so, on vacation i visited, among other folks, my mom and my maternal grandmother.

mom gave me the silver service she and dad bought; each piece is still in its original individual plastic bag, and is as untarnished as it was on 8th January 1977. the box that the silver is in is the original cardboard box that the pieces came in, and it’s now watermarked and dusty and sort of beaten-up looking. the silver is the towle laureate design, which has a modified sort of fleur-de-lis — conveniently, as i tend to use fleurs-de-lis for things such as wax seals on letters, and other froofy things — on it:

i’m curious how much it’s worth. not because i plan to get rid of it, because i don’t, but just out of idle curiosity. i might like to use it at some point, but i can’t open the packaging until i get a proper storage box with tarnish-retarding lining to put it in. so, i suspect the watermarked cardboard silver-bearing box is going to go up on a high shelf in my utility closet for a while.

this is the second relic of my parents’ marriage that i’ve inherited, the first being their wedding rings. frankly, i’m somewhat amazed mom didn’t just hock anything left over. i probably would have.

now, over at my grandmother’s house — which is now a 1-bedroom apartment in a retirement complex, slightly smaller than my apartment, i think — she gave me both an eagle, and a china tea set my dad brought back for her from where he was stationed in japan. the tea set is pretty and, after i wash the dust off it, it may actually get used — the cups, anyways; the pot is really too tiny for practical purposes. she mentioned another set (china? i can’t remember) that she’d gotten from her mother, then passed on to my mom when she moved out of the house and into the retirement apartment, that would be mine at some point.

grandma’s second husband, lloyd, was a veteran (not sure if it was WWII or Korea), and he collected things with eagles on them. he had dozens of little statues around the house. he died about three years ago. and, grandma said, she wanted to make sure i got an eagle… and then proceeded to tell me a story about a friend of hers, whose sister’s house was basically ransacked by relatives after her death. so i guess this was a pre-emptive effort to make sure that i got the tea set and an eagle to remember lloyd by, lest her own home be ransacked.

i found the entire exchange somewhat distressing. yes, okay, you’re eighty, but that doesn’t mean you have to rub in your impending doom, as it were. there’s a little part of my head where i like to remain forever about six; my mom’s got no grey hair, the medicine cabinet is endlessly fascinating and full of all kinds of interesting things (not to mention that cabinet over the stairs that i can’t reach, and i have no idea of how anyone else can either), the non-functioning lightswitch in the upstairs hallway closet is an act of defiance against my desire to turn the stairway light out, and my grandparents will live forever. yeah, okay, great-grandpa winter died, but that’s different: he was old.

then there’s the whole implication of mistrust there, which — when coupled with complaints that she’s seen me more frequently (and i haven’t been down to arkansas in at least three or four years… or, according to my cousin Marty, at least a hundred) than my cousin monica, who lives in the area, as an example of the reported inattention of many of my cousins — is also fairly disturbing. on leaving, she said i was her favorite granddaughter, which i find sort of disappointing less because it favors me than because it means that the cousins i have that live down there are pretty crappy relatives too. i mean, i live seven hundred miles away, i have an excuse to not come down for christmas dinner. so where are the rest of y’all?

that complaint is a little hypocritical, i suppose. it’s probably obnoxious of me to expect that everyone else has the time and inclination to pay attention to grandma, in my constant absence. but how much effort does it take to stop by once in a while if you live in the same — rather small — town?

whatever. family is strange. maybe that’s why i’m happiest living far from all the family politics. this way, when i do decide to show up, everyone is usually pretty happy to see me. and i guess i can put up with the guilt-trips and the complete inability of any grandmotherly person to believe me when i say i’m not hungry and they don’t need to make food for me, if it means that i’m exempted from being a bad grandchild.