World's Largest Paperweight

Well, it came today: the glass sculpture that I bought when I was up in Eureka. When I woke up this morning, there was a message on my cell phone from the shipping company. I called them back and the woman told me that the truck was in my area and the driver would arrive "pretty soon."

He did, in a very large truck. There, in the back, strapped onto its own pallet was the box: five feet long by two feet tall and two feet deep. "It weighs about 80 pounds," the driver said, and I told him that sounded about right. "What do you got in there?" he asked. I was tempted to tell him a paperweight, but replied, "Art glass," instead.

He moved the pallet to the tailgate and lowered it to the ground, then cut the box from the pallet and tipped it onto the dolly. He got the box to our front steps and together we hoisted it up into the entryway. "Sign this," he said. I told him I wanted to open the box and inspect the piece before signing off that it was in good condition. He complained and said it only meant the box wasn't damaged. "If there's anything wrong inside, that was their packing, not us," he said. I kept dismantling the box. "We're not supposed to wait," he said. But he did.

The packing job was almost overkill, and I have never experienced so many of those foam packing peanuts (I call them "ghost turds") in my life. The piece, however, was in fine shape, so I signed and the driver left happily. Afterwards I wondered if I should have tipped him.

Once I had the piece entirely unwrapped, I had a mound of ghost turds four inches deep and about five feet in diameter. Luckily, the cats did not seem at all interested in them or I could have had a real mess. But, after about a half an hour of corralling and scooping and corralling some more, I got all those turds back into the shipping box.

These pictures just don't do the piece justice. It is 36 inches tall and about 14 inches in diameter at the base. The internal coloring and general refraction and reflection of the piece is amazing. The overall impression is contemporary, but much of the technique to create it comes Venetian glassworking in the 18th century, so the color inclusions have an almost classical appearance. It was the one thing I splurged on with the inheritance from mom. I kind of consider it her last birthday present to me. The rest of the inheritance is being soberly spent on home improvements and tucked away in CDs and IRA accounts.

This piece, however, is going to be the visual inspiration for the remodeling that we have planned.

So you'll just have to drop by some time to see the thing for yourself. It has no function except to do what it does with the light around it. And that's pretty cool, if you ask me.