THE ANCESTRAL FORK......

When I was 12 or 13, my cheapass paternal grandfather dropped by.....the only time that he did, before his death, soon thereafter.....our home, to 'give' me a couple of 'heirlooms'......a bakelite AM radio and a silver fork....as though they were 'family treasures'......This was his reaction to having been 'de-grandfathered' by my mother, who thought him the worse of influences on both his children and grandchildren's lives.......However, at my needy,  tender, impressionable age, I fantasized that the radio was 'as if lifted from Thomas Edison's Lab and that the 'fork' had once been used by a king or, here, a queen........I drew, in my unaccomplished or trained 'style', a map of my 'lineage's travel to America, and the queen who must have dined with my fork.......Later, even though I knew my tale was just a fiction of imagination, I asked my then employer, Beverly Bremer, a Silver Dealer in Atlanta, about the 'fork', telling her my childhood fantasy about it.......After a quick glance, Beverly informed me that it was made in the 1920's.....over 400 years later.    We laughed about this.......I still have the old fork, now a century old, and just ate b'fast with it........The old bakelite radio bit the dust 40 years ago, because the replacement vacuum tubes were more expensive than purchasing the new FM/ShortWave radio that replaced it......