Time Travel -- A Story of My Grandmother and My Son

Can everyday objects connect different people and different times?

The other morning, as I do every day, I opened the large brown ceramic bowl next to the coffee pot to pull out a package of splenda for my morning java. That bowl has served that purpose for almost 22 years, holding the artificial sugar that Dave and I put in our coffee to start the day.

I looked at that bowl and traveled through time.

Not literally, of course. But my mind went instantly to two places, one in the recent past and one in the (hopefully) distant future.

The past I thought of was immediately after my maternal grandmother's funeral 11 years ago.

After the service, we went to her house. My grandpa had died several years earlier and my grandmother spent the last months of her life in "a home," as they say. My mother had recently auctioned my grandparent's things off to help pay expenses. After the funeral, all that was left was an empty house, with a few scattered items the auctioneers didn't want. It looked like the place was ransacked.

That was hard. I spent some of the happiest moments of my childhood in that house, with them. I walked through its emptiness now, picking up the discarded items. And the memory of that made me think, that morning, looking at that brown sugar bowl, of the yearbook.

My grandma's high school yearbook, 1927, to be exact. I had discovered it sometime when I was a teenager and was transfixed. When I was in college I snatched it. I think I did tell her sometime that I had it, but I'm not sure.

I loved it because it was a link to my grandparents that somehow made them more, well, like me.

Yearbooks in the 1920s -- at least those from small, southeastern rural Ohio towns -- were mostly "do-it-yourself" affairs. You had to write in all the events and paste in your own snapshots. But the basics were the same -- highlights of the school year, pictures, friends writing in your book.

I learned, from the yearbook, that Grandma was Captain of her high school girls basketball team (Grandma played basketball?) Her team, according to her handwritten record, was 4-5 her senior year.

In a section labeled "Stunts, Doings and Jokes" she has written little tidbits that mean nothing to me, but must have been memorable to her. Why didn't I ask her when I had the chance?

This entry: "January 17, 1927: "You can't get away this time... Reva & Eva" (my grandmother was Eva and Reva was her best friend). What mischief were they up to?

And: "Remember always, July 4, 1926" Why? Was it a first kiss? A night with best friends? When she realized she was in love with my grandpa? What?

And speaking of my Grandpa, his photo is in here too, pasted in by my grandmother. It's a candid shot (and the last one in her yearbook) with him seated, collar crooked and hair (he had hair!) slicked back with a cocky smile on his face. I can look at it and only come to one conclusion: Grandpa was hot.

As I said, they wrote notes in their yearbooks, but they were all little poems that must have been well-known cliches at the time. My Grandpa wrote this in my Grandmother's yearbook:

Friendship is like a silken tie
That binds our hearts together
And if you never break the tie
We will be friends forever.

Someone with the initials "J.S.D." wrote the same poem, but apparently my Grandpa had it all over him, because the man my grandmother spent nearly the next 60 years with was not J.S.D. And I guess my grandparents were an item in school, because someone else wrote:

A pair in a hammock
Attempted to kiss
When all of a sudden
They went like [this]

In the book the the "this" is written upside down. And below it is written: "Pair = Eva and Forrest" -- my grandparents.

I love that little book. And I thought of it as I looked at that brown sugar bowl. I thought about her holding it, when the pages were white and not brown. When the memories were fresh like spring. When she was a serious girl with an ornery streak like you see in the picture of her with Reva. When she held the book as she wrote in it with long, slender smooth fingers not stained with age or warped by hard work. When she was young and full of hope. Before a Great Depression, a World War, the tragic death of her father and ill health turned her into an anxious old woman.

Boom. I looked at that sugar bowl, remembered the yearbook, and was connected to this young, dead woman.

But I also thought of the future.

The sugar bowl is a fixture in our kitchen and, unless it breaks, will likely be there until the end. When Dave and I are both gone, I imagined our son holding it, one of the "worthless" possessions left behind he will have to deal with. It doesn't contain the detailed memories of a yearbook, but oh, the many mornings that his Pappa and I began with our hands reaching for that little brown bowl. The many early morning conversations it lay a mute witness to.

When Grandma held that yearbook in her girlish hands I doubt she knew her grandson would pour lovingly over it 80 years later. When Eli holds that brown sugar bowl in his hands after we are gone I don't know if he'll envision all the mornings his Daddy and Pappa started their days with that dish. But in that one second, the other morning, all those events, past, present and future, were one.

Can everyday objects connect different people and times?