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.”
“I never thought of that,” I admitted softly, mulling on all he’d said. I’d always assumed college athletes had a free pass, that they were the lucky ones who didn’t have to try as hard as the rest of us.
I felt a little guilt at that assumption now.
“Anyway, I was stressed, to put it lightly,” he continued, and I marveled at how his hands spread and shaped the clay, how gracefully his fingertips and palms worked in sync to wedge it.
I’d never stared so much at someone’s hands, and I found myself appreciating the makeup of his, the large knuckles and smooth, bronze skin that stretched over them.
“When I wasn’t in class or studying, I was at the rink, either practicing or playing in games. We partied, of course, but that was stressful sometimes, too, because one night of partying too hard could mean a shit game performance the next day.
I needed something for me,” he said after a pause. “Something that wasn’t goal-oriented, that didn’t have any pressure tied to it. One night when I couldn’t sleep, I was scrolling on my phone, and this time-lapse video of a vase being made came up. I must have watched it a dozen times.” He smiled as if he were back in the memory. “And then, I signed up for a class.”
“And you loved it so much, you made yourself a home studio?”
“Not until I got my signing bonus,” he said. “This shit’s expensive. But, yeah. I knew I’d need it now, in the NHL, even more than I did in college.”
He seemed to be satisfied with whatever he’d done to the clay to prep it, and he balled it up in his hands before rolling over to his wheel.
“When I’m in here, in this space,” he said, looking around at the shelves of clay, at the finished and half-finished and completely unfinished projects. “I’m… free. Free of expectations, free of the pressure I put on myself in every other aspect of my life. If I fuck up,” he said, wetting the wheel a bit before firing it to life. The clay spun centered and beautiful for just a moment before he pushed too hard on it and it warped, nearly flying off before he cut the power on the wheel. Then, he quickly reshaped the clay and put it back in place again, as if it’d never happened. “I just start over.”
My chest tightened as a smile found my lips. “That’s kind of beautiful.”
“That’s not what you said the first night we met,” he teased.