When I was little I would spend hours in front of the curio cabinet where my mother kept what were, effectively, trinkets from China, things that were surely more valuable to us than to anyone else. I was so constantly drawn to and fascinated with the little collection, pushing a kitchen chair against the cabinet so I could reach what I wasn't supposed to be playing with. I'd thumb at the silk linings of mini camphor chests and smell the wood. I'd hold carved, cooling pieces of jade to one cheek and then to my forehead and then to my lips. I would squish the two or three colorful coin purses between my fingers so hard I could almost see the brocade without looking. When we left my father, we didn't take any of that grandfather's items with us. We hardly took anything at all.
He'd been dead for years by then. But I scared my mother when I was too young to reach the cabinets or to have ever seen a picture of him (and much, much too young to be told of his existence) and I described him standing in her room one of the many nights that I was trying to sleep in there alone, just a short while in time (days, a week) before I accidentally set her curtains on fire. I still remember what I saw and her face, part horrified and part stunned, when I told her. She shook me and then she cried. And I remember how confused I felt and was at her reaction to what I thought, in my child's mind, was ordinary.
After having lost so much in every move since, I know I can hardly count myself as being sentimental any longer. It would have killed me to have been. Even my baby book is lying somewhere in a dump, decaying. But I always remember those things in particular, throughout my life, and wish I could spend another hour or so with them just looking, just touching.
