Replying to: What is the oldest thing you own?
I saw this post as I was catching up on my feed and I thought I’d chime in. I am tempted to get all snarky and start by poking at what “oldest,” “thing,” and “own” mean. There proably is a good essay to be written on that theme, but in the interest of getting this post out the door, I will bite my tongue. For the same reason, I am also not going to take this to literally; i.e. I am not going to catalog everything I have to find the strictly oldest item.
It’s a typewriter :
This dates to the late 1940s. So, while it is older than me, it is not old in the grand scheme of things. It’s existence thus far fits in a single human lifetime.
What I admire about it is that it still works—it still lives. It needed a little cleaning when I took it home from the antique shop I got it from, but nothing much. And now it works just as well as when it was new. I did not write this post on it, but I could have (I have, alas, too many writing instruments to give them all as much use as I would like). With some good care, it will outlast me.
That’s satisfying. It’s solid in a way that you don’t see very often in modern appliances.