Little Adventures

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Rug Man

As I go about my normal everyday life, every once in a while I am told or see or read about something that interests me. I keep a mental list and four or five times a year I spend an afternoon finding out more about these things. Last year on a warm and colorful fall afternoon, I walked over to the university library to read up on a wonderful Spanish building called the Alhambra, a kind of movie star dinosaur called the Raptor, and a writer of dry humor named P. G. Wodehouse.

I had finished my investigations and was walking home through the back alleys of Clarion when I came upon a curious scene. There behind an old Victorian mansion was a rug merchant with his wares spread all over the lawn. I could hardly believe it! Here were rugs from Turkey, Iran, Persia, Afghanistan and India laid out flat on the grass as a sort of horizontal museum.

For years I have gone to fine furniture stores every once in a while to see the oriental rugs. The rug makers are generally followers of Islam, a religion which discourages decorations which include realistic pictures of people, animals or plants. For this reason oriental rugs tend to be very geometrical. The labels on these rugs tend to be jawbreakers like Ghiordes, Shiraz and Karabagh. These are the names of the places where the rugs was made, or of the tribe that made them, or of the technique used in their construction.

Now I wandered about the lawn looking at the wonderful rugs glowing in the fall sunlight. I tried to imagine the people who make a Seraband rug or a Tashkent rug or a Ladik rug, but I found I could not. Then came the rug man to ask if I saw anything I liked. I told him that I liked everything but that sadly I wouldn't be buying a rug that day. Then I went on to explain about my fascination with symmetry, and he told me of his fascination with rugs.

Jacob Stein was twenty-five years old and, like his father before him and his father's father before that, Jacob worked in the rug trade. As a young man just starting out, Jacob had thus far been concerned only with the selling side of the business here in the United States. He traveled around to furniture stores to promote his wares, which is how I happened to find him in the back yard of Erma's Place, our local fine furniture store. Soon things would change for Jacob, however, as he was about to go to Turkey for the first time to see rugs being made and to purchase dozens of them for his firm. How I envied him his adventure!

Together we strolled the rug strewn grounds and talked of our interests. Jacob learned something about the symmetry of his rugs, and I learned of his life and dreams, and began my next list of interesting things to investigate.