A while ago I wrote a "post":http://gooblink.com/blog/index.php?id=103 about a panicky phone call I received from my sister who decided to give away a set of dishes that, for years, she had been protecting like it was the Hope Diamond.
It was funny to me, to think that it would be so hard to part with a set of gift-with-purchase stoneware after 20 years of keeping it safely in storage. Last night while visiting with friends the conversation naturally turned to stemware, and I suddenly remembered a time when I, too, jealously protected a seemingly priceless object. Here, now, I confess my hypocrisy.
A while ago I wrote a "post":http://gooblink.com/blog/index.php?id=103 about a panicky phone call I received from my sister who decided to give away a set of dishes that, for years, she had been protecting like it was the Hope Diamond.
It was funny to me, to think that it would be so hard to part with a set of gift-with-purchase stoneware after 20 years of keeping it safely in storage. Last night while visiting with friends the conversation naturally turned to stemware, and I suddenly remembered a time when I, too, jealously protected a seemingly priceless object. Here, now, I confess my hypocrisy.
It was a set of goblets; six exquisitely fashioned, green, antique glass wine goblets that had been in our family for as long as I could remember. I felt so special and unworthy of her grace when my mom told me that I could have those glasses when I moved out on my own. “…a wedding gift from my first marriage…,” I overheard her discussing the glasses with someone on the phone. Her “first marriage” was to my dad who was killed in an automobile accident when I was three. Those glasses had profound meaning to me over the years and through many moves from apartment to apartment, state to state, house to house I cherished and cared for those goblets and the treasured memories they symbolized.
Some time after I had married Chuck I was on the phone with my mom as I was unpacking and I began to brag about what tender care I’d taken over all these years to make sure that the green goblets remained whole.
“Green goblets? What green goblets?”
Is she crazy? Has she forgotten?
“You know; the wedding gift from when you married my dad?” I was incredulous! Was I really reminding my mother how we came to possess this priceless heirloom?
“Green goblets,” she muses, “Oh! You mean that cheap green stemware that I collected from laundry detergent boxes? You thought that was a wedding gift?”
Priceless? Well, those worthless glasses were on the next truck to Goodwill and I haven’t looked back.