Breakage
We had one of those lunches last week where right after the first glass fell and broke, a bowl cracked. And for breakfast, I had dropped one of the mugs we’d gotten from a penniless friend for our wedding 24 years ago.
The glass that broke at lunch had been one of our “good” ones, a cheap blue tumbler that we use pretty much only on the sabbath. My wife picked up a couple of replacements today. They’re blue and tumbler-shaped, but no one is going to confuse them with the originals.
I found this depressing. I am not sentimental about glasses. I didn’t even care hardly at all about the wedding gift breaking. It’s just stuff. (Yeah, well, try saying that about my computer.) What bothers me about the replacements is that they’re plastic. And it bothers me not for environmental reasons.
I’m 52. We’re still re-using cheap plastic cups our children got at kiddie events over 15 years ago, the sort of cup movie theaters use for their $4.00 small size soda. Occasionally one of them cracks. But we have a shelf of far more substantial Disney character cups brought back from Disney on Ice® and Disney on Parade® and Disney on Crack® and Disney Owns Your Freakin’ Ideas® that show fewer signs of age than I do. When my time comes, I will be handing them down to my children, along with my coffee can of miscellaneous screws and the Cuban cigar hidden in my closet that is now twelve years too old to smoke. (The Cuban cigar is legal because I only intended to burn it as an anti-Castro protest.)
So, if we get good quality plastic glasses, I am going to be drinking from them for the rest of my days. I don’t like them enough for that. I like the idea of them even less. I don’t want to be outfitted for life. Because I’m a middle class American, I like shopping, I like novelty, I like assuming that in five years — if I have another five years, if we have another five years — my stuff will be different and better. I don’t want to buy a new suit that’s so durable that as it’s being fitted I’m thinking, “Yup, this is definitely the suit I’m going to be buried in.”
I’m not saying any of this is rational or justifiable. I’m just saying it is.
