Microwunderkammer

 Parental artifact #2 in a series—a 1 quart Thermos flask.

Sometimes, an inherited thing is just a thing. Most of the stuff that has just arrived in my house is encumbered by the weight of memory and sentiment to one degree or another. This Thermos flask, however, carries no obligation to be a symbol of my parents. It is itself.

I know it has quite a history. Some of that history is literally etched into it; on the bottom, scratched with a laboratory diamond pen used to mark glassware, my dad wrote “GOOD”. Thermos bottles break or get compromised, and they were an expensive thing for a grad student, so probably there was another one labeled “BAD” or the like, that is no longer with us. Some of this flask’s history is also found in the archives. I’ve seen pictures of my parents as a young couple, on excursions with the UC Hiking Club or friends, with that Thermos on the picnic table or at the beach or in the mountains.

However, almost none of this Thermos’ history lies in my personal experience. I knew it existed, but it stayed far up and away in the back of the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet—well out of the reach of the curious and nosy youngest son. I have very dim memories of it on early camping trips, and then…no more. For whatever reason, it just didn’t get used any more…even though it was still “GOOD.”

When my brothers and I were divvying up stuff in the kitchen, taking turns choosing this or that item, I opted for this flask and another Thermos, a nice carafe, similarly underused. It was an easy choice. Neither of my brothers likes hot beverages at all and neither had any sentimental attachments to them, so they went to me.

I drink a lot of tea. At home, the carafe gets used regularly because it keeps a full pot of tea nice and hot for half a day’s sipping. On the road, the large Thermos is good for a couple hundred miles of driving. It has seen a lot of good use. I have had to drive to LA and back to deal with my parents’ estate a few times, each day of the two-day drive is a big Thermos and two travel mugs of tea. I also drive all over Oregon on farm business; the drive to Salem for the Oregon State Fair last week was the big Thermos and a travel mug (with enough leftover to see me through unpacking). This Thermos is just a Thermos, a device for making the day slightly more tolerable and keeping my theic self from suffering the DT’s.

It would be easy for me to retroactively add a lot of sentiment to it; indeed, it would be pleasurable to do so, making the object all the more valuable and cherished, and making its every use more significant. I could happily invent the memory that it was tea from this Thermos, poured for me by my dad on a cold and sodden morning while camping, that led to my three-pot-a-day habit. But, that was not the case. My parents’ tea tastes tended towards Lipton, which is like homeopathic dishrag rinsings. But one time, while I was in graduate school, I was visiting home and my mom was sipping some quality lichee-scented black tea that she had been given. I was tired, it smelled compelling, I tried some, and I was pretty well hooked. I started with that, then Earl Grey, then Yunan, and now I have a tea drawer stocked with eight black teas and a few oolongs and greens and other stuff. That’s how I got hooked on tea, and it was my mom’s doing, but the Thermos was not involved.

I could also easily dream that this thermos is an emblem of our family camping trips. It’s in photos of my parents camping before my brothers and I were on the scene. So, why should it not have been there every winter when we would spend a week in Anza-Borrego State Park, or every summer jaunt in the Sierras or Redwoods, or each weekend hike in the Santa Monicas? It could have been an integral part of my family’s trips, which were so important in our life together. It would be with the Coleman stove, the lantern, the lineman’s knife and canteen cup and trenching tool from my dad’s army days— all of these were on every trip, and are now heavily laden with sentiment. However, this thermos was not there.

So, this thermos is just a thermos. It’s a very nice one, to be sure. It reminds me of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “One-Hoss Shay,” so well built it lasts a hundred years and outlives generations of owners. It’s most of the way there. Its vacuum has held for at least sixty years, and the tea I fill it with in Roseburg is still piping hot in Redding. Even though it doesn’t poke at my heart and and remind me of my parents, its quality and reliability is enough for me to give it some love. And, as I drive all over the country with it riding shotgun and pouring tea, it will slowly and inevitably develop a patina of memory and sentiment. Those memories will be mine. As for the thermos? It will still say on its bottom what it is: GOOD.