I Know What

I have inherited a lot of things that if the previous owners knew, they’d be rolling over in their graves to think what parts of them have survived. Some of the things I can identify, because they are labeled with a name, in their little boxes or envelopes, crinkled and smelly from age. A lot of things have a name or even handwriting I can place to a relative. I can do that detective work even if that relative is somebody I never met or who was gone before I was born. You see, my family was extremely respectful of others and that meant honoring their memories. Very religious, very morbid, very clingy no matter who it was. I have inherited some of that need to respect, honor, remember, and cling. My mother taught me most of what I know, and I’d give anything not to have thousands of snippets of names and places, longing for a past that was so brief yet so important.

It is a real curse having to deal with all those words like little cabbage moths flitting around in your head, I can tell you, because you walk around with the years of others hovering around your shoulders, worming their way into your brain, while you are trying so hard to get rid of things that mean nothing to no one else in the whole wide world. Still, you give them safe harbor in your garage or basement, you, who inherited them but cannot know what they really meant. Nobody ever left you any money, but they didn’t skimp on the space-eaters. (I don’t know how much longer I can stand this burden, to be honest.)

It’s true that I prefer history to be told by small objects, fragments of clothing, old greeting cards... not to mention the letters nobody ever writes nowadays. Or the journals with shameful secrets, written and tossed into boxes that are never opened again. Or the newspaper clippings from insignificant events (most events do become insignificant as the years go by, you know) that somebody wanted to keep track of. What do ticket stubs from the movies really mean? Why are they so hard to dispose of? 

Monuments, lurking buildings, huge statues, famous persons’ homes - in my experience, none of these mean as much as a ball of crochet thread with the intricate crocheting, fine thread, and the slender metal hook laid together. It’s as if the user had grown weary or become too ill to work. Perhaps her eyesight was no longer good enough to work with the slender fiber. Other times you find notes that had been dashed off and left on dining room tables to let somebody else in the family know where the writer sof the notes had gone (I know, cell phones and texts are all we need now). Old license tags for a family dog are another way of documenting the past and proof of their effectiveness is how nine times out of ten the one who discovers a tag will burst into tears. Rationing cards from the Great Depression are more generic, but then you realize that at certain times in history things were pretty darn tough. Then you discover next to the cards lies a membership card to the KKK and you are appalled. You know whose it was because it is signed by the member. You hate knowing that about her and wish you could remind her that’s not very Christian, but it’s far too late for that. Still, that KKK thing is definitely TMI.

Despite all the things that were discarded from my mother’s house, the huge dumpster full of items it just tore me apart to see thrown in the garbage, I still have a few boxes of objects here in Maine that will probably not see the inside of a trash can in my lifetime. Just recently I fished into one of those boxes and pulled out some old, dingy, fragile fabric. It might not even be strong enough to hold up to a needle and thread, it’s so old. There’s a piece of cardboard with it, where my grandmother wrote her name in pencil and a few other words like ‘pieces of’. Pieces of what? I am pretty convinced they were pieces cut for a quilt, but the amount wouldn’t make up into anything larger than a small table runner. So are they quilt leftovers or starters? If I want to use them, do I need to ask permission? If I wash them and sew them together because I quilt too, am I failing to honor the original owner’s plans? Am I destroying an artifact? Will everything wilt or melt into a mush of cotton fibers that are decades past their prime?

Am I mad? You must think I am. Who else can stare at musty fabric, faded and wrinkled, and agonize over the answers to these questions and others that are even odder? Am I capable of sitting and talking with the pieces of gingham and seersucker, flannel and muslin, trying to coax their stories from them? Why did I bother to bring these scraps of life over six hundred miles and trek them to two residences? I think I will not answer that question. (You know, I really might be mad.) Now that you know, you might take pity on me, help an old girl out. Here goes.

The cache of fabric I found yesterday has the piece of cardboard (inscribed), a thimble, and a metal object that is driving me mad(der). Don’t laugh. I’ll describe it and you’ll see what I mean. The type of metal isn’t clear to me, but it shows no signs of rusting or peeling. It’s silver-colored, maybe it’s nickel-plated, but anybody I might take it to for analysis would laugh at me. I know it’s nothing valuable, because nobody in my family ever had anything that was worth a lot, and I mean that goes all the way back, back to when everybody came to this country, and there were a pack of them who did that. We do assume that a small collection of material, possibly for a quilt, and barely as big as a cigar box, would belong to a woman. Maybe it was my grandmother, but maybe her mother, who lived in the same place at the end of her life. Great grandma was one of the people who passed on before I arrived, but oh, I heard about her. I knew her name, her nickname, her children’s names, everything. The thimble indicates the owner planned to work on it, perhaps. I know my family had members who were seamstresses, all of them women, of course. Women used needles to write their stories. Men, not so much.

So what is the meaning of this piece of metal in the midst of the wadded up scraps? It’s about an inch and a half wide (or tall) and, say, 5/8 of an inch wide at its widest point. Held one way it resembles a tulip on a stem. Behind the tulip part is a part made of two straight pieces of metal, next to each other. There is no sharp point. From this double bar that can’t be more than a quarter inch wide, a chain is suspended. To make that clearer: a chain is attached at either end of the bar and if I let it hang down, it forms a semicircle about 3/4 of an inch at its widest part. Note that for this to happen, the so-called tulip needs to be horizontal. I hope this all makes sense. I’ve done my best to give you a clear description.

Actually, it doesn’t. Make sense. I worried a little that the tulip petal area had once had a stone set in it that had been lost, and thought how sad, but there was no stone loose among the fabric, plus nothing seemed to have been glued to the metal at any point. This strange object is in pristine condition, I can guarantee that.

Being confused, I took the metal item to a young person and asked her what she thought it was. She suggested a money clip, but I’m not certain she really looked at it closely. She didn’t seem too concerned about knowing what it was, anyway, but I’m used to being considered odd. I moved on to another person, also young but male, and asked him. He surmised it was a hair clip, showing he’d never given much thought to the mechanics of hair clips. He also should have looked more closely instead of simply tossing out an idea, don’t you think?

Now I feel the obligation to chime in with my theory. I am leaning toward a tie clasp, but can’t begin to think how it would actually be used with a tie. The little half circle hanging down might be too small for a tie to be inserted unless it happened to be a thin tie and I don’t know how tie widths have been through history. Suddenly, the word ‘ascot’ comes to mind, and I wonder if those were worn with clips. Were they only women’s apparel? No, not if memory serves. 

I am really struggling with this, you know, and hate to throw a photo out on the internet asking if anybody can identify it. That’s casting a pretty broad net for a little piece of metal. I’m not giving up, though.

An obvious point here is why not just toss this item, or any item, that no longer has an owner and has no known use? The Earth will not stop turning on its axis if I do that, but I can’t. Throwing it into the trash would burn a hole in the garbage bag. It would burn a hole in my brain, too. I would know I was disrespecting somebody, like when you walk over somebody’s grave, and that’s enough to keep it. However, anything I keep needs to have an identification and a use… or so I tell myself.

Now we are in the next-to-last-stage of interacting with this small piece of non-precious metal that looks like a tulip with a bar behind it and a bit of chain. The task now is to find a way to use this item.

It doesn’t have a clip action, so it won’t hold money unless you have a wad of bills and double them over. It’s also slippery, so the bills would slide out. Nix that idea.

It’s not very decorative, so wouldn’t really work to adorn a women’s dress or jacket. If it were slipped over the top of a pocket, the tulip part would be upside-down, too. Not impressive. Maybe, though, it could be slide in the front of a shirt or blouse, with the tulip going sideways. That would work if you have very thick material to slide it onto and if you don’t care that the little chain is completely covered up. The tulip-y end would still be misplaced, not standing up.

Perhaps it’s worth taking a closer look at what I’ve so far been calling a tulip. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not fickle, but it’s possible the straight part that opens into an egg-shaped head with a little dollop on the end, well, it might be a candle with a flame. Or a crocus. Or one could turn the bulging tulip part downward and you get what resembles a kind of a big drop dripping off something. Or the bushy tail of a fox, narrow at both ends and wide in the middle. Plus, there is always the egg interpretation, and some will prefer that.

I put a finger through the semicircle of the chain and found I could just about use this metal thing as a ring. However, the thing’s span runs nearly two inches parallel to my knuckles and makes mobility of three fingers a challenge. Yes, it’s too clunky for that. 

There’s the option of hanging the piece on a keychain, but if it means answering ‘What’s that?’ All the time, no thanks. How embarrassing. Keychains are supposed to have meaning. The shape is awkward, so it’s not a candidate for a necklace either, in my opinion. (I’m running out of ideas.)

A bolder application might be to put this metal object in an artist’s book, as a closure for the cover. It’s one I particularly like, but engineering the device to actually make the book open and close properly - that’s a huge challenge. An assembly artist would definitely put this shaped metal piece to work, but it’s risky with assembly art: If not done well, the assembled fragments lose their individual character and just ooze into one another. This little item deserves more prominence. (Yes, even though it is plain, it IS of historical value. I’m thinking it could be seventy years old. Not something to be just tacked or screwed or glued onto something else.)

You are probably weary of hearing me ruminate about what this object is (and probably dozed off hearing me muse about my grandmother and great grandmother). If so, you could at least make an effort to help me before I really go stark, raving mad, it would be greatly appreciated. I know what! If you like, I can provide you with my address so you can write to me. Nobody ever writes letters any more and it would be greatly appreciated. All the letters I have are close to fifty years old or more, and new ones might cheer me up.