The Plate

PROLOGUE:  This is a story my Mom recently shared with me by phone and I wrote out my version below, but then had her snail mail me her version and I subsequently combined the two by changing a few details in my account and then added parts of her account [in brackets].

***

My Mom tells me she recently found an old plate in the back of a kitchen cabinet that has special significance for us.  It has survived for over forty years without being broken, given away, or misplaced.  Since it came into her possession in the mid to late 70’s she has moved at least three times which can be hard on a large fragile plate.  And when I refer to it as “large” I may be misattributing to it the status of “plate” when it is in fact a “platter” but I will keep calling it a plate.  She told me the story behind the plate last week when we talked on the phone and it conjured up only the slightest bits of memory in my mind, though some of the details have been revealing themselves to me the more I roll it around in my head.

The story goes that I was outside shooting baskets one summer day in ‘77 or ‘78 when the basketball bounced off the court and onto our back porch hitting the charcoal grill and knocking off a plate and breaking it.  My Mom was waiting for my Dad to get home to get the grill started and was unaware of what had happened when I came back into the house looking sheepish.  I disappeared into my room and she heard me shaking money out of the wooden trolley bank my Dad had brought back for me from a business trip to Chicago (or was it San Francisco?).  She tells me she yelled down the hallway, “You better not be getting money out to buy comic books or candy!”  

[The first thing that came to my mind was he was going to go down to the Drug Store and buy more comic books.  I always thought they were a waste of money, but he was always excited to find a new one.  He came out of his room and I assumed money was jingling in his pockets, so he passed me and I followed him out on our deck.  As he descended the stairs I hollared like a raving lunatic “If you think you’re going to the Drug Store to buy more comic books you better think again!”]

I would not let her anger dissuade me from my course of action and when I returned some time later I had a large decorative plate in hand that I presented to her to replace the one I’d broken.  She tells me she felt bad about yelling at me and later learned that I’d ridden my bike to an old flea market/antique store on the town square where I’d found the plate and was able to work out a deal with the owner [Linville Ferguson] to purchase the plate with whatever money I had on my person after explaining my situation to him.

[I sure didn’t get mother of the year award but I was very touched by what he had done.  Many years later I shared the story with some of my friends and brought the platter down from the top shelf for them to see (I do not use it because I am afraid it might get broken).  I sat it before them and they stared at it like it was the Holy Grail.]

She found this quite amusing and now considers it an heirloom of sorts that may have been the first glimpse of a future that did not include me leading a life of delinquency and irrectitude.

We finished talking on the phone about this particular episode in my life and she suggested I should write about it as I have been accumulating stories from my childhood that have been finding their way onto paper (figuratively speaking... I type them into my iPad) the past few years.  She has put the stories that I’ve printed out and mailed to her in a binder that she requested from my Dad so that they are all in one place and can be easily grabbed if her house ever decides to catch on fire.  

I proposed instead that she write down this story because she remembers it more fully than I do.  She could then mail it to me and I could edit it and add my perspective while typing it into my iPad.  She loved this idea and when I called her yesterday she said that it was almost finished.  I suggested as part of this project she have someone (probably one of my sisters) take a picture of the plate on their phone, front and back, and message it to me so I could create a title image for the story.  Seavor ended up being the picture-taker (thanks Seavor!) and now I am just waiting for Mom’s story to arrive in the mail.

***

EPILOGUE: when the picture arrived on my phone yesterday from Seavor I looked up “CANONSBURG” from the stamp on the back of the plate and learned it was a decorative china company near Pittsburgh that started in 1900 and became defunct some time in the mid to late 70’s.  As a kid I imagined it was some priceless antique that I’d somehow miraculously convinced the store owner to release to me at an exorbitant loss after hearing my heart breaking tale.