Gumball Machine Ornament

The Gumball Machine Ornament is a hand-painted gumball machine ornament, blown as a red cast-iron base and lid beneath a clear globe with seven colored spheres sitting inside it. Seven is not an approximation. The spec sheet says seven, and every globe gets counted before it leaves the building, because six reads as half-empty and eight reads as a mistake nobody caught. The coin slot and the crank are laid in silver over the red, and the lid takes a metal cap where the lock would be. It stands just under four inches. My nephew Otis at six years old understood a gumball machine to be a promise the building had made to him personally, and would post himself in front of one and wait for it to be kept. TIFF runs on the idea that the waiting is not dead time, that the queue and the lights going down and the delay before anything happens are part of what you turned up for.