Soup needs a bowl.

Poetry, Prose, and Pottery reboot

Dear Soupers,

You might notice there have been some changes around here. After a couple of years of sporadic postings, I’m hoping to ramp things up and share more about my book in progress. I have about 67k words. It’s still not done, but I have a road map now. You’ll all still be getting the same soup, but I’m changing up the container just a bit.

I’ve been both writing essays about life with Mom, who, unsurprisingly, has become an integral thread in this book, and doing intense research into the men whose early deaths changed the trajectory of her life. The overarching gesture is that, had her father Brad Keeler lived, her life would have been entirely different. In fact, I likely wouldn’t exist. Just one of the many forking paths where one event alters the course of countless others. Maybe she would’ve gone to college. She certainly wouldn’t have met my dad.

To understand my mother’s father, one has to go back further, to his father, Rufus.

One exciting development that I’ve failed to write about here is this: In 1989, which incidentally is the year I graduated high school, a man named Joseph A. Taylor of the Tile Heritage Foundation was corresponding with others in the Keeler family about my great-grandfather and writing what became for those of us in the family a point of pride: an article for a major industry publication designating Rufus B. Keeler a “tile wizard” and genius.

On March 10, the night before my mom’s birthday, I decided to look up the Foundation and, shockingly, it still exists. Not only that, but Joe Taylor still exists, too! I immediately paid the fee to join the organization, and in the memo I mentioned who I was. I figured that would be it. Another lob into the void.

The next day, my phone rang. The number said Healdsburg, California. Do I know anyone there? Probably spam. Nevertheless, I picked up.

It was Joe Taylor.

We spoke for about an hour. Since then, we’ve spoken again and corresponded a couple of times. Some of what has driven my research have been the letters from Great Aunt Jeanne, aka Jean Keeler, Grandpa Brad’s sister. She led a life of adventure and in her later years, I was able to at least speak to her by phone. During the late 1980s, when the article above was being written, Jeanne had written a series of treatises and sent them to Joe Taylor: Looping cursive spelled out pages of details from her perspective about “Father” and “Grandfather” and “Characters”. I’ve since learned that Jeanne is a somewhat unreliable narrator, prone to speculation and latching on to salacious possibilities. “Father had an eye for the ladies…,” one starts. Did he? I have no facts to back that up. But some of the questions that Joe posed to her in his answering letters set me down the path, puzzling things out.

I have spent countless hours scouring Newspapers.com and following labyrinthine trails that lead nowhere on Ancestry.com. But it’s all been worth it.

All of the published accounts of Great Grandfather Rufus’ life say he began his career at Carnegie, named for Andrew Carnegie and a sister operation to Tesla, named for —you guessed it—Nikola Tesla. Carnegie was a clay town, making brick and terracotta. Tesla was a coal town. But the 1906 San Francisco earthquake makes research difficult. Rufus grew up, raised by father after his mother’s early death when he was ten, in South San Francisco. All of my research points to him working for the Steiger Potteries first, before heading off to study ceramic engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and well before arriving at Carnegie.

Why is this is important, I suppose you’re wondering. Well, first, Rufus literally dedicated his life to not just the art but the science of clay. There are so many factors that affect the longevity of a ceramic object, and its usefulness. The clay body of a terracotta roof tile is significantly different from that of a piece of dinnerware. We take for granted now that one can walk into a hobby shop, or even a clay supply store, and buy pre-made clay for virtually any project. But back in the day, it took a genius like Rufus to figure out how to extract the clay from the earth, what additives would make it suitable for the different purposes, what temperature to fire it at, how to build a kiln, how to develop a glaze….

I am not an expert. I am just someone with access to the internet and an obsession with this man who I am related to by blood, whose personality seems akin to my own in the little that I have been able to glean about him directly.

I have outlived him by four years so far. Who is this ghost who performed alchemy, perfected everlasting tile, who could pose so seductively on the beach, and for whom?