A Queasy Selling of the Family Heirlooms

Summary

(Shutterstock) https://commonreader.wustl.edu/app/uploads/2025/09/selling-silver.mp3 The gentleman is kindly, matter-of-fact. He is not scared of a dead mother’s lightning bolts. I stand on the other side of the glass cabinet, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, nervous as a thief at a pawn shop. Not because I stole this sterling and silverplate, but because I inherited it. As a sacred trust, glowing with aspirations to fineness. My Irish great-grandmother paid for her passage to America by working as a maid for a wealthy family, and she memorized their lace-curtain ways and taught them to her daughter, who taught her daughters, one of whom tried to teach me. In each generation, there was more taste than money, so beautiful objects were acquired thoughtfully, and with sacrifice. But I do not want to polish sterling. And when I bring out the fine china and crystal, our friends seem more alarmed than delighted. This was my mother’s world. She loved beauty, and she was expected to entertain—a la Mad Men—clients and colleagues from my dad’s ad agency. I appreciate an exquisitely set table, but our life is not choreographed to need one. Few lives are, anymore. I tried, hard, to find someone who would want, and use, her pale pink Lenox china, the cups delicately curved, the gold rims pristine on all ten place settings…and nobody bit. The care with which my mom sudsed that china after holiday dinners! She had chosen it with such giddy hope, a future bride picking out her pattern. Her life’s pattern. Then my dad went and died on her, and the pattern broke. Entertaining was reduced to family holidays and small parties, which were indeed lovely—but fragile. When I married, I found myself choosing sturdier, friendlier stuff. Hoping for a life to match. I kept her dishes, though, carefully stacked in a dining room cabinet. The silver service—is that what you call it? The coffee, tea, creamer, sugar bowl, tray that nobody uses anymore? It sat in the basement, the intr...