Champagne Glasses...Or, Beer Goggles - Melody Cryns

We had glasses – beautiful champagne glasses from the crystal factory in Germany and beer steins – bright, colorful, ceramic beer steins with all different designs on them, all proudly displayed in our German shrunk – that’s what the Germans called a cabinet – our “shrunk” held all of our kitchen items and I dragged that around with me for years, never expecting to see it again when I left Germany with three kids, $200 and seven suitcases. We also had shot glasses that my then husband collected – shot glasses with names of every town or city we visited in Germany or Austria, or Holland – representing where we’d been.

I used to think that the beer steins and the shot glasses and the crystal would stay in our family for generations to come, perhaps passed down to our kids, and then they would pass them down to their kids – family heirlooms.

I’d admire the beer steins, even hold them sometimes. I didn’t even drink beer, yet they were so beautiful. And the crystal glasses and shot glasses were as well.

Who’d have thought that five years later I’d stand at the City Dump outside Newport, Oregon where my mom’s friend had driven me because he had a pickup truck. Finally, after waiting several months, the 5,000 pounds of household goods I thought I’d never see, arrived – I had to wait until I could get a place large enough to accommodate all the stuff because no way would it fit in the tiny one-bedroom apartment I shared with my kids, and I never expected to see any of it anyway when I left Germany – my ex had proclaimed that I’d never see any of it again.

So there I stood at the City Dump with all this stuff, my exhusband’s military stuff that he didn’t need anymore, his uniforms – because he was discharged from the military under “other than honorable terms” and thrown into the brig for bigamy and larceny. Somehow it gave me a feeling of exhilaration to throw his stuff off the cliff, to watch his uniforms soar through the air and then float down. Then there was the garbage bag filled with the letters we had written each other – the history of how we met and corresponded for over a year before seeing each other, of letters, and cards – and memories.

I could barely lift the bag and had to drag it on the ground, but somehow I managed to thrust it over the cliff. A year or two later, I’d regret that, wishing I’d kept all those words that ended up at the bottom of the City Dump, but at the time I no longer wanted them. My kids might have wanted them, I thought…but now they were gone. All that was left were a few memories, most of them not great, but the kids…

I stopped short at the beer steins and crystal glasses, picking up a glass wrapped in newspaper and opening it up, the sunlight hitting the glass just right.

“Hey, do you want these?” I asked Bill Chrysler, my mom’s long-time friend. “You can have these glasses!”

“What?” Bill looked puzzled and he scratched his beard.

“You can have these or I’m throwing them off the cliff!”

“Okay, no – don’t do that. What a waste. I’ll take ‘em!”

I ended up giving away every single crystal glass and every single beer stein and even the set of shot glasses – my neighbor was so thrilled! Then I sold my exhusband’s stereo for like $50, the stereo with the huge Panasonic CS-722 speakers that he coveted so much – gone.

Was it insanity? Perhaps. Over the years, I’d find that it was dangerous for me to throw anything off the cliff at the City Dump, especially my mother’s heirloom Christmas decorations – that I’d regret for the rest of my life, but it was only an accident.