Remembering Mr. Jess

Mr. Jess and I didn’t have much in common. We lived in the same small Tennessee community, his farm and ours equally poor. I was a teenage girl and he was in his seventies; I was quick and agile and he was feeble and slow. I talked fast and heard everything; he talked slowly and had trouble hearing anything. But we shared a birthday.

So every year, during the week of our birthday, Mother would have Mr. Jess and his wife Miss Etheline for a birthday dinner at our house. Since that was in the days when banks gave gifts for opening or adding to a savings account, Mr. Jess had a great way of getting me a gift. He’d deposit some money and be given a place setting of silver plate. I wasn’t too impressed, but coming from a couple who had always eaten with mismatched, lightweight flatware, I should have been.

I was never thrilled at the prospect, but endured it because my parents said I should. “You mean a lot to Mr. Jess,” Mother would say. “This is the least you can do to please an old man.”

We’d started this tradition when I was ten, and it ended when I was 16 and had just received my sixth place setting of Oneida silver plate. Little Mr. Jess looked at me across the table and said, “You remember me when you use this silverware. You’ll be feeding your family and I’ll be out under a tree somewhere, dust returning to dust, as they say. And you can think of me, and think, ‘I sure do remember when Mr. Jess gave me this silverware.'”

And he’s right–I do.

To my own surprise, at the ripe old age of twenty I decided to get married. I registered for sterling place settings and left Mr. Jess’s gifts with Mother, disdainful of mere silver plate.

But we finally had a house big enough for entertaining at the large dining table, and I decided that it would be nice to have some extra place settings beyond my eight sterling ones. I retrieved them from my mother, grateful to Mr. Jess after all. When we have several people for dinner and I turn to the six settings of silver plate to finish the table, I think of Mr. Jess and his prophecy. He’s been dead almost 60 years now, but every time I use that silver, I do think of him and remember his kindness to a disinterested teenager who was nudged by her parents into doing the right thing “to please an old man.”

Little did I know what that decision would save me!

In 1976, we were living on Cliffview Avenue in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, and while we were out of town our house was robbed. The thieves unplugged the refrigerator and freezer—pure meanness!—and took everything that seemed to be pawnable, such as jewelry and our television. Of course that was long before we all had valuable electronic devices. As the police looked through the house and questioned us, an officer pointed out a dessert fork lying on top of the buffet where I kept my silverware.

“Guess they knew they couldn’t get anything for silver plate,” he said. Then I realized that the one piece they had pulled out was one of Mr. Jess’s forks! They saw “silver plate” on the back and didn’t look further at the sterling I had in the drawer.

Yes, Mr. Jess, after many years your sweet and thoughtful gifts paid off far more than you ever expected!