The Things I Sold

The man peers through his jeweler’s loupe, poker faced and focused behind the glass counter. “These are gold,” his employee had said when he opened the small chainmail coin purse I found among the flotsam in my parents’ basement. It was blackened and greasy, and when I opened it I saw what looked like foreign currency. I snapped it shut and threw it in the box with the old silver, the maybe-silver, the half-filled cardboard coin collection booklets, and other odds and ends. 

“We take it all,” a Slavic-accented man had told me over the phone. Broken jewelry, doesn’t matter, it gets melted down for the gold and silver. No appointment needed, we’re here until 4. 

We scurried around the house combing for unneeded items that might be gold or silver. My mom found an old ziplock bag of currency and threw it in the box. (They turned out to be quarters - worth 25 cents each.) My dad scoured his dresser. Might as well take it all. We’re on the front end of emptying their home of 56 years, no time for sentimentality.   

Lexington Coin was a low-slung building on a featureless street corner beyond the main drag. I might have been suspicious but for the fact they had been personally recommended and somehow had a full five-star rating on Yelp. 

When I walked in, the two employees at the counters were busy with customers, and after a few minutes I set my box down, shifted a few things to make room on a small bench, and sat. My eyes darted around the room, a visual cacophony of memorabilia, old coins and jewelry, lamp parts, anything, it seemed. Every wall was covered in framed news stories, yellowing advertisements for bygone products, certificates, art. It read like your hoarder uncle who somehow turns a buck from it all. 

You take baseball cards? I asked, eyeing a box. “It depends, what ya got?” Oh, I don’t even know, I said, and anyway, it’s in Alaska. 

When it was my turn, I hefted my box onto the counter. The employee removed each item and examined it, scratching the surface gently, testing the residue, peering through his loupe. This is not silver, he said, placing a gravy boat to one side. Not silver. Not silver. This is silver. It’s 800, not sterling, he added, as if that meant something to me. Piece by piece, he evaluated the silver set my grandmother had left me, ever hopeful I would throw a proper dinner party. 

When he got to the greasy metal coin purse, he said, “These are gold. My boss will do these.” 

Now the boss studies each coin and writes numbers on a piece of paper. I stay on the bench, not wanting to crowd him, but once I glance at the paper and see some large numbers. “Is that the value of one coin?” I ask, pointing. Yes, he says. Oh, I say.

The coins, mostly dated in the 1920s, are from Hungary, Austria and Germany. He tells me those countries used standardized coins to enable trade. The coins are in beautiful condition but I understand they will be melted down. As I write this, gold is selling at $4,315 per ounce. 

I sit on the bench, contemplative. Before evaluating the coins, he worked through my grandmother’s silver, a full set of 14 dinner forks, salad forks, large and small spoons, two types of knives, and serving pieces. It’s too heavy to bring back to Alaska, too bulky to store, my dining room table is too small and too cheap for it, my life is too full for it. I know all of these things, yet a shiver of guilt catches me. 

My grandmother and I had once sparred over this set. Standing at the counter of an old silver shop in Germany, the same shop that had fabricated the set in the 1920s, she instructed the staff to replace the blades on the steak knives. 

“But I don’t eat steak, Oma,” I reminded her slyly. “Don’t waste your money.”

“Ach! What will you serve your guests?” she scoffed. “Tofu?”

“Sure,” I said. I was 17. 

“You will serve steak,” she declared. She had carried this silver from Connecticut and wasn’t about to back down now. I met the eyes of the worker, wide with interest. 

Oma won the argument. There was no arguing with her, she inhabited a black-and-white world, particularly when it came to matters gustatory. My father had not been allowed in the kitchen growing up, and did not know how to cook so much as an egg until medical school. 

My grandmother had shaken her head and sighed dramatically over my intransigence, and I had laughed, enjoying the moment and the wonder of being there, with her, in her hometown. She had left at age 23, shortly after Hitler came to power. Her father had been a prominent business man, widowed at the birth of his third child, and a Jew. I am too old to leave and start over, he told his children, but you must go.  

My grandmother married my grandfather, an Austrian Jew, and moved with him to his hometown in Austria. Her brothers, 19 and 17, fled to Belgium and found their way to Israel and Brazil, respectively, where they settled and raised families. 

We were in Muenster as guests of the city, which had invited all the former Jewish inhabitants it could track down for an official visit and apology. The invitation had included a spouse, but my grandfather was dead. My grandmother said she would take me instead - I would be in Germany anyway for a summer exchange program. 

Muenster said the invitation extended only to spouses. Outraged, my grandmother said she would be coming with her granddaughter or not at all. Needless to say, she won that argument, and here we were, eight octogenarians and me, for five days of Holocaust Apology Tour. 

When my grandmother checked into the hotel and the clerk said I had arrived earlier and was taking a walk, she berated him for letting me wander the city alone - a little girl who doesn’t speak German! He replied that my German was better than hers. She reported this to me over dinner that night with feigned offense. I had not been raised speaking German, but it felt like the language was in my brainstem and I picked it up quickly in my high school German class. Maybe it was because my grandparents’ English never fully left behind their German syntax and cadence. 

As I sit on a bench inhaling the musty odor and ambience of Lexington Coin, I remember Muenster. My grandmother’s horror at my refusal to serve steak to my hypothetical dinner guests. The personal apology for the Holocaust the Oberburgermeister had offered us in the Rathaus. My grandmother’s gruff acceptance of said apology and her delight in eating pigs’ knuckles again. 

I eye the silver, each knife still individually wrapped in plastic following the blade replacement, now slated to be melted down, never used. I interrogate my emotions: do I feel guilty? 

No, I think. I don’t have use for this silver, it’s not practical. And my grandmother isn’t in the silver. She’s in the story. “You will serve steak!” She’s in my soul, in the part of my cerebrocortex that still understands a few words of German.

My eyes water over. I am here in Boston now because my 21-year-old nephew died in a car crash. In between excavating my parents’ basement, I am organizing a memorial that should not be happening, ordering sandwiches and photo enlargements, sitting with my brother while he searches through a river of words for understanding that might never come. “It’s a rock that won’t digest,” he says. “I can’t digest it.” 

I can’t digest it either. I blink and dab my eyes, looking around this room teeming with the remnants of past lives. What remains of us when we're gone? What matters? I feel almost suffocated with grief. 

“You must think about the meaning of life a lot working here,” I hear myself say. The men behind the counters glance up briefly, then back down at their work. Maybe they don’t. 

We are not in the things. Things can be sold, lost, burned, melted. Forgotten, stolen, gifted. Things are finite, ephemeral, inanimate.

What's left is love, the permanent imprint of having loved and been loved. It outlasts our bodies, our breath. I grasp fiercely for the love that is left of my losses as the men in the shop examine ephemera. I close my eyes and summon my nephew, hear his voice calling "Grammy!" when he walks in the door, ebullient, exuberant, excitable. How can such energy be stilled? Grief grabs my gut, and I hew to the love, the unbreakable thread.

I leave Lexington Coin with a check that my parents tell me belongs to me and my brother. I feel almost sheepish telling him and my sister-in-law about the money, as if cash were a fair trade for their son. I tell my own son I will buy him the high-performance ski boots and bindings he wants, and he can thank his great-grandparents.

May their memory be a blessing.

Coverage of Mayor's apology, Muenster Times

Apology from the mayor; my Oma and I are at the far left 

My Oma in Muenster

The gold coins

My father holding his father's medical school
transcript from the University of Vienna (1920s)

Another treasure from the basement: if you know my mom, this
gift from a friend on her 40th birthday needs no explanation

Only love