The Village Idiot: Older not necessarily better
My neighbor Harry came back from a trip to Las Vegas with a souvenir coffee cup. It cost him six bucks. That is, if you don’t count the airfare and the hotel and meals and the $1,300 he lost playing blackjack. If you throw that in, the coffee cup cost him more like $3,250. At least he didn’t come back empty-handed.
The coffee cup came from the gift shop of the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas, which is a giant black glass pyramid with powerful searchlights shooting out of its tip straight up into the night sky. It’s supposed to remind you of ancient Egypt. Because nothing screams “ancient Egypt” like black plate glass and halogen lights
Harry’s coffee cup is a beautiful object circled with bands of multi-colored hieroglyphics. Which is supposed to remind you of ancient Egypt. Except they didn’t have coffee in ancient Egypt. Consequently, they didn’t have coffee mugs, either. Of all the millions of fake ancient Egyptian artifacts Harry could have bought from the gift shop — the Rosetta Stone, reed boats, life-sized mummies — he opted instead for something that never existed in the first place. It’s not a fake because there was no original, there was no intent to fool him because it shouldn’t take Indiana Jones to figure out there’s no such thing as ancient Egyptian Post-It notes or King Tut’s cell phone or Cleopatra’s SUV or Ptolemy’s T-shirt.
There is an entire industry now of making old-timey things that never existed in their own time. Queen Anne seems to be particularly popular. There are Queen Anne phones, Queen Anne TV hutches, Queen Anne computer desks. Considering that Her Majesty joined the majority in 1714, it’s not very likely she actually owned any of this stuff. Well, maybe the phone — to make appointments for her Jazzercise class down at Ye Olde Health Spa.
My local discount store does a booming business in CD players that look like 1930s radios. What do you listen to on that? “Fibber Magee and Britney”? These CD players are tiny, about the size of a toaster. I have an Atwater Kent radio from 1933. It takes up half of the living room. It has tubes as big as Coke bottles. We only turn on the thing when we need extra heat.
When we bought our farmhouse there was an old black wood-burning cookstove in the kitchen. Our antique-hunting friends would come in and say, “That’s fabulous, you’re not going to get rid of that, are you?” No, of course not. Sue’s going to get up at six every morning and fire it up with all the wood I chopped yesterday. And in half an hour or so, when it gets up to speed, she can put some water she pumped from the well on the stove and bring it to a boil. But we won’t have time for the coffee because we’ll be busy moving everything in the kitchen at least six feet away from the stove so it won’t melt or burst into flames from the heat. Then we’ll spend the rest of the day removing the thin coating of soot over everything in the kitchen. That evening I’ll shovel out the ashes and throw them on the compost heap, trying not to spill too many of them in the house before Sue hits Defcon Four. Oh yeah, we’re keeping it. How nostalgic!
People who love old things sometimes think their original owners must have loved them, too. I wonder. I had an old car when I was a teen-ager. Now it would be a very desirable, very expensive “vintage” car. When I had it, it was called a junker. It was always getting flat tires.
The radio never worked. The defroster was my breath and wiping little circles on the windshield with the back of my elbow. I miss it the way the ancient Egyptians miss their coffee mugs.
(Jim Mullen is the author of “It Takes A Village Idiot: A Memoir of Life After the City” (Simon and Schuster, 2001). He also contributes regularly to Entertainment Weekly, where he can be reached at [email protected].)