Self-Medicating Depression with Reminscent China
My enduring attraction to the colorful plates of Homer Laughlin’s Riviera china of the 1930’s may have had something to do with memories of what my grandmother always put on them just before our arrival when I was little.
After the long drive from our home in Kelly, Iowa, to hers in Omaha, Nebraska, we would pull in at what seemed the middle of the night to me, park our car in front of the garage at the rear of her lot, and walk back up the loose gravel driveway to the back door of her 1930s bungalow. There, on her kitchen table, would be warm chocolate chip cookies on a small blue plate for my older brother, a green or yellow plate for me, and coordinating Harlequin tumblers filled with milk.
No, this isn’t a picture of my grandmother’s table in 1952; it’s a picture of mine… in 2021
Thirty-plus years later, thoughts of my grandmother’s china still elicited a sense of calm and belonging… and in 1985, a longing to recover it. Unfortunately, not much seemed to have survived. I could find a plate here, a tumbler there, but never more than a piece or two in any shop. If there wasn’t enough for me to use, the few outrageously-priced pieces I did find didn’t seem worth buying.
Two years later, in 1987, Riviera suddenly and inexplicably turned up everywhere! I bought it whenever and wherever I found it, losing track of how much I already had. I had wanted enough that I wouldn’t be upset if a piece got chipped or broken. I wanted enough to last my life.
Riviera service for thirty-two should have been enough china, but it wasn’t.
I continued on to collect some Noritake Topaze, Royal Daulton Biarritz, three different patterns of Nikko, Pfaltzgraff’s Star Trek, Haviland Limoges, and about twice as many settings of Cristineholm’s “Old Fashion Christmas” as I’ve ever had people for dinner at any time of year. (I’d decided that my three grandsons, all now nearly adults who have never even seen that china, much less have a comforting remembrance of it, would love those darling elves on the cups and plates and want it someday).
Collecting china, regardless of the brand or dosage, didn’t seem to be filling whatever need I felt. I needed a different prescription.
[Part three – Modifying the Prescription]
No, Wait! I missed the beginning!
