Patricia Adelstein

"Why are these plates in the living room?" my husband asks.  We are visiting my 98-year-old father, in his apartment in Bradenton, Florida, decorated with memories of a 68-year-old marriage that ended four years ago, when my mom died.   

The plates my husband is referring to are stacked on the second shelf of a small coffee table elbowed between two sofas.  There are six clear, glass plates with gold rims and two smaller, chipped and cracked white porcelain tea-sized plates. They have a pink trim and a different flower painted on each of them.  It looks as if a botanist created them for study purposes. I focus on the two white plates.   

I bought them for my mother, a Mother’s Day present, over forty years ago – at a time when I thought ordering from a museum catalog was very sophisticated.  

I was a bit lost throughout most of my twenties, over forty years ago. I had moved to Washington, DC, from Lexington, KY, and Mom and Dad were in Dayton, Ohio, eyeing retirement in Florida.  I missed them terribly and thought of them often. And I really missed my force of a woman, mom.  I would identify gifts for both of them that I saw in catalogs and at the many museum gift shops in DC.  In an expensive city on a limited budget, I was rarely swayed to buy anything, until I saw the white plates. I thought of my mom and decided to splurge. Thirty bucks. 

Forty years later, when there are no more memories to be made with her, I stare at the plates and think of the life-line she was for me during those uncertain years. There’s no price to be put on memories, but I’d said thirty bucks was a steal.    

I respond to my husband's question. "Because Mom put them there." 

"Oh, I hear you", he said.

There are many immovable objects in my dad’s home.