The kindness of strangers is becoming a recurring theme in my columns for 2025. So let me begin by saying I am ready to receive whatever other boons this new year has to offer. I am open and ready to accept whatever the universe sends my way. The lottery would be great, of course, but I will settle for finding a mess of old comics or vintage paperback books very cheap.
I’ve already told the tale of the Playstation 5 given to my family by a complete stranger on New Year’s Eve. Now, I have a new curio for my office, one with a surprising connection to my family, gifted to me by two of the kindest ladies I’ve met in recent memory.
Anita Thompson and Linda Greene were thrift shopping in Claxton when they came across a small piece of green and gold pottery. It was a small plate, a tea saucer or something, emblazoned with a shield. On the shield was an image of a three-masted ship, sails furled. Crouched on a bar or rod above it was a cormorant, which is a kind of fishing bird. I recognized it immediately as the O’Driscoll family coat of arms.
While not overly nautical myself nor much of a fisherman for that matter, the O’Driscolls of Ireland’s southern coast were once famous as sailors, fishermen and sometimes pirates. I relayed these and other important family facts to the politely attentive ladies as I turned the plate over and over in my hands.
What a mystery! How had this little family memento wound up in Claxton, Georgia of all places? I had been under the notion that I and my little family were the first O’Driscolls to settle in Georgia. Why I thought that, I don’t know. Once we escaped Ireland, O’Driscolls can now be found in most every corner of the world.
Once I started poking around online, what should have been obvious slapped me in the face. Savannah has always had a strong Irish presence and sure enough, there were plenty of O’Driscolls among the city’s Hibernian hordes. Mystery solved, in the short term anyway. Someone ordered the commemorative plate, probably part of a set, from Arklow Pottery in Dublin— Ireland, not Georgia— and it made its way to Claxton. I’ll have to follow up that branch of genealogical research at a later date. More interesting to the general public are the ladies, Anita and Linda. Their pastime of going thrifting, finding curios with names on them and then purchasing them with the intention to giving them away to those they somehow find with the correctly corresponding name is unique, so much so I was tempted to use it as the basis for a story of some kind.
Then it occurred to me, life being stranger than most stories, why make it fiction at all? A year ago, by sheer happenstance, two kindly thrifters found a tiny plate with the O’Driscoll coat of arms. Through my editor Jason Deal they discover a man with the O’Driscoll surname worked at The Times.
I have a vague recollection of Jason asking me about Claxton and some kind of plate and then promptly forgetting about it. Imagine my surprise when my new friends Anita and Linda (because who else but friends, known or unknown, does a kindness like this?) popped up at our offices in Blackshear the other day and presented said plate to me. Anita and Linda could certainly get a good TV show out of doing something like this. Thrifting and gifting items on a new adventure each week, the cheery pair solve family mysteries over lunch.
As for me, I feel like I am just the most recent episode of a larger story.The luck of the Irish is as good an explanation as any. As my wife often tells me, I am luckier than I know— to which might also be added “and more than I deserve”.
Either way, like I said, I am ready for whatever else 2025 has in store. Bring it!
