This week marks my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Neither of them is here to celebrate it, and I almost forgot it myself. But I thought it would be nice to reprint this piece, because it’s about them and about how the good habits of marriage can be carried on from one generation to the next.

(Take a look at my dad in that picture. You can tell how thrilled he is to be marrying Mom. In the 44 years they were together on this earth, and even after she died, he never got over that.)

This article was published in the Boston Globe 10 years ago, and I think it’s my first published piece. I’m tempted to polish it up a bit but I won’t. Better to leave it be.

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Last week we had “reading day” on Sunday. It was my daughter’s suggestion, as both she and her sister had only done about half their summer reading, and the first day of school was looming. We didn’t set aside the whole day, just the early afternoon, but it was great and really peaceful—the two girls in the living room reading their books, George and I on the screen porch enjoying the luxury of leisure reading. Usually I don’t let myself sit down and read until bedtime, and then I fall asleep right away. It was a real treat to have a couple hours of clear-eyed, wide-awake time to really focus on what I was reading.

So we’re doing it again this week, more by default than declaration: After lunch, everyone fell into a book. I took the oppportunity to attack the stack of old New Yorkers and read two really nice articles. I expected All the Answers, by Charles Van Doren, to be a straightforward narrative of his experiences as America’s most famous quiz-show cheater; instead, it was a really touching story of family solidarity, forgiveness, and redemption. Van Doren presents himself as surprisingly diffident in the story, never really admitting to knowingly doing anything wrong and not particularly tortured about it, either. But he is surrounded by people who are much wiser than he is, chiefly his father and his wife, who set him straight. The other article, Hungry Minds, is Ian Frazier’s account of his work running a writer’s workshop in a soup kitchen in Chelsea’s Church of the Holy Apostles. I usually hate these writers’ workshop stories, but this was less about the workshop and more about the soup kitchen, and how it affected the church’s evolution, so it was actually pretty interesting. And the article is chock-full of great anecdotes; my favorite is when he runs into a soup-kitchen guest who is not impressed by the writers’ workshop because he attended one run by John Cheever when he was in Ossining. Good stuff.

I don’t usually do memes, but I saw this little guy sitting on the fence in my garden and decided to make him pay for his lunch.

When we were cleaning out my parents’ house, my sister ran across a paperback novel, the sort of thing that normally we would have tossed on the give-away pile. Except this one had a Post-it note on it, in my mother’s handwriting: “This is the book Mammy was reading when she died.”

Mammy was my grandmother, who died in 1981. My mother passed away in 2003. As we cleared out the house, we found that she had left notes all over the place—stuffed into teacups, stuck on the covers of books, tucked inside folded clothing. As far as I can tell, she wasn’t dying when most of them were written. They were just reminders to herself, and information for us should something happen. How else would we know that the ugly woven-glass basket, which we would have thrown away in a second, was from the 18th century and identical to one that sold for over $2000 at auction? Would we have realized that the black lace mantillas in the cedar chest had belonged to Great-Aunt Daisy, who went in and out of three convents, slapped Mussolini, and sat for a portrait that now hangs in the National Gallery of London?

I wouldn’t call our family materialistic, exactly—we don’t care much about cars or jewelry or expensive stereos—but we do invest ordinary objects with great significance. Like a complete set of china, including massive platters and tureens, that my mother shipped over from Ireland to our home in South Bend, Indiana, after my grandmother died. I never saw her use it, although she hung a couple of the platters on the wall and put a tureen on top of the china cabinet. “Dad must really have loved Mom, to pay for shipping all that china over here that she never even used,” my sister observed. Then we fell silent when we realized that we were shipping the entire set to Boston for pretty much the same reason: Because they belonged to my grandmother.

This is a blog about stuff. Some of the posts will be longer versions of my mother’s notes: Here is the story of this object. Others are about interesting things that I picked up in my travels that I think should be shared with a broader audience. It’s a way of getting the information down and sharing it.

I don’t want to end up like an acquaintance of mine, who taped his father’s dying breaths and then was faced with a dilemma: He couldn’t throw out the tape, but he didn’t want to listen to it, either. If my life must be filled with these oddments and talismans, well, at least I can make something of them. And if somehow they are destroyed, the record will linger.

In the end, like the notes my mother left on nearly worthless books, the stories are more important than the things themselves.