The statement “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” is often attributed to Sigmund Freud. Whether or not he said it, I disagree with the basic idea. I believe most objects are jam packed with meaning, history and emotion. I know my possessions are. Jews, of course, understand the symbolic power and beauty of objects. How else could a rather tasteless piece of flatbread, a matzah, acquire such meaning? Or that an etrog, a Chinese fruit, would become a symbol of Sukkot?
On a more personal level, my house is overflowing with items that provide more than mere utilitarian service. For example, this chair I’m sitting on belonged to my husband’s mother. It is one of just three objects my husband hand-carried from his childhood home after she died. He didn’t take pictures, dishes or books. Just two scrapbooks and the chair. This chair where she sat every day in her later years, watching “Wheel of Fortune” and eating sunflower seeds. This chair where she sat when he visited and they talked.
Often as I walk through my house, or as I dust, I feel as if I’m in a museum, like I’m a docent, silently reciting the history — the provenance, if you will — of a paperweight, picture or plate.
“On the right, you will see …”
In days past, I complained about how uncomfortable Grandma’s ornate walnut-carved couch is, the one she brought back from her one trip home to see her family in Hungary in 1929. Now, however, I think about how ostentatious it was of her to buy this elegant, impractical piece, and how she obviously was showing off to her family how well off she was in the “New Country.” So much “baggage” attached to this rickety, old couch!
It’s gotten to the point where I have attached labels to old photographs, with the relatives’ names, so that “after I’m gone” my kids will know who is who and why they should hang on to pictures.
It’s the same with the family jewelry. It’s not that it’s so valuable. It’s just that it is old, handed down from grandmothers to mothers to daughters — and next to my children. Not “The Crown” old or “Mayflower” old, but Galatz and Kirschen family “old,” and I, as the daughter of a gambler, am proud it wasn’t pawned off to pay casino debts.
I recently misplaced a sentimental piece of jewelry. Each day when I dress, I reach for it, and when I don’t feel it, I mourn its loss anew. I am tormented by my carelessness in misplacing it, and also by not knowing where it is.
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This “not knowing” reminds me of a scene from “Harold and Maude,” when Harold gives Maude a ring and she promptly tosses it into a lake. Aghast, he asks why she would do such a thing.
“Now I’ll always know where it is,” she replies.
This notion of jewelry, hidden and lost, comes to mind in connection with a famous collection — the Colmar Treasure. As the Bubonic Plague swept over Europe in 1348, an unknown Jewish family in Colmar, France hid coins and jewelry (including garnet, turquoise and emerald rings) within the walls of their house. The cache was found in 1863 by workmen renovating a confectionary shop.
To me, these long-hidden pieces truly tell a poignant story — one even gifted historians will never fully discover.
It makes me appreciate how even the objects I own hide their stories from me. For example, my mother’s beautiful engagement ring. How did my father, an electrician, afford it? When did he buy it? They married as teenagers, just a few years after the Depression, and struggled for money. When and where did the ring enter the matrimonial picture?
And while it is not something I “own,” I likewise wonder about the expensive tombstone on my father’s mother’s grave? She died when he was 16; the family was very poor. That headstone had to have been added years later, and I suspect it was done by my father and his four brothers. His own father was not a sentimental man and was remarried. I’m not sure he would have been concerned with his dead wife’s headstone at that point.
Most people my age are obsessed with decluttering and downsizing. Me? I’m into labeling and categorizing. I want more shelf space and improved lighting for my displays. Marie Kondo me not! Merry Clutter me more!
And about cigars: When I see one, I think about my father’s passion for Macanudo Prince of Wales cigars — pricy, stinky stogies we kids would buy for him as holiday gifts — and how my mother would banish him to the backyard to smoke.