Microwunderkammer

 Parental artifact #18–a 12-place set of Heath Ware

My parents acquired this service partially as a wedding present, partially as a purchase, in 1958. My mom noted in her handwritten catalog of possessions that it was “considered quite classy.” As a young couple my parents were keen on “mid century modern” design, with its spare elegance, and a number of their furnishings—lamps, tables and chairs, ceramics, chests of drawers—fit that aesthetic. However, as they got older, as kids multiplied, and as they inherited things from relatives who were less simpatico with their vision, stylistic coherence waned. Mid century modern bumped into mission and Victorian and ranch and more. Despite this, I think they kept a fondness of the clean aesthetic of that style.

This service was always the “good” china, rarely used. Two other sets of china lived through complete lives, from purchase to piecemeal destruction, as my two brothers and I went from babies to adults, and as my parents went from adults into the fog of Alzheimer’s. But the Heath ware remained inviolate. Even though (or perhaps because) it was only used rarely, it acquired a thick patina of emotional significance and memory for all of us over the years.

When it came time to apportion my parents’ chattels, most of the job was relatively easy. However, we brothers have a shared spreadsheet labeled “grand bargains/horse trading” that was our effort at dealing with those really significant items that we all felt strongly about. The Heath Ware was on that list, along with The Microscope, the cactus painting, the Ceropegia painting, the silk dragons, and a handful of other items. These are objects that I think were so internalized as part of our personal identity as individuals, but individuals within a family, that relinquishing them felt like relinquishing a piece of one’s own anatomy.

So there was some bargaining, some horse trading, and some strong emotions; and while I do not have the microscope or the cactus painting, I do have the Heath ware. Its emotional and aesthetic desirability is combined with practical appeal: the china we had been using, a treasured wedding present from Duva’s sister, was starting to decay, its glaze failing under the assaults of the microwave and the dishwasher. The Heath Ware has become our daily service. We have a set of plain Corelle plates for Pesach, but no “good” china as such. If you dine with us, you will eat off of what was my parents’ good china.

Shortly after bringing the Heath Ware into our kitchen, I was loading the evening’s dishes into the dishwasher and I had a most unusual sensation: I was carefully placing a plate into the rack, and superimposed on top of that mundane experience, a much older version of myself, with pale, aged, and slightly shaky hands, was accidentally dropping that same plate and watching it break.

I was just starting to register that this was odd when I also experienced:

—carefully getting the Heath Ware plates out for our weekly dinner with Grandaddy when I was five, an event which was routine, but kind of special.

—serving our parents a cake for their 50th anniversary in 2008, and using the Heath Ware because it was a special event. Even if my dad was already starting to fade in dementia’s fog, he understood the significance.

—having my favorite cake served on the large plate for my eighth birthday, and feeling important for that.

—noticing that the posh restaurant at which Duva and I were celebrating our anniversary used the same plates, but in a different color.

—pointedly not getting the Heath Ware plates out for our weekly dinner with Grandaddy, well before his death, but at some point in time when the dinners became less special and more routine.

—watching, in my PJ’s, after I was supposed to be in bed, as my parents entertain some important guests with a fancy dinner off the good plates and at the special table—with a tablecloth, even!

I can’t say that I experienced all these things simultaneously, because that word implies that they took place at the same point in time, in an ordered sequence of events. Rather, while I was holding that plate in my hand, I got a view of time from the outside, from a position where events were not sequential; they just existed, stacked on top of each other in no order. It was instantaneous, a flashbulb illuminating a different reality.

Can baked earth give a transcendent vision of reality? I suppose if you were amongst Abraham’s ancestors, before he scorned idols, it might provide some connection with the divine, but that notion has been rejected since.

At any rate, without any interruption, I finished the motion of loading that plate into the dishwasher. I didn’t drop it, it didn’t break. That particular event is, I guess, in some version of my future.

Nothing is permanent, that’s an obvious lesson, but I had a lot more to think about. Maybe it was a piece of ceramics trying to explain the world to me; maybe it was my parents, reaching out to reassure me from wherever they may be; maybe it was a momentary slosh of neurotransmitters between different regions of my brain, triggered by strong but suppressed emotion. No matter. An alternative view of time can be useful in coping with the turmoil of history’s march of “one damn thing after another.”

I went for a hike along the North Umpqua Trail a few days back, from Steamboat Creek, downstream a couple of miles. This area was devastated by the Archie Creek Fire two years ago. The walk was profoundly, deeply disturbing. There were very very few live trees, and what I remembered as a hike through a mature forest of towering cedars and three-hundred-year-old firs was now a dismal tour through a morgue of disfigured, tortured corpses. I won’t live to see this be a mature forest again. No one alive today will see it as a mature forest either.

It is proper for me to be sad for what has been destroyed. If I stay within linear time, I’ll stay sad about it. Linear time bestows upon you a sense of loss—before, there was a forest, or one’s parents, healthy and vital. Now, and for all the rest of my march through linear time, they are gone. There’s not much comfort there; at best, I can say that there is a spur to action. If I want to do the work of repairing a broken world, planting trees, restoring trails, taking action against climate change—“better” is something that I can only see in linear time. But there will always be that sense of loss. As it is written, “it is not for you to see the work finished; nor are you free to cease the labor.”

My parents’ Heath Ware, though, seems to have offered me an alternative view, a refuge from this sense of loss. If I can be in this destroyed forest, and see it from outside time, I may not exactly be comforted, but I can at least not take it personally. The forest, my parents, both in their bloom, are as real as the “present,” always right there for me.