So it took me awhile to find an (extra)ordinary object. I'm not really sure why, I'm a hoarder of nostalgia and junk in fact I have a whole shelf in my office devoted to items I've collected. Right now i'm looking at some Philippine pray beads that I was badgered into buying in front of a 16th century church in the intramuros district of Manila. But they don't really seem like an extraordinary object to me, like everything else on that shelf the beads are just another collected memory. But finally, this morning as I was walking through my kitchen avoiding the stack of books on my desk I found the object I've been looking for. My object is a 7 year old single cup Italian coffee percolator.
I got my percolator in college when I was 21 years old, a senior, and living in my own studio apartment that I called 'the bungalow' because it was in the backyard of a big house and had a low steel corrugated roof that overhung a tiny porch. Heeding the advice of the friend who converted me to percolated coffee, I made sure I got a percolator made of stainless steel---it's easier to clean and doesn't leak flavor into the coffee, he said. I love the shine of stainless steel, but my percolator is dull and greasy because I store it on one of the back burners on my stove and the oil from my roommate's cooking is constantly spraying onto my percolator. It only occasionally bothers me--and certainly never enough to compel me to clean it. At the time, when I was 21 and itching to be done with college, I thought it was sophisticated---for some reason it fed into the careful cultivation of my intellectual identity. It's european, it's made for espresso—you get the idea. It just screams for you to pack it full of dark italian espresso, boil it up, sit down with a newspaper, light a cigarette and sip away.
It's just another thing I do that for a minute takes me away from the fact that I live in Ann Arbor Michigan and not Paris, Rome, or New York City.