A foot on it

Made a thing with a foot on it that did not collapse. I have been trying to throw a foot since about March. It is the part where you stop making a bowl and start making an object that was designed, and it has gone wrong every single time, usually at the trimming stage, usually because I am impatient and the clay is not leather hard yet and I go at it anyway. Today I waited. That is the whole technique. I waited an extra twenty-five minutes doing nothing in particular, wiping down a wheel that did not need wiping, and then it trimmed like butter. Arlene came past and looked at it and said, there you go. Which from her is roughly a standing ovation. Two hours in which the entire contents of my head were a cylinder and then a foot. I have been thinking on the drive home about why this is the only place in my week where waiting is not excruciating. I wait all day professionally. I am extremely good at waiting in a room with somebody while they get to a thing. But that waiting has a person at the end of it who needs something from me, and this waiting has a lump of clay that is indifferent to how I am doing, and it turns out that is the variable. Clay under the nails again. Danny has started calling Tuesday the clay night, like it is a thing we have always had.