A silver dish: thus is the relic that comes to embody Woody Selbst’s conflicted relationship with his deceased father in Bellow’s short story. From its very title, the story "keeps the materiality of the missing object at the heart of the narrative" (Camps-Robertson 156). This dish is the one that “Pop” had stolen decades earlier from the Christian missionary family who had taken Woody in, hoping to make him a seminarian, thus compromising his son's relationship with his protectors and leading to his expulsion. After his father's death, the object alludes to the son’s ambivalent memory of his father and recalls his hand-to-hand struggle with Pop. Now deprived of the presence of his father, the dish acts as a kind of metonymic substitute and testifies to Pop’s absence. Just as the posterity of the silver plate depends not on the object itself, forever lost, but on the discourse about the object and its value, the commemoration of the father is based on an ambivalent portrait that combines longing and the overt mention of conflict between father and son.