Leaning low, iPhone flashlight app lit, I step calculatingly into the crawl space off the study and grab the cardboard box and drag it out, almost in one continuous movement ---lunge forward; lunge back.
Black serpentine electrical cords are motionlessly writhing in the dust-covered box. Their existence is meaningless, separated from the parent machine they were created to power.
There’s a cream-colored cord almost dazzling in the black muck. It’s attached to an u-shaped hard plastic stand with tiny pillar in middle. A base and cord for an electric toothbrush. Did you know that the first electric toothbrush was invented in 1927? It didn’t get mass-marketed till the late 1950s? No, neither did I.
Memory is a fractured yet nimble process and the retrieval of encoded memory is a writer’s dusty box. And so it is with a disjointed memory of a summer in Northern Michigan when I was 21. It was my first visit to a dentist. In twenty years in India, I never had been to a dentist and had no cavities. I was beginning to think of myself as a superhero. Then that summer, living in a two-room apartment in the cheap side of town, playing Frisbee on deserted streets with a few friends, while my girlfriend worked at one of the fancy clothing stores that catered to the summer folk who lived in gated communities along Lake Michigan, I got an embedded wisdom tooth that needed extraction. That’s when I encountered the electric toothbrush.
It was a first sighting for me. An emblem of the first world. Since then I’ve read that the first mass-marketed versions in the US were for people with limited motor-skills! What was unique once was in the junkpile now.
Memories are sorted into junkpiles too. But that doesn’t mean that they are useless. Electric toothbrush charger, a clear-blue summer in Petoskey, my girlfriend then, who is a grandmother of two today, and me with shoulder-length hair with a handmade braided headband, and round granny glasses, are memories worth diving for into the musty crawl space.
Create your profile
Only paid subscribers can comment on this post
Check your email
For your security, we need to re-authenticate you.
Click the link we sent to , or click here to sign in.