sencha. But we’ll see how they turn out.”
“They look okay to me.”
“Now,” he said. “But I could screw them up in the design process or in the kiln. Especially since we live in Florida.” He shook his head. “The moisture here fucks everything up.”
I felt like a little kid in Santa’s workshop, an excited smile spreading on my lips as I leaned forward and took it all in.
“And then,” he said, reaching for a plastic container on one of the shelves behind his wheel. He set it on the table and popped the lid, revealing multiple sealed bags of clay of all different colors. “I’ll start something new.”
“What do you do with all of them?” I asked. “When you finish?”
He shrugged. “Depends. I keep some, give some away as gifts, throw some right into the garbage where they belong.”
“Use some to make ten grand for charity.”
“Someone’s gotta make the rich assholes of the world feel good about themselves,” he said pointedly, and we shared a knowing smile.
I continued peppering Vince with questions as he got started, and he had the patience of a saint as he walked me through everything he was doing, step by step. I had just as many questions about this as I did about hockey, except this was more exciting to me because it was something I had personal interest in.
I loved tending to my garden with my hands, loved cleaning up the earth with my hands, too. The thought of creating something with them, of taking something from the earth to make something beautiful and useful… it was enticing.
“How did you get into this, anyway?” I asked after he had placed a few pieces into the kiln. He grabbed a bag of clay next, adding pieces of it to a scale until he had the right weight of what he wanted to work with.
“I don’t really know, actually,” he confessed, covering his workspace with a large piece of plywood. He plopped the clay onto it before taking a seat, readjusting the stool and table until they were at the perfect height. Then, he dug his hands into the clay and began to knead it. “I kind of stumbled upon it.”
“How does one stumble upon pottery?”
“I was a freshman at Michigan, my first year playing hockey at that level. And I knew it would be tougher than when I was in high school, but I didn’t realize how much of a toll just being a college athlete would have on me. It’s not just hockey,” he said, molding the clay with long, smooth presses of his fingertips. “And it’s not high-school-level classes. It’s grueling practices, high-pressure games, and getting a degree, a career. I mean, of course we all want to go pro, and most of us know we’ll play in the circuit in some way, at least for a while.” He shrugged. “But what if you get a career-ending injury? What if you only play a few years and then get let go altogether? We can’t all play pro forever. There are too many players with the same dreams.”