My mother had been my father’s first wife, and the plate was their first joint purchase, bought when they were students in postwar Europe. They were living on a minuscule scholarship stipend when they stumbled across it in a small Paris shop. My father, who was studying art history at the time, thought that creating ceramics at the end of the war was Picasso’s way of contributing something useful to the world after so much destruction. My mother, too, had studied art history, but she’d switched to writing, declaring that she was much better at fantasy than at fact-gathering. But she loved the plate’s plump, shimmering white dove and its quizzical gaze.

Wonderful little personal essay.

Joe Stracci