Childhood Crockery {Or, How I Cleaned Out My Pantry and Connected With An Old Friend}

I ate a lot of leftovers out of this dish as child. Creamed potatoes on one side, black-eyed peas on the other. Cheese grits and fried okra. Maybe corn pudding and salmon croquettes, if Mom was feeling adventurous.

I pull it out from the back of the pantry as I make attempts to shed my home—and thereby my self—of items (attachments?) I no longer need. I am listening to Joan Armatrading. In an instant I begin to cry.

“Show some emotion, put expression in your eyes” she sings. “Light up if you’re feeling happy, but if it’s bad then let those tears roll down.” And so I do, as I make my way off the stepladder, fearful I might fall because I am breaking down on an otherwise lovely, sunny day on which I do not have a care in the world besides losing ten pounds and a leak in the guest bathroom.

The dish–which I took when my sisters and I divvied up the spoils from our childhood home after Daddy died and Mother moved to a retirement community–takes me back to my childhood, a precious time that I thought everyone else enjoyed until I grew up and met folks who didn’t so much revere their parents as despise them; people who couldn’t look back fondly on late afternoons spent running behind the bug spray truck because they were too busy trying to dodge what happened at night in their homes; friends who wouldn’t dream of honoring their past and instead had to bury it deep and hard.

The song takes me back to my days at Millsaps College, a place—and a people—that saved me after a disastrous freshman year at Ole Miss. It is one of those tunes that transports me across state lines and through decades with such speed and force and accuracy that I would swear I am altered physically. Hearing this song on this day makes me think of certain people, one in particular: a high-school and college classmate I haven’t seen in twenty-five years.

Now that I am in my fifties, I try to follow my gut immediately instead of taking time to “mull it over” or “weigh my options” or “worry how it might look.” So I Google this person and find his work email address. I fire one off, telling him that I saw this piece of crockery from my childhood while listening to Joan Armatrading and it made me think of him, of the times we spent together with like-minded folks, how I always knew, even back in high school, that he was one of the few who understood. I knew he could take it, that it wouldn’t freak him out. He emailed back within half an hour and we reconnected, just for a few minutes. It is enough.

For a while longer, at least, the dish, and the memories, remain in place.

I heard Joan Armatrading live once, in New Orleans. I can see her now, belting it out, moving me to tears. That was then, and this is now.