The 1955 Bud Vase: A Smoky Glass Memory

Wichita Falls, Texas

1955

                          

This six-inch high, hand-blown bud vase has been in my family almost as long as I have. My parents, Wayne and Marty Blackstone, bought it as a Christmas gift for my grandparents, Carrie and Jerry Blackstone, back in 1955—the same year I was born. (See the note that was attached to the bottom of the vase when I ‘inherited’ it.)

As the genesis story of both me and the vase goes, my appearance on the planet was something of a surprise. My parents were barely more than kids themselves: my mother got pregnant at sixteen and gave birth at seventeen, while my father was twenty.

Both my mother and father had grown up in rural Ohio in small communities and extended families. When they learned that Marty was pregnant, my father Wayne left Capital University and enlisted in the US Air Force. It was a decision born of urgency and responsibility, I guess, but also, I can sense, deep love.

Dad got stationed to Shepard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, so when I was born in September 1955, they were far from home and far from the life they had imagined for themselves at that age. And when the vase was presented to my grandmother who was in Texas to help my mom that unique Christmas, I was only three months old.

The vase itself is simple and elegant: a slender neck rising from a rounded base, its smoky glass filled with suspended air bubbles. Its form reflects a certain cool aesthetic, with echoes — or so I’ve read —of Scandinavian and Murano glass design. But what it represents to me goes well beyond its appearance.

I think about my young parents that Christmas. I imagine how their lives had suddenly taken that crazy unexpected turn. Yet they chose something beautiful to give to my grandparents—this small object of grace and celebration in what must have been an overwhelming year.

Maybe that’s why this modest vase speaks of something more important to me than its delicate appearance might convey. It holds more than flowers.

It represents that moment in time: my parents bringing a child into the world at seventeen and twenty, their own not so old parents unexpectedly becoming grandparents, and me—three months old—just at the beginning of what would turn out to be a wonderful journey.