A Funny Little Find…

Lookit what I found!

Yesh. So there I am, trying to find some old CDs to listen to for the first time in three or four eons. I find a drawer in the media cabinet. A drawer!!!! Jeez. Pull that open, and there’s a little box, stashed in there with a fistful of old strike matches (sulfur!). Grab the box. What IS it?

Open the box. Find a set of six black seafood forks.

Black forks? How quaint!

Study the black forks and eventually figure out that they’re prob’ly silver. Or silveroid: silver plate. Nothing in my house could be sterling. So they must be silver plate.

Break out the silver polish. Scrub. And scrub and scrub and scrub and scrub… Appears to be silver. Drop one of them on the floor. It goes clonkity clonk, not clingity cling. Plate.

The box is emblazoned with the logo “1847 Rogers.” The same logo appears on the back of the clonkiting forks.

Rogers Silver was founded in 1883. Apparently these objects were not made in 1847. Further googling reveals that they were made around 1914 (or thereabouts, give or take 30 years) and are worth about $3.20 apiece.

But aren’t they pretty little fellows? So simple, so plain as to qualify as “austere.” Apparently the Rogers company thought so: they called the pattern “Cromwell.”

😆

 I do not know where these came from. They could’ve come down from my mother. But…really? I don’t recall them. I recall the coin silver. I recall the ridiculous set of silverplate she bought with Green Stamps and presented to me as a wedding gift. I recall having to store those things in a dining-room buffet and break them out whenever she and my father came to dinner, the only time they were used. Argha.

But these things? Would my mother’s family have ever eaten seafood?

Well, yeah: they lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. But were they the sort who had special forks for seafood? Well, no. On the other hand, that branch of the family favored the minimalist, in the design department.

Would my father have allowed seafood forks in the house? Not a chance.

Possibly they came from Dear Ex-Husband? Perhaps I made off with them, unknowingly?

But DXH’s mother would never have been able to afford seafood, living in Colorado in extreme penury with a worthless husband. Her parents, though, were what we would call small-town gentry. Her dad owned a lumber shop and they lived well and her mother’s china came from Tiffany. Yeah, they were the sort who would have seafood forks. But…in Colorado? Not likely. And DXH’s grandmother’s taste ran to the ornate. “Austere” was not her style.

Maybe they came from Semi-Demi-Exboyfriend?

Huh. SDXB’s family were even less likely to decorate their dinner table with seafood forks than mine. Where we were working-class, they were working poor. Frou-frou, foolishness, and extravagance were beyond their ken.

Now Tootsie, SDXB’s late and honored and much-loved mother, was fully capable of classy and austere taste. But how on earth would she have come by such a thing? And why?

Unlikely.

So there we are: I have no idea where these things came from. But aren’t they charming?

Here they are with a couple pieces of my remote ancestors’ coin-silver tableware:

Could be, I suppose. Anything’s possible.

Click on the images for bigger, higher-res views.