Word: heirloom
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...part of the first-grade catechism (Pilgrims, friendly Indians, a day for offering thanks) and rarely move beyond Care-Bears sentimentality. This built-in ickiness is a pity, since it tends to overshadow the symbolic significance of Thanksgiving, that most unrepentantly old- fashioned of American celebrations, that patriotic heirloom that nobody has figured out a way to ruin...
...even more worrisome reports. JAPANESE BUY HEART OF N.Y., declared the Dallas Times Herald. "The roll call of all-American icons falling into foreigners' hands added a new name yesterday," reported Newsday. "When the whole house is being sold off, it doesn't matter much that a cherished heirloom goes as well," sobbed the San Jose Mercury News. The Sacramento Bee carried a photo of "delighted" Japanese tourists gazing at the property now controlled by "their countrymen...
...Ballybeg, the clan in the big house on the hill is the nobility. But at Ballybeg Hall the members of that gilded tribe are keenly aware of a wider world and their piddling place in it. They glamourize the past: a tatty cushion or tarnished candlestick becomes an heirloom by reason of a (probably fictitious) anecdotal link to some bygone celebrity. They embroider the dismal present. They deny the looming future of dissolution and dispersal...
...piano in Doaker Charles' living room is a family heirloom, and like most heirlooms it is prized more than used, its value measured less in money than in memories. For this piano, the Charles family was torn asunder in slavery times: to acquire it, the white man who owned them traded away Doaker's grandmother and father, then a nine-year-old. On this piano, Doaker's grieving grandfather, the plantation carpenter, carved portrait sculptures in African style of the wife and son he had lost. To Doaker's hothead older brother, born under the second slavery of Jim Crow...
...only it were that simple. No matter what is growing out back, whether catnip, horehound and fleabane, or chubby cabbages and Creeping figs, or heirloom roses and masses of delicate ranunculus, the garden will eventually become all consuming, of time, money, concentration and passion. Around the time that new gardeners are feeling most warm and gratified with their endeavors, delighted with the fresh vegetables and thrilled with the view from the porch, they also discover the risks involved. "A garden," warned Ralph Waldo Emerson, "is like those pernicious machineries which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand...