I try to fill my entire life with ordinary objects with extraordinary stories and memories, though not always mine. I am an avid thrift store shopper and dumpster diver. I love anything that's old and looks like it has energy attached to it. I have all of my Grandpa's and Mother's clothes that fit me, from the 1940's-1980's. 90% of the things I own came from a thriftstore, were found on the side of the road, or were hand- me-downs. I like picking up everything around me and knowing it is special because it is different, old, weird, etc. I like to wrap myself with stories and time...
My object(s) is those tiny "To:/From:" stickers that go on Xmas gifts usually next to a ribbon or bow, so you know who the gifts under the tree go to and who they are from. The details aren't very exciting, sadly: they're usually about the size of 3-4 stamps, with some tiny decal or drawing like a smiling snow man or a snowflake or a santa head or a xmas tree or maybe even a gift (which is kinda "meta," no?). The fancier ones are not stickers but tags and have glitter (glitter = fancy? ha! yes, that's how I think of it) and maybe a hole punched in them so they can be tied to the Xmas gift. But those aren't the ones I'm thinking of...
It is a tiny strip of plastic, somewhere between a twisty tie and a plastic grocery bag. It has two beads tied into it, tiny, simple, fading, white disks, both emblazoned with a letter, M and P.
Its ends are frayed, and it bears the wear and tear of the four years it spent on my wrist, and the weight that it has carried then and now.
I have a little stuffed Kermit the Frog sitting on my stereo speaker. He's an exact replica of the Kermit who sits on my parents' banister every year at Christmastime, capping off the garland and lights my mom always winds down the staircase. Except my Kermit's not wearing a festive plaid vest with gold buttons; he's in his more usual state of undress. He's only 8 inches tall or so, and he's poseable. Usually I have him waving at me from his perch with his ankles crossed.
This is a chess set - maybe more like a collection of mismatched objects rather than a single object, but I think of it as a single item. The pieces are lightweight, hollow plastic, hailing from 2 or 3 different original sets. One of the pawns has had its top broken off, and several pieces are chipped. The board is made of worn wood, the paint on its surface scratched from a long life of many games. A small brass hook on one side keeps it clasped shut when it's not in use, storing the mismatched pieces. Boards like this are a dime a dozen in Russia.
My object is an electric toothbrush. It is around eight inches tall, I think, with a pulsing blue light near its base. It comes with a holder and charger that can hold a few brush-heads, but I only have the one that you will see perched atop the base itself -- each head is expensive!
I bought this toothbrush when I was in Washington DC, working for a nonprofit, trying to live under a strict austerity regime. I lived in small room with a thin secondhand mattress. The job paid poorly but the health care was good, and I was able to afford this fancy toothbrush under the dental plan. I remember justifying the purchase to myself, saying that if I was going to indulge any vanity it should be a vanity related to teeth, because tooth care is fundamentally practical and wholesome.
A dish cloth is an inexpensive cloth, the size of a washcloth, but thinner and usually made of a more synthetic material, with a waffle texture. It is designed for no purpose other than washing dishes, and often comes with the word dish printed onto it in large writing to make this clear.
I spend a lot of time thinking about dishwashing utensils, not unlike the way other people become fixated on utensils for brewing coffee or shaving. We spend no less time washing dishes than brewing coffee or shaving, and I find it extraordinary that so few others seem to spend as much time thinking about dishcloths.
Grapefruits are amazing. They have this epic size, the "king" of citrus fruits, if you will. Thick skin that's smooth and soft and the most amazing fleshy interior...ruby red or champagne white (take your pick, california or florida), they're pulpy and massive, and tart, and sweet all in one. Interesting that the fruit impresses me in this way, since I absolutely detest grapefruit juice, but that's another story altogether.
My object is a powder compact. I´m not sure what brand is, something you could by at any drugstore in 1999.
It´s about the size of your palm, maybe a little smaller and on the outside, before you open it, it´s brown and pretty dingy. when you open the compact, there is a cloudy mirror on one side. The mirror is covered in compacted powder and it´s hard to see much, except towards the very center of the mirror. On the opposite side of the mirror is where the powder lives. Even though the compact is 10 years old, there is still some of that compacted powder around the edges. There is also a thin, well used powder puff.
Grandma Leona’s candy dish—rounded porcelain with a vaguely Asiatic aesthetic, covered in tiny, delicate red, yellow, and light blue stenciled bunches of flowers and geometric designs inlaid with gold. The lid had a filigree knob handle and a small, jagged chip on the edge about the size and shape of a candy corn.
The dish had been on the wooden table next to the couch at my grandmother’s house. Every time we went to visit her, my brother and I went straight for it, barely stopping to say hello before helping ourselves to a sampling of whatever was inside—Hershey’s chocolate kisses, coffee or cinnamon hard candies, M & Ms, peppermints, caramels.
Everything I love about my childhood memories—about being young— are encapsulated in the remembering of that dish, of the feeling of walking into her house, of lifting the lid to see what exciting, delightful surprises awaited us.
My object is a utensil that I always use in the kitchen. No matter if I am cooking pasta or frying eggs, or mixing batter, or even flipping things over (like pancakes or grilled cheese sandwiches) - I always use the same utensil. I use it to saute onions and garlic. I use it to flip over asparagus when its grilling under the broiler. I use it to stir soups and sauces in the crock pot. I have maybe ten different cooking utensils that could be used - spatulas, flippers, spoons, ladles, salad tongs, grilling tongs, etc., but I always use the same one, my favorite. I wish I had a name for it, but I don't. I should name it "Lucille" like BB King named his guitar.
My object is a piece of bent metal, a "helix-shaped toy," a spring. A slinky. When I was about 8 or 9, I asked for one for my birthday after I watched a NASA video in school about how slinkies didn't work in space. First my parents gave my a plastic one even though I specifically said metal and I was very disappointed. I asked for a metal one again the next year and got it. I'm not sure why it had to be metal, but now that I've had both, I know that metal is much better. Plastic slinkies go down stairs so slowly, and then often either stop or fall over. And if you twist them just a tad bid too much, they break. The metal ones are much hardier. But most importantly, plastic slinkies don't make a satisfying noise when you bounce them in your hands. There are few noises as satisfying as the "sllllink" "sllllink" sound of the metal slinky.
I am truly blessed to have two very different families stemming from my parents. My mother had 8 sisters and brothers growing up on a farm in rural Vermont. As such, I have plethora of cousins, aunts, great aunts, adopted aunts, etc. and our family get-togethers are loud and cramped in my grandmothers small house, always surrounded by great company and even better food. On my father's side, I'm the only granddaughter in a Sicilian family. This has afforded me a very different, and equally fantastic, experience. This story is about my father’s mother (my Grandma) and a blanket.
My object is about 2 inches long and 1.5 inches high. It is a mouse cast in concrete. Her face is molded over by concrete algae or patina or whatever grows on concrete. And her casting must have been a botched job because her features are sliding and blurry at best. She is small and cold and hunkered down. She sits, without a pun intended, near my mouse pad on the cluttered table that sits at the center of my house. In other words, I keep her near.
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.
When I read [the call for object stories], I was excited by the opportunity to participate in some creative endeavor or at least to contribute to one. Then I thought about the specific request and it called forth longheld fears about my relationships to objects. Objects are one of many things that I'm decidedly meta about. For as long as I can remember I have always looked for the perfect souvenir and have hoarded all manner of material items because they held some meaning. And yet, when I think about it, I always feel like I have chosen the wrong things to keep and to discard. Further, I often feel guilty for not loving or cherishing the things that hold meaning and/or memory. What I've decided to tell you about for this project is an object that both exemplifies and disrupts that pattern.
A book. Letters to a Young Poet, by Rilke. It was old, the cover torn, and worn on the edges. Small. Paperback. A dark purple with yellow text on the front. The pages dyed an "aged yellow"- the text bold. it was soft and flexible in the hand. a few pages in the center were loose from the binding.
In the year 2000, my good friend, Emily, convinced me one afternoon that we should apply to study abroad in France. It was not a well-thought-through plan, but we decided, what the hell; we were seventeen; we would throw caution to the wind.
We were both accepted to a cultural exchange program in northwest France.
I suspect that we were going for different reasons: Emily wanted to learn French (we’d been taking it for four years, but it had trouble sticking to Em for some reason); and I wanted to get the fuck out.
My object is a very old Gerber Baby Food Jar, with mashed peas listed on the label. But it's filled with grey ash. The label is pealing off and the lid of the jar is gold colored metal. The label is blue colored with white writing on it. It's got an expiration date in 1980. It's about half way filled with the grey ash and half with air. I now keep it stored on a decorative shelf in my apartment. I pick it up now and then to look at it and show other people.
My (extra)ordinary object has to be my monkey pen-topper. I started using it five years ago because I was always losing pens. I would go through a pack of 12 in a week because I was so careless with them. Besides being wasteful, I never had a pen when I needed one. I added a pen topper because I thought it would make my pens a more valuable and beloved object - and I couldn't forget my pen if it was looking right at me. Also, when I left my old job at Zingerman's Deli, my coworkers threw me a party (a pink princess party, on my request), and gave me school supplies - my monkey topper was among them.
When I was in college, I became good friends with a woman who was pretty severely psychotic. The "cure" depressed her, of course, eventually to the point that she piled all her belongings in my basement, said she'd be back for them someday, and took off for a med-free life on the street.
My object is a garlic press- in particular, a garlic press that wasn't mine, but was my friend's press. She gave me the job of squishing the garlic with the garlic press for a pork tenderloin dinner and I felt honored to have a job and do something useful, and then I used it improperly, I think, and broke it. I'm not sure I used it improperly, it might have just broken, maybe it had had it's life as a garlic press and it wouldn't have mattered who was using it, it would have broken at that moment. I like to think that. But I sense I did something wrong maybe, or used it improperly, because it just all felt wrong from the beginning the way I was trying to use it and then I forced it. Anyway, it went in the garbage, I believe.