Observing my china cabinet, a friend who knew my mother once observed that I had inherited her love of dishes. It’s not as though I never met a dish I didn’t like, but I do like far too many. Sifting through all the dinnerware suddenly available to me at Mill Brook House, it seems sad to give up the “Monticello” Hall China—soft white with a rim of tiny flowers—bought for the house for $5 at a rummage sale and replace it with our elegant Dansk plates from the condo, and, as usual, I wonder how much of my mother’s formal Noritake—white edged with gold (and 12 of everything!)—I will ever use again.
This causes me to reminisce about my mother’s own journey through dishware. Until I was nine, we ate off Fiestaware. Introduced to the market in 1936, it was rapidly becoming outmoded in the course of the 1950’s. Then a miracle happened which would forever alter our lives and our dishes: my father, through Michigan State University, accepted a Defense Department contract to mentor and teach at the University of Ryukyus in Okinawa. Unlike most of the military personnel stationed there, my parents found the island and its culture—Japan’s fused onto an ancient local folk culture—immensely fascinating, so much so that they spent every weekend driving around the island, visiting small villages and combing the beautiful beaches. Because the island remained under American military occupation, it had Japanese goods, sold in local shops, but no Japanese industry or tourism, no hotels or large chain department stores, and only one highway (Highway 1, of course), which petered out somewhere beyond the large air base in Kadena, about 18 miles north of the capital city Naha.
Although the Army generously shipped household goods around the world for its soldiers and civilian employees, my mother was only too happy to leave her outmoded Fiestaware behind. Instead of replacing it with whatever the Post Exchange (PX) had on offer, however, my parents, charmed as they were by the local culture, bought mountains of cheap Japanese dishes, available throughout the island in dozens of small shops dedicated to selling all the varied dishes required for a Japanese meal. Among these were dinner-sized plates, presumably intended as serving dishes, which my mother adopted as our new dinnerware. The plates had a soft, blue-green glaze with cranes and pine, symbols of good fortune and longevity, placed asymmetrically to one side. The only problem? They were not flat, and American cuisine at the time still dwelt primarily in meat-and-potatoes-land. Whenever one tried to use a knife and fork, the food on the far side of the plate was inclined to springboard up and hit one in the face.
Nonetheless, my mother never went back to her Fiestaware, even after returning home to Michigan. We endured those Japanese plates until our next sojourn in Okinawa when she purchased a more suitably designed stoneware, which had recently come into fashion, at the PX. Her Noritake, too, was purchased there during this second tenure. The Fiestaware lived in the basement for many years, but by the time it came back into fashion in the 1980’s those original plates had disappeared, probably donated to a cache reserved for MSU’s foreign student families. But that’s okay. Athough it evokes fond memories, Fiestaware was never really my taste, either.