I love that place. What great idea.
Last Monday, a week ago, I went to a small party for fireworks shot off nearby the place near Bonnie Brae. After the party after most people left, for some reason the host pulled out three nested colored bowls he recently inherited. He was tickled with these vintage colored bowls that pretty much everyone had in the late 50s and 60s. He un-nested them and nested them back together inside the largest bowl.
I was all, pfft, so what.
He kept attention on them. Like a child learning colors he called out the colors we could clearly see for ourselves. Then he said, It's missing red. That's the big bowl, I think.
His largest bowl didn't seem that big. He's probably right.
I found the bowl easily on eBay.
Apparently there were more than one set. One of the sets, the largest bowl is yellow. But my friend has a yellow bowl. If he is wrong and his yellow is actually the largest of his set then it's not very large. Turns out, the largest bowl is #404 no matter the color and it holds 4 quarts, one gallon, and that really isn't very large.
I just now bought a #404 red bowl and had it shipped to his house.
There's a good chance he'll end up with two #404 bowls, one yellow and another red. Oh well. Can always try again with another red whatever number he's missing.
It would just be very cool to have a complete set. And I went by what he said. It's a gamble. And boy, will he be surprised when the UPS guy shows up with a red bowl. And dismayed and bemused if it's not larger than his yellow.
We had those same bowls back then. I'll bet one of my sisters has them now. Online sites say the largest bowl usually gets broken because of its size. None of our bowls broke even through very many moves, even through two moves in Pennsylvania, three moves in Japan, three moves in Louisiana and two moves in Colorado. It's kind of awesome how some iconic things like these colored bowls held steady through so much hazard only to mention the hazard of a large family.
My dad used to alway say you cannot have nice things when you have kids. And there's truth to that but it made me feel bad because my presence caused my parents to not have nice things. Because I really did wreck a lot of things. I had no concept of value and property and cost and where things come from. I thought everything around simply sprung up automatically from nature, like flowers. I had no sense of value even for flowers. I thought they just grew like all other plants. God made them. God made everything. I picked the neighbor's flowers to give to my mother. She freaked out and told me not to do that. I thought they just grew by themselves. I thought property just appeared. Everything around me simply appeared. For me to stick my fingers in and explore, test its tensile strength, examine its structure, check its durability, poke and jab at it with the nearest thing at hand, scrape it, pull at its threads, smash it to see how it holds up. So, sure, I can see that, you cannot have nice things because I'll get my hands on it, but do you have to say that all the time like I'm guilty of being born? I guessed those colored bowls weren't nice. Because they lasted forever.
Except in other people's house it's usually the big one that gets broken.
Wach this be a different case where the smaller red one was broken
All I had to do was ask him to read the numbers on the bottom but that would ruin the fun of the surprise. It's brilliant if it works. And it's *high pitch* STEW *low pitch* pud, if it fails.
5 comments:
We have been selling a lot of our old stock on Ebay. There are a lot of problems with it. Like any time you see about 10% of the transactions will go south. Ebay always takes the buyers side.
We sold some shape wear that this person was obviously buying for resale. We sell at rock bottom prices just to get rid of the inventory. This person was planning to buy it from us and sell it at a higher price. When she got it she wrote a five star review. Then she decided it was dirty and wanted to return it. We have a no returns policy but she kept calling and emailing. She found our personal email addresses and our home address. We did some research and found out she had eight separate Ebay accounts. We blocked her on Ebay which you can do. She bought our cheapest item under a assumed name and then proceeded to give us terrible reviews to bring down our rating.
When Ebay investigated they found for us and took the reviews down. But PayPal refunded her money. PayPal and Ebay are run by the same people and they always favor the customer. Even though Ebay found in our favor they still refunded the money and closed the case which can not be appealed. It is a bunch of bullshit but you have to swallow it if you want to do business on Ebay.
Ebay is intriguing place where value and worth is constantly up for grabs. This story intrigues me on two levels.
One has to do with the description of the adult show and tell that took place, in which the host used inherited objects from his childhood to request attention from others without revealing or perhaps even realizing why those bowls were significant enough for him to want to keep, take home, and engage in the sensory process of showing, touching and talking about with others, unnesting and nesting them and noting their colors.
From my POV, the deeper unspoken tell in this story centers around the missing red bowl (and the possible find by another)and my understanding of the way unprocessed emotional experiences (positive and negative) from childhood are stored as fragments of sensory memory in the right brain, where they await the integration of thought with feeling. Physical objects that link back to experiences of intense or confusing emotional energy that could not be safely regarded, expressed or understood can hold or provide sensory connection points and serve as triggers, puzzle pieces, symbols or touchstones.
As for STEW-pud, along with other inner and outer judgments over fit, appropriateness and outcomes, (including statements from fathers about children precluding the possibility of having nice things) my thoughts went to learning styles and what otherwise learned and responsible adults know and don't know about children and nice things.
Studies convey that approximately 65 percent of the population are visual learners; 30 percent are auditory and 5 percent are tactile learners, with again, most people being a combination of these learner styles.
I am a visual learner; show or draw me a picture and I "get" whatever needs to be conveyed in a snap, quicker than Quicksilver or Quickdraw McGraw. The younger SonM, the one who learns by doing, the one who frequently touched and often broke things as a child is a auditory and tactile learner. He learns best from from the school of life and is ever curious, continually interested in and learning new things, open to what is new, while valuing what's been realized.
Given my understanding of what's involved in maintaining a career and holding a position of responsibility within the military establishment, I can understand how parents who functioned within that system might have been confounded or felt frustrated by the behavior of a child who had a learning style different from the one they knew and understood to be the most useful for their way of living.
That said, the curiosity, desire to learn and ability to envision and create that I see and
value in my son, extends far beyond the worth of the nice things that were broken along the way. I wondered as I read this post if that sense of value was also present in a father who said one thing while doing his best to hold onto and impart his own way of doing things, while carrying another deeper awareness of worth much closer to the heart.
For pondering: Was the curiosity, valuing and awareness of others that comes through time and again in post after post learned or could it have been inherent from the beginning without much opportunity for it to be practiced or realized? Or maybe it's both, or like ebay where things are continually up for grabs?
Whatever the case, the red bowl sound likes a wonderful surprise, one that can be noted and held or easily released to fall to the floor or into the hands of the next buyer or seller in the circle of life.
Ebay is a cool invention. It's nice to be able to find things you remember from childhood, even if you don't buy them it's nice to visit. It's good for used books, too. Stuff you might not be able to find on Amazon or Alibris can often be found on Ebay for very reasonable prices.
Fitting two nices into one sentence is a coup balanced with cool!
ABBooks has been my go-to place for hard to find books, but these days I am doing letting go than acquiring.
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