Glass by Mark Dunau

I’ve only had an employer once. That was in 1976 as a playwright for an experimental

theater company in New Orleans. My payment was $50 a week. I had helped write a

grant to the National Science Foundation for a play about science based on the invention

of clear and colorless glass in Venice in the Fifteenth Century. Amongst other changes,

this invention led to the telescope, microscope, mirrors, and light in the home through the

mass production of glass windows; generally upending the framing of European thought

and life, from the discovery that the earth was not the center of the universe to a new

focus on self, as evidenced by an explosion of self-portraits through mirrors. Amazingly,

we received the NSF grant, and successive grants to tour the play in most of the science

and technology museums of the United States. Part of my reward for my singular

employment was a modest royalty, which I used to travel for 13 months in Asia.

Which brings me to India, and a small village in a remote part of Rajasthan, where I was

the first white visitor since the British had left in 1948. The color of the villagers of this

light infused and arid land astonished me. The women dressed in six basic colors; bright

red, blue, orange, yellow, green and fuchsia. They each wore a skirt, blouse and

billowing shawl/headdress, and were usually brilliant in at least two of these colors. The

men dressed in all white, often capped with a bright pink, yellow, orange, scarlet or white

turban.

Guided through the village by the elderly feudal lord, Ugrasen, penniless and nearly

landless except for his falling down castle, I was welcomed into the homes of the

villagers. We took daily walking tours, and through Ugrasen’s English and good cheer, I

was introduced to the large and diverse personalities of men with caste assigned jobs that

included camel herders, carpenters, teacher, tailor, miller, liquor merchant, astrologist. I

often had chai with the Jatt men, and came to admire the bracelets that they wore. I asked

the eldest son of the goldsmiths if he would make this silver bracelet for me. We had

become friends, and he replied through Ugrasen that only farmers wore this bracelet. I

said I had never put a seed in the ground and didn’t care. So that night, over flaming dry

buffalo dung, which was further heated by blowing through a straw over its flames, this

master craftsman fashioned me this bracelet. It’s never left my arm.

2

Now forty-five years later, I’ve been a self-employed farmer for thirty-two years. My

odd jobs for this light-filled employment start in the spring with the filling of green

houses with thousand of transplants, bringing the tractor up to snuff, repairing electric

fence to keep out the deer, procuring compost and organic fertilizer, placing and getting

the water pump working, running irrigation hose, transplanting by hand thousands of

plants every three weeks, direct seeding thousands of more plants on a two week

schedule, for six months covering and uncovering fields with row covers, weeding and

weeding, lining up customers and their weekly orders, harvesting and packing for

deliveries that have taken me the equivalent of twelve times around the earth. This is

nowhere near all the odd jobs of my agricultural life, not to mention growing the working

relationship with my farmer wife and children, and over the years teaching more than

thirty interns how to farm. Overall, it’s an odd job, brutal and beautiful, relentlessly

problem solving, outlined by nature, which does not care about our politics or personal

problems, but offers myriad gifts.

How did I get here? I think my goldsmith friend was warning me when he said that only

farmers wore this bracelet. Perhaps my scientific mind was too rational to believe that

the beauty of a bracelet could lead to a farm. The village where this bracelet was born

had no glass windows, only shutters. There’s no one way to see the light.