Monday Memories--the treasure found and lost, and found again

On Memorial Day week-end here at Lakeside, many families have yard sales (for the most part, we have no garages or basements). Some street corners will have four. So it is fun to walk or ride around and poke through musty boxes or old treasures. I was riding my no-speed bike (now 40 years old) down Third and whizzed past a card table with a few items, and there I saw it--a memory from my childhood. I put on the brakes and turned around.



My neighbor, Mike, and I were probably about four or five years old and poking through the neighborhood trash cans when we saw a lovely (or looked that way to us) brown china tea pot painted with white and orange dots trimmed in gold). We carefully lifted our treasure out, wiped it off, and I took it home to my mother. She turned it over looked at the gold painted single word on the bottom, JAPAN, and told us it had to go back to the trash can. We didn't understand war; we didn't know how to read; both our fathers were in the military. All we knew was that our treasure was something awful to adults. Suitable only for the trash.

I picked the tea pot up from the card table, inspected it--covered with dust with a hairline crack near the spout. The owner came out of the house.
"How much for this tea pot?"
"One dollar."
"I'll take it," I said.I wrapped it in a plastic bag and continued on my bike ride. Later I washed it and showed it to my neighbor, Steve, who is an antique dealer and auctioneer. He confirmed that it was probably a pre-WWII tea pot, maybe 1930s, very common. A dollar, he said, was a good price for a childhood memory. I put it on my bookshelf. It can hold some flowers when the time comes for that.