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Copyrights reserved by the author. If you are in doubt, please click on 'Copyrights' and read the details. Obscure objects of our past - do you know where your old fondue set is? By J. G. Fabiano Every home has a big drawer. It may be in the bedroom, the basement or the kitchen. It may even be in the form of a closet or an old dresser of drawers in the garage, but everybody has a place they put stuff for which they have no further use but which they can't bring themselves to throw out. The other day my wife decided to do some winter cleaning, which meant I would be doing some winter cleaning. Since there was three feet of snow on the ground and the outside temperature competed with the remotest reaches of Siberia I thought her timing was good. I was given the job of cleaning out one of the larger drawers in our kitchen. It was like looking into the last 25 years of my life! The first thing I did was pull out six or seven telephone books pushed to the back to the drawer. The books were long out of date but what interested me was the lists of phone numbers written on the back pages, all of them quite important to me at different times in my life. Some of them for friends who had moved on and whom I hadn't seen in decades and I found myself wondering what had happened to them, where they had gone, what they were doing, what they might look like now. There were also phone numbers for pizza parlors, doctors, dentists and even lawyers we had needed in the past, for reasons I could no longer remember. Except for the pizza. Parlors. But past was the key word here and into the large green garbage bag they went. Getting rid of those old phone books was like breaking down a brick wall and discovering a time capsule was buried long ago. I uncovered a pile of stuff I had long since forgotten. I pulled out menus from restaurants that have since been turned into banks or shopping malls. One was from the Spice of Life, a restaurant that once stood where Fleet Bank now stands in York Village. Looking at its menu brought back memories of many a great evening spent there with good food and entertainment. I remember the building as very old but clean and owned and operated by a Greek gentleman whose name I couldn't remember but whose food was very popular with the then small population of York. Other menus were from the many restaurants that tried to survive in the building that sits where Route. 91 meets Route. 1 now occupied by The Mandarin Inn. When I first moved to York there was a restaurant there with an orange roof I believe was called, The Yorkway. What I do remember is that the food was great and it included meatloaf and roast beef dinners. There was also an excellent macaroni and cheese dinner that came in a casserole dish topped with spiced breadcrumbs. My favorite side dish though was the mashed potatoes drowned in real butter. I remembered the food and the prices which were perfect because they fit easily into the budgets of young families like ours literally trying to survive. After pulling out the menus I found old black plastic cassette tapes of music by people I am embarrassed to think I liked back then. Somebody else must have left them there. Or maybe that's why I put them there in the first place. There were also instruction manuals for appliances long since consigned to the landfill. I even found a temperature probe that went with some kind of new fangled cooking device that had long since passed into history. There were cookbooks filled with the latest cooking crazes, like 'The Art of Cooking with Margarine'. There was also an entire book about how to make different kinds of fondue. Remember fondue? Do you know where your fondue set is today? Digging deeper I found seven pairs of scissors, two of which were in perfect working order. I also found a pair of shoe laces still packed in their original wrapping. The plastic on the package had yellowed to the point that I couldn't see the color of the laces. After I opened the package I understood why they were never used. Even 30 years ago I must have thought there were few places I should be seen wearing yellow and pink checked shoe laces. I found an old pocket address book that had the date embossed in faded gold lettering in the bottom right hand corner. It was from the year 1980. After I flipped through the pages I noticed that it was empty. I guess I didn't have much of a social life back in 1980. I found old birthday cards, some received and some from me to other people but never sent. Some of the names were a complete mystery to me. There was even a Christmas card with a picture of a young family who had long since moved away and figuring out the date of the card I realized the baby in the picture would be in her third year of college about now. Some of the items I discovered had long since been compressed into tight little wads at the bottom of the drawer, like old receipts if we were wanted to return something. One was for a toaster oven and another for a knife sharpener that had a lifetime warranty promising to keep all of our knives sharp forever. I guess they must have brought out the lifetime knife sharpener just a few years ahead of knives that never needed sharpening. I still have no clue where the knife sharpener would be. I dug out old batteries that were manufactured before a battery had to have an expiration date, an extension cord that once was white but which had aged into a yellowed wire with a now obsolete two prong head, a bag of dry cleaning cloths that had become chemically bound to their plastic wrapper, felt guards the size of pennies that could never have protected anything, and some round wooden things that must have never had any use because they had been put away new. I then realized I had filled the large plastic garbage bag to its capacity. Looking back at the drawer I was puzzled to see that the bag was at least six times bigger than the drawer. Being a science teacher I wondered if I had just proven the Law of the Conservation of Matter wrong. After throwing away the old telephone cords, some broken Christmas lights and those mysterious round wooden things that there was no apparent use for, the drawer was finally empty and looking at it I realized I was no longer looking at my past. I was looking at my future. A future that would be filled gradually with other unneeded and obscure objects in the coming years that I did not think were necessary but which I could not quite bring myself to throw away. The End
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