Our wonderful mind stores everything that we’ve ever experienced in its “attic” that’s piled with dusty trunks, battered boxes and memories stacked up like yellowing magazines—both complex and simple, happy and sad.
Marcel Proust, the author of In Search of Lost Time, understood how seemingly inconsequential events and objects suddenly and unexpectedly sweep us into the realm of nostalgia where visions of long-past moments are recreated. For example, I had several responses from people who remembered how the nighttime passage of the steam engine filled them with inchoate longing.
Bill and I save a bunch of stuff that we no longer use. A few times a year, he says, “We absolutely cannot get anything more unless we get rid of something.” Fortunately, that mood doesn’t last! I suspect that we hold on to some items because they are subconscious symbols of our past and are freighted with nostalgia.
Bill cleaned up our storage barn and brought in our beaten-up old picnic basket whose once bright red plaid has faded after forty years. I offered it to Vicki, thinking that it might be of use on their pontoon boat. She replied with an enthusiastic “Yes!” — probably because she has her own memories connected with it.
Like the old codger in Mark Twain’s “The Ram’s Tale” that I wrote about last week, I cannot resist a little digression. In the “olden” days when we were young, some groceries and gas stations gave S & H Green Stamps to customers as loyalty rewards. We assiduously saved and pasted them in books.
What fun it was to peruse the catalogue of gifts and “shop” at the Green Stamp store in Irvington on the south side of Washington just west of Audubon where you could redeem your stamps for various items such as the steel roller skates that we got for Vicki. One memory leads to another: Mother saved up Wilson’s condensed milk can wrappers for my sidewalk skates.
The items were of very good quality and useful. Combining our own stamps with stamps that my mother gave us, we got a large, oval, filigreed silver-plated tray that we still use for our tea set. We also still use the clothes hamper that was offered.
In 1896 Sperry & Hutchinson started selling stamps to businesses who gave them to customers. Their catalogue became the largest publication in the U.S. during the 1960s. S & H printed three times as many stamps as the U.S. Postal Service. They even had a branch in England.
Then recessions hit, and the prizes required more stamps. Also, in 1972 the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the fairness doctrine of the Federal Trade Commission and declared the restricted trading of the stamps illegal. . .sigh . . .
One year, we chose the picnic basket. Just as Proust’s aunt, the village of Combray and its people came to life from a spoonful of tea and a cookie crumb, that old basket is bursting at the seams with the experiences of time past.
When Vicki was a girl we took it to Ellenberger Park where she sat in the Cinderella coach. The little grandboys called it “Hamburger Park.” We used it at Garfield Park where we admired the garden and watched the lighted fountains, and we took it on camping weekends at Monroe Reservoir and the Dubois Creek Campground near Liberty.
We stored dishes, silverware and pans in it when we camped out West in a pine forest at Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah. It sat on the picnic table at Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park. Bill’s brother and sister-in-law, Rick and Esther, their daughter and son-in-law, Susan and Paul, joined us a couple of times. When Bill and I were last at Grand Teton even a water jug would be confiscated by rangers, lest it attract bears. Times and people have changed, but my past time is not lost. It lives on in my present. wclarke@comcast.net