A telephone booth may well be the most recent obsolete item of our modern age. You don’t have be all that old to remember the fad of seeing how many people you could stuff in a phone booth, let alone identifying with Clark Kent’s iconic changing station or thriller movies in which the bad guy makes contact via pay phone. In an age where smart phones are the norm, there’s not much point to phone booths taking up room on the sidewalk. But it can be hard to see them go.
What nostalgic, unnecessary thing do you love?
Stationery. I’m not writing nearly the amount of letters I used to, but I still acquire so much stationery.
E-mailing resumes is convenient, but I miss sending out resumes on fine paper with a certain heft, and a high rag content so it that was nearly cloth.
I was shocked and dismayed when I heard that my cousin (ten years younger than me, went to the same college) didn’t know what resume paper was. I felt like I was watching a beautiful custom die.
I also appreciate VHS tapes, mostly because I bought them before DVDs entirely took over, and because I can buy them cheaply at thrift stores ($1 VHS or $5 DVD for the same movie). At the library, DVDs are more likely to be damaged (careless inconsiderate people scratch them up, sometimes until they are unusable) than VHS tapes.
But I don’t have any nostalgia for cassette tapes or vinyl records. I don’t miss rewinding and fast forwarding cassettes and not being able to get directly to the track I want. I also don’t miss the tangled mess when one comes unraveled. I don’t understand the appeal of vinyl to the vinyl fetishists of the new generation–it’s a clunky, inconvenient medium. It’s someone else’s nostalgic, unnecessary thing to love.
The oldest, still useful item that I hold dear is a small cracked stained red tea pot that was given to me by her huisband after the death of his wife, Janey, who was my dear housemate friend for years. she worked for the old Braniff Airlines in Kansas City and she and I enjoyed sharing a big rental house with other women and were a foursome who called ourselves “the Four Fearless Forgers” when we took a vacation to Mexico in March of 1940. Later, after her recent marriage, she was traveling by plane to meet him in Iowa and we heard the relayed message that the plane had crashed and she was killed. The red teapot carries all of these memories and more of Janey. I still use the little pot for morning tea. As I write this, the sadness overwhelms me again.