Shattered Dishes and One Girl's Wishes

Thanksgiving 2018

The year is 1993 and I am a 26 year old, newly engaged young woman.   My fiancé and I have gone to Bloomingdale's to register.  We may or may not have had a mother or future mother-in-law in tow, that part is fuzzy.   Registering seemed so exciting and so full of hope and promise.    At the time my fiance was a graduate student and I was working at a non-profit.   I probably don't need to say that we didn't have two nickels to rub together.   But, we could register ourselves for a life that didn't exist yet.   We must have registered for three dozen wine glasses, 12 for red, 12 for white, and 12 for I'm not sure what.   I wasn't a big wine drinker then, and I'm still not, but I certainly envisioned dinner parties with a long, then non-existant dining table, with a white linen table cloth (don't forget to register for that) that someone would spill red wine on that I would quickly pour salt on just like my mother did.    I was starry eyed as we selected napkins, blenders, pots, pans, forks, spoons and knives.   It was just so much fun.   Then it came time to choose the every day china.   My mother-in-law's friend had generously offered to buy us an entire set that she had picked out from a well known household goods store.    We went to look at the set and I immediately knew it wasn't for us.   "That's not our china" I remember thinking.   It was lovely, and I'm pretty sure I've seen it in other people's homes where it seemed quite at home, but it wasn't ours.   As a young, soon-to-be bride I wasn't as used to asserting my opinion as I am now but I knew that it didn't belong on the non-existant dining table that I envisioned.   I think there was some disappointment on the part of my mother-in-law that I wasn't overly exuberant about this potential, extremely generous gift but that's a blog for another day.   So, on the day we were at Bloomingdales, I turned a corner and saw "our" everyday china.   It came in multiple colors, was slightly Asian looking (just like our slightly Asian family). You could register for just one color or pick and choose several.   We were all in for the blue, green, and of course, purple.   We registered for 12 place settings.   I couldn't imagine ever needing more than that.   As I looked at the china, so many dreams filled my head.   I imagined two place settings for a romantic dinner for two with a candle in between, but also all the plates filling the aforementioned, nonexistent table set for a holiday meal with all our current family members and also members who were yet to be born.   I could see a single plate being used to hold a first birthday cake, or a bunch of cookies for Santa, or a seder plate with matzoh, hard boiled eggs, and horseradish.   I saw a plate full of a boring weekday meal but also full of a decadent dinner for the most special of occasions.   So many dreams for one set of dishes.

The year is 2018.   It is some 25 years later.   I am loading the dishwasher.  It is a mundane, every day job and I'm not thinking much about it.  Then suddenly the bottom rack of the dishwasher lurches forward and crashes to the ground.   Several dishes go flying and break.   My dear, beloved dishes that have lasted 25 years are now in fragments and dust on the kitchen floor.    I am stunned for a moment (as is the dog) and don't do anything.   I know that the dishes were discontinued years ago and my heart kind of breaks alongside them.

These dishes have held so many meals.   They have held Wednesday night macaroni and cheese as well as prime rib on Christmas Day.   They have done their job holding birthday cakes that resembled a bunch of bananas, a strawberry and a sandy beach (amongst other things).   They have held Santa's cookies many times, and acted as Seder plates.   They have held meals for people who are no longer with us, as well as for people who now live far away.    They have travelled from our tiny first apartment where the two of us dined on an inherited coffee table, to another apartment where we became a family of three and ate on a dining table that had been had been well used, and passed its prime, by multiple generations of my family, and finally the set had moved to our current house where we had become a family of four and in due time it landed on the now existent dining table that had been so clear in my mind 25 years ago.    At some point one of the dinner plates must have broken unceremoniously because for the past few years we have just had 11.   In fact, just this past Thanksgiving we had had exactly 12 people at our Thanksgiving dinner.  I gave myself a plate that didn't belong to the set.    It was a lovely Thanksgiving.   There were candles, and there was both red and white wine in our wine glasses.    In many ways, it was exactly what that 26 year old was dreaming about all those years ago.

But all of that was broken now.

If it was possible for dreams and memories to shatter all at once, they just had.   And I was paralyzed in the debris.  

After the initial shock wore off I realized that I needed to deal with the mess so the dog or I didn't end up with a piece of shattered memory in our feet.   With great sadness I took the broom and dustpan out of the closet and cleaned up the mess.    I eventually became more concerned with the potential danger of the shards of the glass, than anything that the pieces meant.   I emptied the dustpan into the garbage can and as I peered into the contents all I saw was dusty ceramic debris.  Nothing more.

There were no dreams and memories in there.
Somehow those had remained intact.
It turns out that those are shatter-proof(and dishwasher-safe)