Age

What is the oldest thing that you have in your possession? Is it your baby blanket from 50+ years ago? How about your house from 40 years ago? Maybe it is a piece of furniture you inherited and it is easily 100 years old. Sounds old, right?

Time was, age meant something. Now, we are fascinated with the newness of things. A new car every two years, unless we stumble on a vintage car that has been meticulously kept up. A new phone every 2 years and god forbid we fall behind that curve. Do we go out and SEEK old things? Maybe at an antiques store, but we have to hunt.

I blame credit cards.

In the olden days (this) we used to use cash and part of the excitement (for me, at least) was sifting through coins to see what history threw into my pocket. Imagine, a simple transaction and suddenly, I was in unexpected possession of a coin from 1960. Bam, 60 something years old and I was holding it in my hand. I didn't plan for this, but I had a coin that had passed through thousands of hands and was around for all the historic events. I wasn't going to be able to interview it (apparently, we only wish that these walls could talk, but the walls around me are like 10 years old and can't tell a story worth a damn), but it meant something special to me -- I was connected to the past.

I continued to collect coins but mostly by happenstance. More transactions, more coins to look through. More treasures to stumble on. And stumble I did! Then the credit cards came. Cash fell out of favor, and this was made more acute once people could pay with a wave of a phone. So where are the relics of yesteryear that might fall into my lap without warning? I'm not going out there and buying up Twinkies, knowing that one of them is probably a few years old.

No more accidental Wheat Backs. Now I have to go looking.