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needed when I designed anything special. It stood always at the far end of the workshop between the stock shelves and a bank of four tall gray lockers, where my assistants and I kept our personal stuff.
    It was he, my uncle Ron, who named his enterprise Logan Glass, and he who drilled into me an embryonic business sense and an awareness that anything made by one glassblower could in general be copied by another, and that this drastically lowered the asking price. During his last few years he sought and succeeded in making pieces of uncopyable originality, working out of my sight and then challenging me to detect and repeat his methods. Whenever I couldn‘t, he generously showed me how; and he laughed when I grew in ability until I could beat him at his own game.
    On the afternoon of Martin’s death both the gallery and showroom were crowded with people looking for ways of remembering the advent of the historic millennium day. I’d designed and made a whole multitude and variety of small good-looking calendar-bearing dishes in every color combination that I knew from experience attracted the most tourist dollars, and we had sold literally hundreds of them. I’d scratched my signature on the lot. Not yet, I thought, but by the year 2020, if I could achieve it, a signed Gerard Logan calendar dish of December 31, 1999, might be worth collecting.
    The long gallery displayed the larger, unusual, one-of-a-kind and more expensive pieces, each spotlit and available: the showroom was lined by many shelves holding smaller, colorful, attractive and less expensive ornaments, which could reasonably be packed into a tourist suitcase.
    One side wall of the showroom rose only to waist height, so that over it one could see into the workshop beyond, where the furnace burned day and night and the little gray pebbles melted into soda crystal at a raised heat of 2400 degrees Fahrenheit.
    Hickory or Irish, or their colleague Pamela Jane, took turns to work as my assistant in the workshop. One of the other two gave a running commentary of the proceedings to the customers and the third packed parcels and worked the till. Ideally the four of us took the jobs in turn, but experienced glassblowers were scarce, and my three enthusiastic assistants were still at the paperweight and penguin stage.
    Christmas sales had been great but nothing like the New Year 2000. As everything sold in my place was guaranteed handmade (and mostly by me), the day I’d spent at the races had been my first respite away from the furnace for a month. I’d worked sometimes into the night, and always from eight onwards in the morning, with one of my three helpers assisting. The resulting exhaustion hadn’t mattered. I was physically fit, and as Martin had said, who needed a sauna with 2400 degrees in one’s face?
    Hickory, twirling color into a glowing paperweight on the end of a slender five-foot-long steel rod called a punty iron, looked extremely relieved at my return from the races. Pamela Jane, smiling, earnest, thin and anxious, lost her place in her commentary and repeated instead, “He’s here. He’s here ...” and Irish stopped packing a cobalt blue dolphin in bright white wrapping paper and sighed, “Thank God,” very heavily. They relied on me too much, I thought.
    I said, “Hi guys,” as usual and, walking around into the workshop and stripping off jacket, tie and shirt, gave the millennium-crazy shoppers a view of a designer-label white string singlet, my working clothes. Hickory finished his paperweight, spinning the punty iron down by his feet to cool the glass, being careful not to scorch his new bright sneakers. I made, as a frivolity, a striped hollow blue-green and purple fish with fins, a geodetic type of ornament that looked impressively difficult and had defeated me altogether at fourteen. Light shone through it in rainbows.
    The customers, though, wanted proof of that day’s origin. Staying