Just One of Those Things

In high school, after a trying day, it was not uncommon for me to come home, dump my backpack beside the couch, and announce to my mother that I needed my gravy boat. She would nod sympathetically as I sat down on the carpet next to the lower shelves in our kitchen’s island. The gravy boat in question was a beautiful piece of fine china from Limoges in the Autumn Leaf pattern. It was permanently fastened to its dish and had painted gold details on the lip and handles. If the day had been particularly rough, I might even go so far as to pull out a flat soup dish or two. I very seldom needed to go as far as hauling out the teacups, but I knew they were there if I needed them.

Call it object therapy.

I read an article recently that said in terms of the money/happiness relationship, you get more of the latter if you spend more of the former on travel as opposed to material objects—the point being that experiences, rather than stuff, are more consistently likely to make you happy. Having recently entered the final month before a long awaited, self-funded trip to Spain, I was certainly encouraged. I also didn’t miss the fact that the real thing that makes us happy is interactions and relationships with other people: it makes a certain amount of sense that tromping through Barcelona in my beat-to-hell Tevas with one of my best friends will make me happier than buying several pairs of obscenely expensive, if lovely, shoes.

Nevertheless, I would make an argument for the occasional object. Stuff for the sake of stuff has always been something of a touchy issue for me—I realize its folly most of the time, but I have also been known to take joy in retail therapy (I recall in particular an instance with purple leather gloves—my motivations are sometimes unknown even to me). However, I do believe that material objects aren’t always equivalent to just stuff.

When I would sit with that gravy boat and be comforted, I think it’s safe to say I wasn’t only sitting with a gravy boat. I was sitting with my grandmother, with whom I shared a deep love of beautiful things made priceless by the history they carry. The Autumn Leaf china was her mother’s, whose story I learned over countless cups of tea—one of many histories that reinforce who I am even as I protect their memory: we guard each other. For most Christmases and birthdays, I would get a fruit compote or salad plate to fill out the set. My grandmother and I agreed that the gravy boat was the crown jewel of the lot, so almost without realizing it, I anchored years of love and comfort to it.

A few days after she died, just before I left for the airport to fly back to school, I swiped her last box of Tic Tacs from a basket on the kitchen counter because it was something to see, something to hold in my hand—a small signifier of a very large love, because she was not there anymore, and I needed something to hold.

I make the case for objects not as things, but as artifacts of experience. I grew up with the sense that I did not construct the things in my head in a ‘normal’ way; that my own mind could be called into question at any time, making my thoughts and memories somehow invalid. As a result, I came to assign very intense meaning to things—objects that I could hold out as proof of the things in my mind; undeniable evidence that something had been there, and it had been important. I came to realize later, of course, that there is no normal, that what I had learned was a doubted ‘idiosyncrasy’ could actually be interpreted just as easily as a unique ‘personality.’ My instinct to anchor, though, remained.

A few days ago, I was walking through an open air market with someone who makes me deliriously happy, which is always a good place to end the weekend. One of the things I love most intensely about him is his ability to make the things about which I am most self-conscious seem like the most natural things in the world, to make my quirks seem both normal and special. As we walked, we had been talking about our love of objects that contain memories and history. He had been looking that day for something glass to have in his apartment, and he turned to me and said, “Why don’t we buy something together, and have today be the memory for it?”

Were I to say something like that, I would instantly berate myself as cheesy and ridiculous, even if I did believe it whole-heartedly. Another thing I love about him is that he makes me feel that if I believe in something whole-heartedly, my believing in it is all the validation it needs.

We ended up picking a glass perfume bottle that, oddly enough, had scenery straight from our past painted right on it. He is taking the first shift in our joint custody arrangement, and he’ll bring it to me when he visits. It was a strange reversal for me, because for the first time an object didn’t simply anchor a memory for me: it was also proof of a possibility, and it was proof to someone else too.

I would always choose a person over an object, because even though I do love my things, I know the one is just a stand-in for the other. But it is comforting in a very real way to be able to hold my gravy boat and think of my grandmother, and to know that somewhere, it is entirely possible that someone is looking at a little glass bottle and really wishing I were there.

And really, if at the end of the day, you have some combination of comforting memories, beautiful things, and people to love, you could do a lot worse.