My book club has been reading Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland. It’s historical fiction, set in NYC at the turn of the last century. The Mr. Tiffany is the stained glass Tiffany and not the jeweler Tiffany, who was his father. Clara was a real person who worked at the Tiffany studio, and who, according to the story, came up with the idea of using stained glass to make lampshades, while Mr. Tiffany took the credit. Whether that’s true or not, it’s a great story with just enough detail about making stained glass and about factories of that time. For example, even if women were allowed to work in the factories, they had to quit when they married, and they could not join the men’s labor unions.

Fast forward to last weekend when I happened to be in Brockport for the arts festival. I was walking down Main St. on my way to the Lift Bridge Bookstore, when I saw a sign in front of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church that advertised Tiffany windows inside. A year ago I might have kept on walking, but since reading this book, I have a new appreciation for Tiffany glass, and I had to go in to see it.

 This is just one of the windows, and my picture certainly doesn’t do it justice. The church has many stained glass windows, but only three of them are Tiffanys. What impressed me was that I didn’t have to ask which ones were made by Tiffany. They just stood out. It wasn’t the color or even the design. It was the way the light shone through them, the effect of Tiffany’s layered glass technique that I had read about in the book. They were stunning.

In another “coincidence” the assignment from my writing group this week was to write about a piece of art. Here’s my attempt to describe through poetry my thoughts as I looked at the Tiffany windows.

          Excellence
Excellence doesn’t need
introduction, explanation, justification.
It knows its own name,
orchestrates its own symphony.
It doesn’t push others out of the way
to take center stage.
It simply stands up,
and everyone else backs away.
It turns on its light,
and everyone else becomes shadow.
It starts to speak,
and everyone else cowers in silence.
Excellence is poetry,
everyone else just spits out words.