Every grandchild has eaten from the yellow chair, graduating to a phone book when the next baby came along. This year at Pesach, there were minor arguments between sisters and vociferous ones between their daughters when a two-year-old and one-year-old were hungry at the same time.

On my desk in Manhattan is an eggcup, so worn that its china pattern can scarcely be discerned. It comes from the cottage our family owned for fifty years. I have not eaten a soft-boiled egg since weekends spent there as a child, but the eggcup is in my sight every day, a homely keepsake of paradise.

In my studio is a drawing, sketched in black ink. We were teenagers when my closest friend made it for me. The drawing shows a room anchored by a desk for writing. Everything portrayed in the light, peaceful space is the embodiment of my nascent hopes for a future only a great friend could have discerned. But love bestows prophecy, and the sketch markedly resembles the room in which I write these words.

Once I met an English woman whose family had lived in the same London house for two hundred years. The rooms were crowded with objects that had belonged to her ancestors and would some day be hers. I could not imagine any Jew opening a door to a private home registered in the same name for centuries. Our treasures are scattered around the globe, some in museums against our will, some in illicit hands, and some acquired at auction by prosperous Jewish collectors amassing heirlooms for coming generations — heirlooms of other families.

I, too, cherish the silver Elijah cup from the last century bequeathed by my grandfather, the ivory mirror and jeweled boxes inherited from my grandmother. Their value can be objectively appraised, but they do not share the patina of memory with the sketch, the eggcup and the chair.

The poignancy of the commonplace, memento of everyday love: Who can measure it? When I look at the yellow chair, I see the first house in which we lived, my young father in the early dusk beyond the kitchen window spraying the back yard with water to make us a skating rink. I see my mother peeling the apples that will make a thousand pies for the Shabbat dinners whose taste none of us can replicate.

Sunday morning in the cottage dining room, I am tapping a just-boiled egg, trying to remove the top in one piece, laughing with my cousins, the entire wondrous day before us, nothing to do but what we pleased.

In a month, my closest friend and I will enter the third decade of our friendship. The years that followed her gift of the sketch have been composed of sorrows we clairvoyantly knew would befall us, alongside unimaginable exaltation. Her drawing, the embodiment of her steadfast confidence in me, became a blueprint for my life.

Sometimes I want to cry out to my children: "Take heed. These days will not return." But I cannot anticipate what they will remember, which objects, invisible in meaning, will later be potent with their past. In any case, I do not wish upon them the consciousness of time, that bittersweet awareness that marks the end of childhood more than any single rite of passage.

For me, farther along on the journey, rich memory outweighs all wistfulness, my modest inventory alchemized into a catalogue of infinite feeling.

A sketch. An eggcup. A yellow chair.

Almost worthless at a yard sale.

Priceless.

Nessa Rapoport is the author of a novel, Preparing for Sabbath, and of A Woman's Book of Grieving.




Reprinted from The Jewish Week. Used by arrangement with the author.
Copyright © 1999 by Nessa Rapoport. Do not reproduce without author's permission. All rights reserved.