When I Was Ten

The Beatles had already hit Ed Sullivan’s stage . . .
John F. Kennedy had already been assassinated . . .
Sputnik had already been launched . . .
The Civil Rights Act had already been passed . . .
War had already been declared on poverty . . .
Martin Luther King, Jr. had already given his I have a dream speech . . .
The Edsel had already come and gone . . .

Viet Nam was a place I knew from the nightly news . . .
and on the day I turned 10, July 30, 1965, President Johnson
signed legislation establishing Medicare and Medicaid

Memory is a fuzzy thing, so I think that was the year I visited my great aunt Vivian with my mother and grandmother, Vivian’s sister.  Vivian never married and lived in the family home until the brief time in the nursing home that preceded her death.

The house, as it was called, was a marvel of a place, filled with treasures of delight.  And because Vivian was a caretaker of the house and its contents for the generations that came after, she had devised a system to handle the desires of we younger folk: sticky tags were put on the underneath sides of everything in the house, bearing the name of the descendant who would get it on her death.

So it was a game, and one Vivian loved to be played, to go from room to room and look under every bit of furniture in search of something to be desired that was not yet claimed.  Because I was of the second generation, the pickings were slim.

I remember a beautiful silver tea service and its finely crafted wooden cart – claimed.

A small rocker – made by my great-grandfather for a child, but which petite Vivian used all her life, that delighted me because my own mother’s name was on it.

Tables and wooden love seats and apothecary cabinets and rocking chairs and so much more captivated my imagining.  But all I could find to lay claim to that day, all that did not already bear the evidence of someone other cousin’s stamp, mine!, was a candelabra on the dining room table (already claimed).

I liked it well enough, but I did not love it.  But I claimed it.  Vivian got out the sticky labels, I wrote my name, and we put the label on the base of the candelabra together, both smiling in pleasure at the gift given and received.

The candelabra was just a dime store kind of thing and when Aunt Vivian died years later, I didn’t keep it for long.

But because I had a large house suitable for antiques, other family gave me some of their things.  So today I have my great-grandfather’s hand-crafted wooden love seat with lion heads at the ends of the arms that aren’t identical and Aunt Vivian’s rocker and a table.

In my mind’s eye, the candelabra  reflects back Aunt Vivian’s smile to me across the years.  I wish I had kept it.