TOO MANY PLATES
It took an outbreak of termites in my storage closets for me to realize I was the owner of 250 assorted plates. This was not always the case. When we moved into this house in 1980, we didn’t have much of anything. To get us started then, I had bought a stack of white plates, neutral enough to be used for every day and for the parties that we planned to throw. My parents had loved to throw parties, and were not concerned about being too correct, nor were they about to spend a lot of money, when less would do. For this reason, perhaps, their parties were always very lively, and people relaxed. I remember them dancing wildly in our cleared dining room to Bill Haley’s newly released “Rock around the Clock,” a doctor friend with a trickle of blood running down his forehead from having bumped into the low hanging chandelier. We lived in a beautiful big house, and no one minded that the wine was pretty basic, and the simple food cooked by my mother. And they had plenty of plates, for my...