A Silver Set

Along the shelves in my office are treasures that I've accumulated over my life. These range from a paper crane a colleague gave me when I worked as the environmental reporter at the Island Packet, to a foam pig emblazoned with the Web address of the American Veterinary Medical Association. There are other treasures as well, things of greater weight and significance, things that were passed down from family members who are no longer here. There's a brass burro paper weight that my great uncle John, an Irish Christian Brother, brought back from Peru. I have a small ceramic teapot my grandmother picked up during a trip to Ireland in the 1960s, and cranberry glass pitcher she used for iced tea in the dog days of the Red Sox season, back when no one ever thought they'd win the World Series.

Then there's set of silver, a mug and bowl. The mug reads simply "Laurence March 5th 1922." The bowl reads "Baby Laurence March 5th 1922 From Adolph S. Ochs."

Being silver, these items are incredibly suceptible to the chemical reactions caused when my curiosity leads me to reach out and grab at their glow. The oils of my touch accelerate the process of tarnishing, by which silver sulfide blankets their shine with black, leaving the set looking every minute of its age of 87 years.

Yesterday, I decided it was time to shine them up. Polishing silver is not something I've often had to do. Like most of us, I eat with stainless, throw my setting into the dishwasher and let the Jet-Dry do the hard work. I also don't own much in the way of silver jewelry. So, I was amazed what happened as I began wiping away the years of neglect from the set.

Laurence was my grandfather. He was born in New York City in 1922. His father was businessman who worked for a large department store. His job was to find the best textiles and fabrics in the world, negotiate a fair price for them and have them shipped back to the United States where tailors and seamstresses would turn them into the clothes worn by the beautiful. His mother worked as well. She was an assistant for Adolph S. Ochs, the publisher of the New York Times. But she did more than take messages. My grandfather told me that Ochs considered her the bets accountant he had on staff, and so whenever the books were being checked, they were always double-checked by my great grandmother. What I do know is that she must have been important to him, because when her first son was born, he ordered a set of silver for the boy.

As I polished it yesterday I couldn't help but to wonder the pride the family of immigrants from Ireland must have felt when they held that mug and that bowl, engraved with the name of their baby boy and the name of the most powerful man in newspaper publishing in time when newspapers were king. With each stroke of polish, I felt a connection to the relatives I never met.

I thought to about the set's journey. From New York it went to Atlanta. My grandfather was just a boy when his father was hired by a department store in the south. He had to take the job. He'd been given a salary that allowed him to hire the family a servant. It was young black woman who lived in a shack that was built in their back yard. In the shed, she kept all of her belongings, which included a phonograph, my grandfather remembered. It was there, in one room with a packed earth floor, that she called my grandfather so that she could play him a record. It was "hot music," he told me. "It was Louis Armstrong."

I wonder if my grandfather's first American dance teacher ever cleaned this silver set. What might she have thought as she held this piece that tied her employers, brand new Americans, to a social class that excluded her?  As I wiped away layers of tarnish, it seemed its whole history was being uncovered, like a paleontologist unearthing long forgotten creatures, the stories passed on to me and buried by the daily routine were suddenly bursting forth from the set, with a gleam I'd forgotten. Where did this set stay when my grandfather, then a Catholic priest, returned to the south with a printing press in the summer of 1963? Where was it when he took off his collar and he tucked into a drawer for the final time? Did he polish it that night? Did he wonder what had become of the boy whose birth had captured in tarnished silver?

Inheritance is powerful. It's layered in the expectations we have for ourselves, knowing that path our genes have travelled. For me, it's layered, as well, in being a journalist, knowing that the first generation of my family was celebrated by a titan in American journalism. It's layered in knowing the hands that have held what I must painstakingly shine to keep brilliant.

When I finished, I took the set, and returned it to my shelf. Its story must continue.

Comments

[Bridget]

Beautiful.