Porcelain Poodles

 March 3, 2021

Two little porcelain poodles. That’s all they are, except they’re more than that. I gave them to my mother more than sixty years ago, and wherever mom and dad moved, they moved, too. I last saw them sitting on a shelf in her bathroom, but when mom died and we had to sort through what we would keep and what had to go, no one, least of all me, thought of those poodles. I remembered them yesterday and thought of my granddaughter who loves dogs. So I asked my sister and sister in law if they had seen them when packing mom’s stuff. They remembered, but didn’t know what box they had been put in or where it ended up. A lot of that stuff we took to the AMVETS in the city. They had another trip to make there and said they would check the shelves. Today I got the text; they checked—no dogs. Maybe mom’s stuff hadn’t even been sorted through yet.

It would have been nice to have been able to give them to my mother and then to my granddaughter, but apparently that is not to be. It’s not a big deal. What is a big deal is the fact that my brother and sister in law were willing to drive back to AMVETS, look all through the store and even inquire about them. Families often help each other out, but going out of their way for a silly couple of porcelain poodles was for me, the extra mile. Over my years as a pastor, I’ve seen my share of families with fissures that completely ruptured at the death of a matriarch or patriarch. I’ve watched as people stopped talking to one another over tiny slights and trinkets. It’s sad to see relationships take a back seat to stuff. Tonight, I am thankful that when mom died, the overall attitude was, “I’ll take it if no one else wants it,” or, “This means more to you than to me; why don’t you take it?” I saw that selflessness again with a pair of porcelain poodles, and am grateful for the family of which I am a part.