This isn’t going to be a long post, but it’s a bit of an offbeat one.

Red Skelton said, “If you have a talent, that’s God’s gift to you. If you use that talent, that’s your gift to God.” Apparently God gave me the talent to write about anything. So my gift to God is…writing about everything.

I say this because my latest article, in The Bulwark, is about electric heaters. The feel of the heat they produce, the old-fashioned smell of an electric radiator, the intense, quiet orange glow of an electric element, and other thoughts about nostalgia, memory, and consumer products.

Thinking of a big, heavy metal electric radiator my parents had, I wrote:

I couldn’t describe that smell, exactly, but it signaled the dark cold of winter, and its partial alleviation, every bit as much as a lit-up Christmas tree. Rolling in the heavy, oil-filled electric radiator—what kind of oil was it?—was a little seasonal ritual for me. The smell was a little like the inside of vintage electronics—the kind of thing that brings to mind both the real solidity of those products themselves, and even a certain imagined stability of the society that produced them. It was, like Proust’s madeleines, the smell of nostalgia.

That radiator is still in their house, with a broken thermostat. And so I also wrote about keeping old products around, which are theoretically repairable but may not worth the trouble:

Our household is only four years old, and we already have a dehumidifier with a bad fan and a dead humidifier with stripped, rusted internal screws. I fully intend to fix them one day. They’re cheap and lightweight, but they aren’t junk. A certain amount of what we consider to be the junkiness of products is really our own throwaway ethic, which itself is bound up with the low cost of replacing these products and the value we put on the time we would have to spend repairing them.

Question for the room. I’m curious what old products do this for you—inspire strong memories (pleasant ones!), that make you wonder who designed and made them, that maybe even make you wonder whether it was a better society that was able to make them. I don’t necessarily think that, but it’s something that crosses my mind occasionally. The solidity and craftsmanship of some old stuff is sometimes astounding, and its tempting to think that it’s some kind of reflection of the character of the people who made it.

On the other hand, it’s all just mass-produced stuff.

The most-clicked link, of the 10 I included in my end-of-year roundup post, was this one, titled “Mechanical Romance,” in which I compared watching an old Japanese cassette player to attending church. I guess I keep coming back to the fact that manufactured products can take on so much meaning.

Is this weird? Do you have one yourself? Leave a comment!

Social card image credit Michael Pieracci/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Related Reading:

Cassette Tapes and Madeleines

Why are Airbnbs so Comfy?

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