My wife, Betty, had just come home, proud of her find at the local thrift shop. Six small glasses. “Six dollars for the whole set,” she said.<\/p>\n
“Hmm,” I said. “We could use them for orange juice.” I picked up one. Nice design. Cut glass, solidly made. I liked the heft of it in my hand. I held it up to the light…and noticed something on the bottom. An inscription.<\/p>\n
I turned the glass upside down. There etched in the glass was a crown and the British lion rampart encircled by the words: the Cunard Steamship Company, Limited. A Cunard glass!<\/em> Immediately I put the glass down for fear I’d drop it. My first instinct was that we needed to lock up the set.<\/p>\n “Betty, these are Cunard glasses! They probably graced the table of some first-class dining room on a long-ago liner. They’re real collector’s items.” Betty knew of my fascination for old ocean liners, and Cunard was top of the line, famous for its transatlantic ships like the Lusitania<\/em> and the Aquitania<\/em>.<\/p>\n The first ocean voyage I took was on a Cunard ship, the Scythia II<\/em>, and even though it was World War II and the liner had been converted into a troop carrier, it still showed evidence of its prewar style.<\/p>\n Why, these juice glasses could have been used on any number of historic ships<\/em>. Betty put them in the sink. “Be careful with them,” I said. “I’m going to find out just how much they’re worth.”<\/p>\n I called an appraiser. “I’d say each glass is worth at least $50,” he said. “In a few years even more.”<\/p>\n “We can’t use these for breakfast,” I told Betty. I took them from the drying rack and put them on the top shelf of the sideboard. “They’re too valuable.”<\/p>\n “Nonsense,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron and following me. “I bought them to use and that’s what we’ll do.”<\/p>\n “Don’t you realize what we’ve got?” I raised my voice in anger.<\/p>\n “Six juice glasses,” she said, and in a moment we were having a full-blown argument, with Betty even quoting the line from scripture about not storing up things “where moth and rust corrupt.” I said she didn’t understand a thing about collecting and she said when you buy something you should use it.<\/p>\n Dinner that night was frosty. We didn’t want to say much and the glasses glared right back at us. Finally Betty broke the silence. “Remember your war bonnet?”<\/p>\n I flinched. I’d told the story to our boys many times. When I was 10 I’d won an Indian war bonnet in a contest. I was so in love with it that instead of wearing it, I hid it so my brother couldn’t find it.<\/p>\n In fact, I hid it so well that I forgot where it was. I never really enjoyed it because I was so afraid it might get dirty or someone else might bust it.<\/p>\n Maybe something even worse than moths or rust could corrupt a thing. I thought of another Bible verse: “He that is greedy of gain troubleth his own house.”<\/p>\n I looked up at the glasses. “We’ll use them at breakfast.” Betty smiled. I took her hand. After all these years it felt like I’d finally unearthed that old Indian war bonnet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My wife, Betty, had just come home, proud of her find at the local thrift shop. Six small glasses. “Six dollars for the whole set,” she said. “Hmm,” I said. “We could use them for orange juice.” I picked up one. Nice design. Cut glass, solidly made. I liked the heft of it in my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29266,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[246],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[734],"class_list":["post-21217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-healing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n