Material culture. The totality of physical objects made by a people for the satisfaction of their needs. (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
I've always loved old stuff. At least from the age of eight, when I found the aspirin tin in the backyard.
Digging with a stick—as a child does—I struck something hard that wasn’t a rock. When I levered it out of the dirt, I saw it was a tin. Very small, rusted shut, but with some printing still intact. An energetic finger and some spit released the powerful spell emblazoned on the lid. St. Joseph’s Aspirin 10ȼ.
I don’t know whose yard ours was, or what old house stood on the lot, before my Dad built the post-War modernist domicile where he, Mom, my sister, and an English Springer Spaniel named Duchess lived. But there'd been houses in that neighborhood since WWI. In 1918, or 1922, or 1936, someone walked to the turn-of-the-century pharmacy four blocks away, and put their silver dime on the marble counter to buy a tin of aspirin. For a headache. Or a sprained wrist. Or a sore back.
The hurting shopper and the tin came home, to my street and my block and to some house standing where my house later stood. Aches and pains ate up all the aspirins, over time, and the tin ended up in the garden.
I could prove all that, even at age eight. I had the evidence. The tiniest, tinniest, bit of Jazz Age material culture, in my grubby eight-year-old hand.
The aspirin tin went into the Box of Very Important Things I kept under my bed. Now and then, I took it out. Images and stories and smells and secrets sparked from it for years.
Those years and more passed. The old tin and I parted ways, but I never lost the sensual joy of the here and now touching the there and then. I have no idea where St. Joseph’s Aspirin 10ȼ traveled in the years after it left me. For all I know, it may be back in the garden, the one on Branch Avenue or some other. Waiting, silent and still, full of sparking stories, for another young writer to find it.