On Gold Mountain, First edition 1995, p. 74:

“Hold this bowl up to the light. See how it has perfect silhouette? See how the light glows through the porcelain? These elements show you that the piece is good.”


People say, “Great Minds Think Alike.”

You don’t have to be a great mind.

When Shirley and I were collecting for our store, the store that never was, we were continually learning.

We went to the stores that sold fine china. The French tea cup. The British home-grown answer with Wedgewood. The Slovenian contribution of Rogaska. The origin in China where so many things were discovered or invented.

You can imagine my shock of recognition when I read in Lisa See’s On Gold Mountain, her family history, where, on p.74, the aforementioned passage above.

Years before, pursuing my Master’s in English Literature at Cal State L.A., I had written a series of Seminar Poems in lieu of an academic paper as the final essay for the class.

I don’t know what all I had been reading, or how I knew what I knew, but I had written two companion poems “From the Ancient Dynasties.” [You can read them in my book, For Lo These Many.]

One was the voice of the potter to the Emperor. The other was the voice of the laborer who carried dung.

The potter to the Emperor revealed his trade secrets in the lines:

My fingers are a thousand years
My joy is to be old with my accomplished clay
What mineral secrets crystalize throughout
The strength of my extended fragility
The glaze is my own
I hold each piece to my eyes and the sky
A perfect curve of living light

It was as if Lisa See and I shared the same mind as we shared virtually the same words.

How is this possible?

Later, Shirley became good friends with Lisa’s mother, Carolyn See, then we both became friends with her daughter Lisa. Carolyn would send us notices: “Dearest Shirley, be sure to go to my beloved daughter’s talk at Vroman’s about her latest book.” We did, and became good friends.

How, so many years earlier, had I bridged the time and found the words?

Well, I’ve said it before.

Words and ideas whirl around us all the time. We don’t have to know each other to reach out and pluck the same words. There may be many other people who can claim the same context.

There’s a confluence in randomness in the universe allowed by the limitless time of eternity.

As I’ve said, with earned humility, “I’m just a monkey at a typewriter.”

The reference, of course, is to the truism that “a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters in a thousand years will write Shakespeare.”

Not that I’m really a monkey. But when an explanation can explain the unexplainable, for the moment, that’s good enough for me.