HISTORY

Several weeks ago I was in an antique shop, en route to the front desk to pay for the items I’d selected from a multitude of treasures, when I stopped to pull something down from a high-up shelf.  It looked as though it had fallen off of an old-fashioned castle; it was a wooden tower with a green wooden steeple, and with pieces that could be removed and rearranged.  It was priced at twelve dollars – twelve dollars that I no longer have because, of course, I bought it.

Once I had brought it home with me and had spent about ten minutes trying to explain to my husband why I was so enamored with a wooden tower (I think he eventually understood, even if he couldn’t quite bring himself to my level of enthusiasm), I devoted some time to internet-sleuthing.  I learned that my purchase was a Russian toy, probably manufactured sometime in the fifties.  The tower had an unknown past as the plaything of a child in the Soviet Union.  It had a history, and even though I didn’t know all the details, that history made the tower more interesting, more worth having.  It wasn’t just a thing: it was a story.

This is the value of old things.  This is the reason that I am attracted to antiques and other relics of the past, even those in less-than-perfect condition that do not, perhaps, work as well as their modern equivalents.  I used to have a dresser in my bedroom whose drawers stuck horribly.  There was an art to the process of making them go back in after retrieving a pair of pants, and those drawers were a source of frustration when I was in a hurry.  But it was a beautiful old dresser, and the knowledge that an unknown someone had constructed it by hand many years ago made it worth the inconvenience.

It is hard to explain why a poorly-functioning old thing should be worth so much more than its brand-new, perfectly-functioning counterpart.  The best that I can do by way of explanation is to refer you to the words of a writer named Bill Bryson, taken from his musings about baseball and Fenway Park in Boston:

In fairness it must be said that the new ballparks of the 1990s, as opposed to the multipurpose arenas built in the previous thirty years, do strive to keep the character and intimacy of the old ballparks – sometimes even improve on them – but they have one inescapable, irremediable flaw.  They are new.  They have no history, no connection with a glorious and continuous past.  No matter how scrupulous a new Fenway they build, it won’t be the place where Ted Williams batted.  It won’t echo in the same way.  It won’t smell funny.  It won’t be Fenway.

I grew up in an old house.  It was almost sixty years old when my parents bought it, and in two years that house will have existed for three quarters of a century.  I used to lie in bed at night and listen to the house creaking, which it did all the time, but most noticeably at night when all other noises faded away and the house could grumble without interruption about its aches and pains.  These grumblings, which I soon learned to ignore but which kept my friends awake when they slept over, were the house’s way of reminding us that it had been around long before us.  It was telling us that it had a past, and that the past was worth remembering.  The past was still useful in a way – after all, wasn’t it providing us with a roof over our heads and shelter from wind and rain?  The house could be torn down and a new one built in its place, but if the building was gone, the memories of every child who had ever dashed madly down the stairs and of every family dinner that had ever been prepared in the kitchen would be gone.  A new house might not creak at night, but it wouldn’t be the same.  It wouldn’t have any stories to tell.  It would be lifeless. 

Earlier this week, my mother and I drove out onto the rarely-traveled roads southeast of town with a woman who had lived in that area seventy years ago.  She is ninety-five, but she remembers towns and communities that are now no more than shadows of what they used to be.  She can point to empty fields and recall the names of the families who once farmed them, and she can still remember which roads she took when she rode her horse to school in the 1920s.  She travels these roads and sees buildings that have been torn down, history that has been lost.  In her memories, she is preserving a past that no one else cares to remember, a past that has been torn down and painted over and is barely recognizable for what it used to be.  She pointed out to us a piece of land that used to be the location of a country store.  It didn’t look like anything at all.  Every bit of the past has been erased from the spot.    

Too few people place enough value on the past to make it worth preserving.  Some of it is forgettable.  But I have a tower that was once played with by a Russian child, and someday I will let my children play with it, and maybe, when I am older, I will let my grandchildren play with it as well.  I want them to appreciate it, not because it is remarkable in its own right, but because it carries memories that would otherwise have been lost.  And because it has the potential to collect new memories, and to carry them on into the future.