Where to begin?

Perhaps a year ago, I had a dream about an armoire. The bottom of the bureau had several large drawers, like a dresser, while at the top, two cabinet doors swung open to reveal many small drawers. When opened, these small drawers unleashed a flood of identical small brown mice. My attempts to analyze this dream yielded little fruit, but the image has stayed with me. (The closest I got was “infestation,” which didn’t—I recall—have a very positive connotation.)

Nevertheless, the image has stayed with me, and not in a frightful way. I love hidden treasures, mysterious, thrift store finds, and the histories and stories that are linked with objects. Part of this probably has to do with the fact that I’ve been surrounded by old objects for most of my life. My great grandmother bought furniture and dishes and, subsequent generations of women in the family have, to a large extent, carted many of those same objects around rather than buying new.

My great-grandmother (“Daisy”) was not someone I ever thought about until, in my early twenties, I was contemplating a career change from magazine editor and freelance writer to something in the health care field. I thought I might like to be a therapist of some kind but it meant changing…everything. As I would be at several other times in my life when contemplating big changes—personal and professional—I was pretty stuck. Then, at a family reunion, a relative said, “Did you know your great grandmother was an occupational therapist?” Somewhere, she said, she had my great-grandmother’s obituary, which she later produced.

In her obituary, I read about a life with many changes. Beginning life as a wealthy debutante, my great grandmother had gone on to work with soldiers in World War I, as a rehabilitation aide—a field which later came to be known as occupational therapy. In her middle age, a widowed mother of three, she had risen to the head of occupational therapy at a hospital in the Chicago area. That was the first time my great grandmother—her life and her transformation—became a fascination to me (and, side note, I ended up becoming a pediatric physical therapist…who still likes to write).

A few years ago, as my mother began downsizing, I inherited a china cabinet that had belonged to my great grandmother. As a kid, I would gaze at this collection of beautiful, useless items—each one unique—and marvel at them. I would imagine a future where I drank from the tiny, elaborate teacups and ate from her equally ornate plates. Today, I sometimes see my two children standing in front of the same cabinet divvying up the treasure. “You’ll take the blue one,” my daughter says, “and I’ll take the gold one.” In the few years that I’ve had the cabinet, I’ve only used its contents twice. It strikes me that I should change that.

This week I started reading the book Show Your Work by Austin Kleon. I like this book so much, though I’m still only halfway through. (I saw this book in a YouTube video from Samurai Matcha btw and the title intrigued me). Imagine my surprise and delight when I turned to page 70 of the book to see Kleon’s illustration/writing advising readers to: Open Up Your Cabinet of Curiosities.

Don’t mind if I do.

Together with his advice to explore more of what you love (no matter what people think of it), I acknowledged that old things, their stories and mysteries, and the narratives of women and mothers are all things I have a deep interest in. So why not open my actual cabinet of curiosities, I thought, and explore a bit more about a woman who is some historical version of me, some root of my future, through her things? This project is sort of a two-birds-one-stone thing, too, because this cabinet and its contents have needed cleaning for a LONG while. Inspired by my recent practice of cleaning my toilet every day (an admittedly odd habit I also learned about from a Samurai Matcha video, and which you can read about here), I decided that maybe I would clean the teacups slowly, and study them, and see what they revealed to me about my great-grandmother and, who knows what else.

Lasserre Restaurant, Paris

For no other reason than that it has some information to share, I started with this tiny porcelain pan. And my first object revealed some surprising evidence. The most interesting is that it, in no way possible, belonged to my great grandmother.

The pan is a keepsake from Lasserre, a Michelen starred restaurant in Paris that opened in 1942 during the German occupation of France. One look at Lasserre’s menu has convinced me that this is a bucket list visit. “Morel mushrooms and green Provence asparagus in yellow wine, egg from les vergers de nos secrets” anyone? How about “Braised sea bass, imperial caviar, beech wood smoked sea potatoes.” Oui, merci!

According to Lasserre’s Website and the blog Food Snob, in 1948, Rene Lasserre opened his “Casserole Club” as part of the restaurant. With its retractable ceiling, celebrity crowd, and flocks of doves (really), the club was a place to see and be seen, and was visited by the likes of Marc Chagal and Salvidor Dali. Lasserre also started a tradition of giving female diners/clubgoers a small souveneir—you guessed it…a little pan. (Check out some of the links above for vintage pictures of Lasserre, menus, etc.)

But now some mystery remains. Who went to Lasserre, when, and why? (My great grandmother died in the 1930s, well before Lasserre even opened.) And what will my cabinet of curiosities reveal next?