John.

Carol, John's wife, works the night shift at a Duluth hospital. She clocks in for the night just as he's leaving the workshop, and at dawn they cross paths for ten minutes in the kitchen, with the gray light off the lake coming through the window. He leaves the pot on and the coffee made before he goes. Among his people, mating is for life and you always return to the same house; they've spent twenty-four years coming back to the one in Lincoln Park. This mug is for that first coffee, the one at the crossing, the one that opens the day.

I created it facing forward and on a plain background: on a mug, the portrait is what rules. John isn't one for grand phrases; his way of loving is to leave a thing done before it's needed, and the dawn coffee is exactly that. When he finally closes the workshop at night, he leaves his guitar on the bench and heads home to get the coffee ready. A simple mug, white with the yellow inside, suits a man like that. If you take to this bald eagle, there's more of him in his biography.