Dishes

[cosmolinguist]

"Holly, turn around," Grandma said as we sat at the table after a lunch of Christmas Eve leftovers, "and pick out a dish."

My oldest cousin picked out a Fostoria cake-plate. Her sister said she wants a pink candy dish. The other girls are in Kansas and can choose something the next time they visit Grandma and Grandpa, hopefully in July. That just leaves me.

My grandma's been meaning to implement this scheme for years. I think it's an attempt to avoid the sort on infighting she's seen in other families upon the death of the matriarch. The dishes stay with Grandma now anyway; she's put a little strip of tape with the girl's name on the bottom of the chosen ones so everybody knows which they are.

I turned and glanced warily at the cabinet behind my chair and the bigger one next to it. Grandma has a small house and lots of dishes; things manage to fit only if they are arranged just so. Anybody can wash and dry the china and silverware and crystal bowls we used last night for Christmas Eve dinner, but only Grandma knows how they all fit together to be put away. There's so much stuff there, I wouldn't even know where to begin. I am no connoisseur of crystal.

And for some reason I felt weird about my mom and my aunt (the only other females present; the guys were all in the next room hoping the Packers could beat the Bears) being there. Maybe just my aunt: Lacking a life of her own, she watches other people's so closely and so critically that I can't help but feel self-conscious.

Yet she soon saved me, for her comments and questions about everything turned everyone's attention away from me and toward what I wanted to hear about: Grandma's dishes. I can tell that some of them are nice to look at, but they're much nicer to hear about than to look at. I happily absorbed stories about bridal showers more than half a century before my own, about garage sales where other old ladies' beautiful dishes were sold for a quarter apiece after they died, about my grandma's grandma (not Hanson but the other one, whose name sounds like Erret and looks like Ecgvrt).

In other words, what I really want to wrap carefully and ship to Manchester to keep with me always is not a dish but my grandma.

She happened to tell me that she had a small dish that belonged to my other grandma, Dad's mom. A small pink dish, she said, with a curved handle. "See it down there?" she pointed. I looked and I did. "You can take that with you now, if you like."

When my dad's parents could no longer live on their own, his brother and sister-in-law unilaterally decided to move them away from their small town and everyone they knew, to a soulless skyscraper of a rest home in Rochester, where the aforementioned brother and sister-in-law live. After taking Grandpa and Grandma out of the house, those two took everything that might be valuable or antique. "To have it appraised," they said. They took all the photo albums. "We'll make copies to share," they said. And they took all of Grandma's dishes, except her Fostoria stemware, which my mom had always liked, and two or three other small things. My parents expected never to see the rest of it again, and that is exactly what has happened.

Silly as it may sound, I remember my grandma's dishes from many events of my childhood. None of it really was terribly valuable; it certainly won't mean as much in an antiques store as it would to me. (I'm getting sentimental in my old age!) It won't mean anything to my cousins if they end up with them; boys now aged two-and-a-half and a terribly immature fourteen.

I don't know how my mom's mom ended up with a dish that belonged to my dad's mom. But I do know that this will probably be the only way I have anything at all from his side of the family. Which is, admittedly, not a terribly nice or close family even at the best of times, but still.

I am envious of the collection of stories dishes that my living grandmother has in her china cupboard; I am glad now that I can carry along at least one little pink story for my dad and his family.

Comments

[emyjo.livejournal.com]

My grandma does this thing where if someone gives her a little kitschy gift, she writes the name of the giver on the bottom in permanent marker. Thus, she avoids infighting, because it just goes back to the person who gave it to her.

Just by looking at the name on the bottom of the kitsch, she can tell you the story of when she got it. It's an amazing skill.

[morphogenesis.livejournal.com]

My wife's mom did the same thing; everybody knew what out of the really important stuff they were getting long before she sold her house, divvied things up, and sold the stuff nobody wanted.

[hephaestos.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much what Katy's family is dealing with at the moment, is the infighting that comes after the death of the matriarch. And that was about ten years ago in this case. And it really has nothing to do with dishes or property; more with entropy.

Katy's mom is trying to hold it together, and doing and admirable job I think. Most of the rest of that generation is either disabled or dead.

I have a set of my great-aunt's dishes, and they're pretty cool, but I know none of the stories behind them, so they don't mean so much to me. And that's kind of sad.

(And the Packers didn't beat the Bears, did they! Boo-yaw! I can't stand the Packers. :)

[cosmolinguist]

Well, yes, we don't like the Packers either. But there was the dim hope that if the Bears lost the Vikings might have some chance at the playoffs...

...at least until they cocked it up anyway, losing to Baltimore.