The Meaning of an Object

If your house is on fire, and you can grab only a few things to take with you, what would it be?

Assuming all people and pets in your space are fine, what else would you take?

Of course, my purse and laptop. Maybe the basket my grandmother wove in fourth grade that holds a century of family mini rosaries and prayer cards.

I might grab the brass perpetual calendar on my desk.

It's about 75 years old, and sat on the desk in my grandmother’s master bedroom at Stinson Beach, California. Whenever I would come to visit, I would run to her bedroom and see if the date needed to be changed. If it were off a day or two, I would think, How could she have missed two days? It’s not Monday, July 12. It’s Wednesday the 14th!

Rotating those tiny knobs was such a cool activity for a kid that I couldn’t imagine any human being would not want to do that. It was like opening tiny creamers to add into my mother’s coffee. It was a privilege.

My mother and grandmother are long gone, passed away decades ago. But the calendar sits on my desk where I see it every day. Every morning, as I sip my coffee, I turn the knobs to bring it up to date.

I think about its travels from the Bay Area to where it is now. I like to imagine the moving trucks that the calendar has lived in, following my grandmother from her house on the Pacific Ocean north to the wine country, and later across the country on I-80 on a giant truck to my parents’ house. Now, 20 years later, it’s at my home.

Jung believed that objects can connect us to the numinosum, to that quality that causes consciousness to be altered. Symbols can connect us to the divine, to something larger than ourselves.

This calendar is my connection to eternalness, to the generations that came before who gave me my DNA.

On a trip to North Carolina this week, I was at the airport waiting to depart when I heard the brushing of wings and desperate chirping overhead. As a bird flew down the hall over our heads, I thought, I have seen this before. Birds stuck in air terminals. How ironic. Beings of flight in a place of flight.

What do these birds eat? Do they run out of food? Do airport workers ever try to trap and release them?

It turns out that like us, birds sometimes choose to be in an airport terminal. They learn how long automatic doors will be open and dart inside when there’s an opportunity. They scrounge near food courts and trash cans for food.

Like us, birds too can touch the possibility of being transported somewhere else. They see us humans with our roller bags and carry-ons. They come and go. They, too watch days pass. They have their own perpetual calendar of the setting sun.