Hey those of you still with me. Thank you so much for the comments the last few days. Many people have called and written – am I okay? Yes. I don’t like this situation, but I am basically okay. There has been much grandchildren interaction this week - Olivia and Hunter have stayed over with me two different nights. Bobby brought Abby down to spend the night with me, but it snowed that afternoon! So he took her home, assuming I would not be able to return her on the morrow. Olivia and Hunter did build two snowmen, a “baby”, and one about three feet high, with a scarf from my nice coat, and a Dodger cap, of course.
The new double ovens were installed Thursday. They were ordered a long time ago and have been sitting in the garage for some weeks now. These things are state of the art, and would be good for a family of ten. Will I ever bake again as I did in the “olden days”? Probably not.
I am writing this the night of the 8th of March.
Today I saw an article in the paper – “Corning to auction Steuben glass.” Reading on, we see they will find a buyer by the end of the year, or close down the Steuben business and the factory. This news caused me extreme sadness, so much so, that I went to the china cabinet and retrieved the Steuben bud vase that Henry gave me on our twentieth wedding anniversary. I just wanted to hold it for awhile. This simple elegant piece of art crystal, about eight inches high, is engraved: “Chance cannot change (my) love, nor time impair.” The line is from the 9th stanza of the Robert Browning poem Any Wife to Any Husband. The line preceding it: “Therefore she is immortally my Bride,
Chance cannot change that love, nor time impair.”
Again, Henry introduced me to the finer things of life. Actually, we came to know Steuben crystal through the New Yorker Magazine, to which Henry subscribed since our days in Hobbs, where Peter and Allison were born. He read The New Yorker avidly, every word, every week. (As I write, there is a stack of unread New Yorkers, about twenty of them, in the Dodger Den, that Henry just could not get to. I knew the end was getting close when he stopped reading, about the middle of last October.) The New Yorker is where we first became aware of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, serialized in 1962. Also much of James McPhee’s Annals of the Former World first appeared in the New Yorker. And, Roger Angell was the baseball writer. It was a thrilling magazine in those days. Through the years, I could not keep up with reading The New Yorker every week, except the Talk of the Town section – in our era written by E. B. White ( of Charlotte’s Web). This elegant writer set a lofty standard. After E. B. White retired from the staff, the New Yorker was never the same for me. I still checked out those wonderful cartoons, some of which Henry would have to explain to me, as often they were a play on situations in the news in New York City.
That was a time when printing the weekly reviews of a certain Broadway musical became so monotonous, as it played for so many years, that finally the editors inserted a paragraph from James Joyce’s Ulysses in the space where the review of the show would have been. Through the years that show ran on Broadway, one would have read much of Ulysses, a few lines a week. English literature majors - and at least one geologist - loved this idea. It took Henry a few weeks to realize and then figure out the inside joke, and show it to me. I cannot remember the Broadway show – what played the longest at that time - Fiddler on the Roof, maybe. When the show closed, so ended the weekly Ulysses entries.
Anyway, Steuben crystal art pieces were frequently advertised in full page spreads. Beautiful. So very beautiful. We would fantasize that someday we would own one. Especially the piece with the Eskimo stretched out on an ice flow holding the harpoon as fish swam below him, this all encased in a crystal shape somewhat like an iceberg. Exquisite. We flew back and forth from the States to the Middle East for nearly thirty years, and many times we had a layover in New York City, so we often visited the Steuben glass store. I remember it as being on 5th Avenue then, but now the flagship store is on Madison Avenue. We would walk in, wander through – in awe at such beauty – and discuss buying. We never did buy, as most pieces we considered were upwards in the ten thousand dollar range. My! Did we have a champagne taste.
However, at twenty years of marriage, Henry did secretly acquire the bud vase, and presented it to me with much love.
A lady friend happened by a day or so later, and saw this simple piece of glass. It was the inscription that brought her to tears: “Chance cannot change my love, nor time impair.” She was nearly speechless, as she hardly knew Henry, except as the Gruff Old Grouch. She just then became aware of the marshmallow in there. And, she burst into tears, literally: “Henry gave you that?.... For our wedding anniversary this year, my husband gave me a hymnbook!”
I thought, well, books are good for certain occasions. He just doesn’t know about the finer things in life. A few short years later, I visited her and her children in the States, right after their divorce.
He should have known about Steuben glass.
Much love to you all … Bonnie and the Cook Family