I was just
knee high to a grasshopper the first time I saw his
collection.
Bottles arranged carefully yet somehow carelessly on shelves. The shelving covered every wall in the
basement of my neighbor's house, and reached nearly to the celing, towering high over my
little girl eyes.
I remember the myriad of colors- firey reds that melted to orange, deep cobalt blues that looked torn from the midnight sky. Inky black, wasabi green, sunshine yellow, brilliant magenta... any color you could imagine seemed like it was there, trapped inside the delicate glass. Sometimes outside light would come through the basement windows and the colors seemed to glow, as if they would escape their glass prisons and wash everything in a more vibrant shade of perfection.
And even as there were many colors, there seemed to be infinite shapes to those flasks. There were voluminous demijohns and jugs, small boxish medicine jars, petite decanters, curvacious coca-cola bottles, hand blown vessles just a leetle crooked. There was even something akin to a klein bottle on those dusty shelves.
Cool to the touch, the bottles seemed both so fragile and everlasting. Nothing could destroy the beautiful bottle collection.
Not even after it had been destroyed.
One evening, my neighbor and his wife got into a fight and she took a baseball bat to the bottles. Afterwards (and after they dealt with their marital troubles) he took the shards he had saved from the massacre, got some copper foil, and spent endless hours binding the pieces together in incredible stained glass jigsaw formations.
I'm telling you, no good thing can ever truly be destroyed.