Inanimate Magic

A significant part of anyone's life story revolves around a place or object that holds deep, cherished memories. This could be an old homestead, a tree, a table, a bookshelf, or items like a grandmother's rolling pin, a grandfather's toolbox, or a mother's sewing kit. Whether practical, like a door or chair, or specialized, like a well-worn tool, these objects absorb the essence of our experiences and tactile connections. As time passes, they become touchstones for memories, evoking emotions tied to moments or to people who are no longer with us. Each inanimate object, large or small, carries the weight of our combined stories, flooding us with emotion whenever we use, touch, or encounter it. Inevitably, we lose track or move on from some of these objects and places. This is as much a part of our story as the items themselves.

I have experienced this with many different places and objects by this point in my life. Each of my respective grandmothers’ houses, where once my childhood held a main stage, has now become someone else's place of memory. Visiting those houses now would be to discover that they have not been frozen in time as they are in my mind and heart. The new owners might be surprised to find out how intimately I know their spaces. I spent so much time playing on the kitchen floors, being sung to, fed, comforted, loved and learning how to cook and bake. To those families, it wouldn't feel like anything special, any more than their stories might be of significance to me. For me, they represent a formative part of my identity and it is impossible to understate how much they mean to me still.

Perhaps because of my unsettled upbringing or maybe just because I have a sensitivity to such things, I am very aware of the burden of memory, especially of objects that slowly and powerfully become part of my story as it is woven into the skein of the people I know and love.

These objects aren’t just valuable in themselves, but they have greater emotional weight and significance of memory. I can almost feel the aura of remembrance with certain objects.

What brought this to mind recently serves as a good example of what I’m trying to convey. When we first moved to our current residence, we purchased—among many other things—a gas range for our kitchen. For fifteen years (and only one major repair, and one kitchen renovation) that stove stood stolidly by and baked countless meals, holiday feasts, thousands upon thousands of homemade pizzas and batches of Micki’s amazing biscuits, loaves of bread, challah, soft pretzels, battalions of cookies, casseroles, meatloafs, lasagnas, baked zitis, garlic breads, cornbreads, cakes, brownies and loads of other tasty treats. We used it hard and it served us well.

Fifteen years isn't a very long time in appliance world, at least it didn't used to be. For our stove, it lasted us as long as we could hope. It had been on its last legs and we understood that the time had come to replace it. We both researched (separately) what we’d want and arrived at the same stove in our investigations and so I went to purchase our new one. 

In the logistical nightmare of lining up delivery with the gas company and the electricians, I was too busy (and overwhelmed) to think about how significant the old appliance had been to us. Once it was disconnected from the gas and we awaited the men to come pick it up; our old stove began to radiate intense memories that I felt distinctly.

Each Friday for years, we gathered in the kitchen to make homemade pizza (a tradition that Micki's parents started, that she carried on as a single mother and that we keep up to this day). Each of those meals, from preparation to clean up, had that stove figured prominently at the center of the process, and that was just one day of the week.

Ritual is very important in the human family unit, especially ours. Every time we cook or eat or gather together within the sanctuary of this home, around a table or counter in the kitchen, in the dining room or the den, we participate in a timeless liturgy of powerful natural magic. Objects become sacred with use, tactile contact and the outflow of memories from us, like an altar in an ancient propitiation of the elder gods. We shed some of our life into the objects as we use them. The act of creation, such as baking or frying up scrambled eggs is quotidian—utilitarian, and yet, when performed over and over, it builds up a charge of the magic that binds life and memory to the family and adds savor to our stories.

On the day that the men were scheduled to come to take our stove, I had a moment of real nostalgia where the significance of this inanimate appliance rushed over me in a flood. Like all such tools, we take them for granted. Yet, at that moment, I could see, as if standing in a river of flowing emotions, each meal, each loaf of bread, each golden pizza and smell the rich aromas of all the meals we'd ever produced woven together to tell part of the story of our family's combined and knotted life. Our children grew into adulthood within the presence of that stove. They cooked with it. It fed friends and far-flung family and became the unsung power at the heart of our culinary art.

My heart swelled with this gush of memories and I hurt a little to think that this particular appliance would be going away. Change of any kind is disruptive to someone like me, mainly because I spent so much time as a child wavering between the whims of two sets of parents. There wasn't much stability, and later, when my mother fell ill, and I was left to my own defenses, the house I lived in became a castle in which each stone and every floorboard mattered as a place of security and emotional safety. When my grieving stepfather forced us to leave after our mother’s death, it devastated me and that exile left lasting scars. The items that we couldn't put into a pickup truck were destroyed; objects that had been slowly gathering the memory of our mother and our family's story to that point.

This is why inanimate objects mean so much to me. I realize, too, that there is the deepest sense of the religious impulse involved in this way of seeing things. Only a person familiar with this impulse would liken an appliance to an altar. As much as I’ve attempted to clear myself of the cobwebs of faith, it might seem hypocritical to call an oven a source of ritual and family sanctity.

Man-made religions try to exploit the religious impulse and manipulate a natural inborn response to the power of human experience to gain control and solidify power through fear and repression and coercion. Natural religions, on the other hand, cement the concept that, within the natural order, humans have a specific place and a purpose in the web of nature. To me, that purpose is at least to try to see ourselves as a part of something larger and to seek to better understand our position relative to everything around us. If we can see this as a natural impulse, then it becomes part of something bigger than us that we can attempt to connect with.

Family, for me, is that higher power, and the daily rituals that facilitate the magic and traditions like meals and holidays, stories and memories, are the bindings that hold us together, not just as a family, but keep us safe within the larger mechanism of the natural order. Because we are imbued with this sacred connection to nature, we share that power with the objects we use and the places we dwell. It flows through us into our possessions, and that, in turn, reinforces our stories.

So, I bade our former stove goodbye as I might an old friend that I would never see again. And as I watched it leave our house after many years of devoted service, I admit that I was a little sad. It is the end of an era, and that is always cause for a tear, but I am so joyful about the memories we have made together as a family in our kitchen, and I hope that they will further bind us together as we make even more. The end of one thing, in the web of nature, is also always the beginning of another. In that way, too, we don’t end. We just become part of the world in a different way. 

Our new stove is ready to be the source of many memories for our granddaughter and other family members yet to be born or invited into our story. While I won’t rush it, I do look forward to those new tales unfolding and I know that, although my brief sadness is perhaps silly, it is also a testament to just how meaningful the tightly woven skein of our family’s memories, emotions and stories have been to this sentimental man.