Objects of memory, II

More objects from my dad's house that I don't want to own, but do want to remember. My baby shoes.

A few books from my childhood that I cared about enough to hang on to. Go Ask Alice; Madeline L'Engle; Herman Hesse; The Lotus-Eaters; sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; 1984; Little Women; Heidi (that's the ductaped one); the Narnia series; Don't Look Back... Okay, I'll stop there, you can look for yourself.

I made this hammer in middle school metal shop.

My mom made these hilarious trays out of plain wooden trays; she pasted on the newspaper clippings with shellac.

I made this cup, but I can't remember where.

Cheese board with cracker basket.

This butter dish, I tell you what. Who has a wooden butter dish? But between the butter dish and the baby shoes, no contest. Maybe it's because I like butter so much. Maybe it's because it's so hopelessly and unapologetically seventies. Maybe it's because it had a patina of butter that went back decades (it's not like you could put it in the dishwasher, even if we had had a dishwasher, which we did not). Maybe it's because my dad liked his butter soft. As with everything else here, I don't want to own it, but I do want to remember it.

This is my dad's chess clock. He played a whole lot of chess at our dining room table over the years, and the "click"- "click" of the players hitting the buttons was one of the normal background sounds in our house. He had one dear friend who played chess with him just about weekly for forty years.

A tin measuring cup from our regular set.

A tea strainer, never used for tea that I can remember, except maybe weird infusions that Mom would make out of things she brought home from the garden. I know it was a bath toy at one point.

The original flatware of my youth. It is heavy, steel, and the handles are square on the ends, so that holding them feels a little like holding heavy square metal chopsticks. When my mom's mom died, we got the Gralenski silverware and used that instead. I now have that set, as well as the Rosenberg silverware from Dad's mom. 

This crazy hatchboard table (in the process of being taken away by the downstairs neighbor, who owns a thrift store). The tabletop was once a hatch cover on a WWII ship. It has cast iron legs and weighs a ton. When I was a kid I would always put things in the little "bowls" at the corners. They were meant as handles but sometimes people used them as ashtrays.

I thought it would be wrenching to let go of all of these things. But Dale observed, with perfect insight, that once Dad was gone it was like the soul went out of all of his things, too. Without him there to use them and arrange them and keep them and even ignore them, they were just stuff. I love the memories, and we picked plenty of other special treasures to bring with us physically.