Mourning the China

I guess if you could characterize my mood today, it would be sad. I just read an article about baby-boomers and their need to dispose of their accumulated belongings, and the outlook isn’t brilliant. I am, I suppose, a permanent resident of Mudville, and mighty Casey has been dealt a deathblow.

I have—like most of my generation—a lot of stuff. I guess it would be expected: parents who survived the Depression by making do and doing without, their limited ability to indulge their children, the economic boom we experienced when we grew to adulthood…the rise of advertising and its partner, self-indulgence. We were all primed to become shoppers extraordinaire, to fill our ever-more-elaborate houses with fine things: antiques, china, crystal, collections of various types—all the things we wished for and would like to pass down to our children. In addition, some of us possess the fine things that our own parents left behind. So here we are, up to our necks in stuff, ready to hand things off to the next generation.

The kicker is: they don’t want it. No china, no silver, no crystal. No antique linens, or tables to put them on. “Brown furniture” has become a term of derision, while mid-century modern is on the ascendant. If it’s blond, if it’s low-slung and clean-lined, if it’s aluminum tubing and minimalistic, it’s okay by them. But I lived through the ‘50s and found it cold.

I like wood. It’s warm. People touched it and shaped it into being. I like my china and silver and crystal. It tells stories of holiday meals and careful washing and drying afterwards. So it sits in a cupboard most of the year. It doesn’t have to. There’s something celebratory about setting the table with grandma’s place-settings: the heft of the silver, the sparkle of the water goblets, the tracery of the dinner plates. Even if it only happens once or twice a year.

I could stand in my house and weep over the precious cut glass bowls (how pretty they are!) or my assortment of turned-wood bowls (the artistry! The hours of work!) I could marvel at the creamware I’ve acquired over the years (the teapot’s pierced design, the braided handle, the delicate curves of the sugar bowl)—to no avail. Who will keep them when I am gone? Who will treasure my collection of monsters, my books, my Ogden Nash poems? Who will love the things I’ve loved? I am haunted by estate sales I’ve attended, where lovely, cherished things are dismissed , or picked over by hordes of bargain-hunters, looking for the recent past, the chilly enamel kitchen table, the Swedish chair, the lean, the spare, the space-age relics that have captured their imaginations and their pocketbooks today.

It is, I fear, a waiting game that no one wants to play. Fashion changes, and as surely as refrigerators will change from stainless to white to avocado green or harvest gold, all these things may return. Brides may once again select china and silver patterns; grandma’s furniture may enjoy a resurgence, and someone, somewhere, may one day open an attic box and gasp at the wonder of my creamware and cut glass, my turned wood, my lovely dishes….But there are no assurances that that someone will be anyone I recognize or am related to. No one will say, “This belonged to your great-grandma…” or “I remember where it used to sit on her shelf..” The memories they hold will have worn away, and there will be nothing of me, or my predecessors, remaining. No wonder we weep.