There’s a wall at my cousin Sheryl’s house she took me into see one day. There the license plate hangs, singular, standing out as the one really odd thing, alongside a reentry permit of our grandfather’s. We had been looking over things from our grandfather’s life for me to take home and scan, and/or research.
The license plate just ended up there, the way objects do in a family, surviving long after the people who could explain them are gone. She said she had no idea what the license plate was about, but she ended up with it when her mom died.
The plate has German-style lettering and numbering, 401 Z-6569. Nobody in the family can tell me where it came from, what car it was on, or why Frank kept it. I want to tell you more about it. But I have to start with something that isn’t an object at all.
No one else is left for us to ask about these things.
We, once the kids in the family, are now the elders.
So weird.
My aunt Shirley kept various notepads late in her life where she wrote down what she remembered of the family’s move to Washington State in 1939. What the family was doing and what her and my mom got up to. Most of it reads the way you’d expect: some dates that don’t quite line up, correcting previous understandings, or needing correction with new information, towns she isn’t sure she has in the right order, a childhood pieced back together decades later. All useful, all fascinating to me.
But one line stopped me when I first read it, and it hasn’t let go since.
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