In this Iteration, I want to talk about things, specifically the things in our lives that take on a particular significance because of what they have come to represent and how difficult it can be when we let them go, either by choice or by circumstance.
A few days ago, Adrianne and I bought a new car and to say that it was a challenge would be a bit of an understatement. To be fair, the actual car selection process wasn’t too bad—especially compared to how long it’s taken me in the past (see Iteration 37). But trading in my 2010 Honda Fit proved to be extraordinarily painful—so much so that I had a bit of a meltdown at the dealership and wound up texting Adrianne from the parking lot telling her that I couldn’t go back in and that I just wanted to go home.
My Fit was a terrific car and I loved it. It was super clean, a blast to drive, got great mileage, and after nearly 14 years, only had about 45,000 miles on it. But more than that, it was the car that brought me to the East Coast, with Adrianne, to a brand new life that has been the best thing I’ve ever done as an adult. And for that, I will always be grateful to our “little car,” as it came to be known. So to trade it in felt in a way like I was abandoning it, and abandonment is something I know all too well. Like I said, I had to walk out of the dealership and I couldn’t go back in. The next day, when the deal was all said and done, our salesman asked whether I needed a minute to say goodbye to the Fit and I absolutely did. I know it’s “just a car” and I know that whoever buys it is going to get a great car that they can love or come to love as much as I do. But it became something more than just a thing to get us from point A to point B—because every time I drove it, I thought about that week of driving across the country with Adrianne, getting to know each other a little more each day until we arrived in DC to begin our new life together.
I’ve had a handful of similar experiences over the years, letting go of objects that have become more than the sum of their parts, but I can’t remember any of them hitting me as hard as saying goodbye to the Fit. I did have a gorgeous Nikon F2, which was a camera that I had wanted since I was in high school, when for a brief moment I thought that I was going to be either a sports photographer or a photojournalist. I ended up going in a different direction and years later, I was talking about it with my mom. We must have been at her store because her friend Roger, who owned the store, chimed in and said he had an F2 with a bunch of accessories that he only used a few times in college and it had been sitting in his closet ever since. I asked whether he would consider selling it and he told me to just come by the house and pick it up. No charge. I had never actually seen one in person before and when I took it out of the case, I was a little overwhelmed by it. The design is definitely a reflection of the times but it’s also timeless, if that makes sense—and this one looked brand new. Roger told me that he only ran about five rolls of film through it while he was an architecture student at USC. After that, he put the whole kit in the closet where it stayed for more than 25 years. I didn’t use it straight away. In fact the first thing I did was to send it in for a CLA and to have the seals replaced. For a few weeks after that, I would just take it out of the case every once in a while and look at it. I thought, given its history, it deserved something more than photos of mundane objects around the neighborhood. Then again, Eggleston made a career out of exactly that, so I started using it. I took it everywhere and used it for several years—I even hiked to the top of Angels Landing in Zion with it hanging around my neck. It was and still is an incredible object, both in design and functionality, but for some reason, I ended up selling it and I can’t even really tell you why. It certainly wasn’t because I needed the money. It didn’t hit me immediately but after a little while, the regret of selling it started gnawing at me and continued for years until I finally found one in similar condition on eBay from a seller in Japan. I bought it immediately and it’s currently sitting behind me on one of my bookshelves next to a YashicaMat 124G, whose origin story I will save for another time. It’s a good one, though. I’ll never sell the F2 again and even though I’ve only used it a few times, just having it back in my life makes me happy both for what it is and for what it represents.
Most objects are just objects—bits of plastic, metal, rubber, maybe even glass—designed to perform a specific task or fulfill a certain need. But sometimes, we imbue those objects with possibility, with memories, with bits of ourselves that can elevate an otherwise simple thing into a something more. In the case of my Honda Fit, it became a memory machine that allowed me to connect to and relive one of the happiest weeks of my adult life every time I drove it—and in saying goodbye to that car, I was worried that the memories that were associated with it would start to fade. Getting a new thing is not unlike making a new friend in that both are opportunities to have new experiences and to make new memories and I don’t know that that’s all life is about, but I think it’s a big part of it.
Thanks so much for reading.
QUESTIONS
Are there objects in your life that are imbued with memories?
Have you ever gotten rid of something and regretted it?
I've very rarely gotten rid of something and regretted it...but that's primarly cause I'm really bad at getting rid of things - even with the ubiquitous internet and the fact it should be reasonably easy to replace any lost item.
I loved my Fit too. Never understood why they weren't more popular in the US.
When my son was entering his teen years and discovered manga and graphic novels, I really regretted having gotten rid of a box that held old Heavy Metal and similarly wide-ranging oddities, as well as a near-complete set (at the time) of the Akira series. Then later ditto for my Magic cards. It's not so much the things that I missed, it was the ability to pull them out and share them - and as well to remember what I felt when I bought those in college. Yeah sure, I could buy any number of collections of Moebius' work, or some of those artists. And I did go back and buy a box set of Gaiman's Sandman series a decade or so ago after missing my originals. But it isn't quite the same, is it?