I had two thoughts today, pretty much back to back, which put me into a strangely contemplative mood.

The first was, “What the hell am I going to do with that wedding pitcher?”

The second was, “Jesus, it’s six months today.” Six months since my father died, when decisions such as “what the hell should I do with that pitcher” fell to me.

I think the two were coincidental. I have a mental block when it comes to the exact date of my father’s death, and I had to check a calendar to confirm that today is the semianniversary. The question of what to do with the pitcher is unchanged from what it was yesterday or what it will be tomorrow, but it’s the anniversary that got me to thinking this way, to wanting to write about it.

The pitcher is part of a collection made by my mother, who like many Jewish women of her generation, had display shelving which she mostly filled with expensive and pretty ceramic crap. About a third of that crap is my fault. I spent twenty years traveling around the world, looking for gifts to bring home. At an early age, I realized that if it was breakable, useless, and optionally Jewish, it had Mom written all over it. (Jewish was frequently difficult when shopping in Asia, so somewhere along the way kashrut was replaced with sake set.)

Those items are easy; these are the keepers. I’m highly sentimental, and these are part of my story with my parents. It’s not just a Hungarian tea set, it’s the Hungarian tea set which, after schlepping it across Eastern Europe on a bus for three weeks, and hand-carrying it onto the plane, returning home after a trek of 4,000 miles, I managed to drop the teapot lid from a height of two feet onto an equally breakable glass dining room table.

Miraculously, both held. Otherwise, my parents would have heard the Finno-Ugric blue vocabulary I had learned on my trip, at high volume.

It’s the rest of the pretty and breakable crap which is giving me trouble, and raising the question of just what a memento truly is. Take the wedding pitcher: it’s the size and shape of what might be used to serve lemonade on a hot day to a family of eight. My parents’ initials are engraved on it, in a font that screams “1965, and not the part that came anywhere near acid.” To the best of my recollection, I’ve never seen it used.

But I can tell you where it sat in the old house, and how it looked at an upward angle when my eyes were only three feet off the floor, and that a picture of my mother from her prom was on a shelf beneath it. It was a very attractive picture, and I don’t know if I still have it.

I can tell you today that the pitcher has very little meaning for me. But this isn’t really about today, it’s about who I’ll be and what I’ll remember thirty or more years from now, and what mental bits of my parents which I have now might be lost between now and then. What I might want to hold onto. And what might help me remember.

I doubt I’ll ever care about the pitcher. But how often do I think about the prom photo without the pitcher to lead me there? Do I lose one if I lose the other?

And perhaps to make it even more twisted, seeing as how this blog is as close to a permanent record as I have, and I expect to keep it available for my own use until I’m past the point of caring: does this essay, on the six-month anniversary of my father’s death, replace a glass pitcher?

I have no idea.

There’s one thing that’s always struck me about death, about the way things should work to my way of thinking. After the mourning, after the wound has started to close and life has gone on in the way that it does, it seems to me that a fair God would give you the chance, every once in a while, to just sit and kibitz with the people you’ve lost. Like Homecoming, without the football game and the brass band. I’d like to crack wise about what my father went through, needle him a little bit like my mother and I would have, and have him appreciate the humor, as he would have. And then to say, seriously, “That really sucked for you. I’m glad you’re past it. It’s good to see you again as I remember you.”

Then I’d ask, “hey, what should I do with the pitcher?”