Pop Culture Mementos

I was going through the bookshelf the other day and I pulled out my old tattered copy of “A Little Princess”. This was one of my favorites as a early reader and a pre-teen. I didn't even have to open the book, just viewing the fraying and torn green cover reminded me both of the story which I LOVED and my memories of reading it. I could remember how old I was was, where I read it and what the weather was like. I remembered how I cried every time, which was sometimes embarrassing if I was reading it in public. I remembered how the first time I read it, I cried so hard that my mother thought that something was very wrong, and how we laughed about it later.

Just gazing at that old book in my hands, I realized, of course, that I could read it again. And learn something new, both about the book and myself. And that is amazing! This piece of pop culture, well-entwined with my memories and my childhood, can still be accessed and consumed and it will be new and different.

And I think it is both the power to contain complex memories that are kind of meta but also to keep creating more complex memories that give pop culture mementos their power. Unlike a piece of sea glass that you pick up to remember a good day at the beach with your family or a rose pressed into a book to remind you of your first Valentine, I can go back to “A Little Princess” and have a very different interaction with the story. I might see things now from a perspective that I could not have envisioned when I read it at 12 years old. I might even fall out of love with it (unlikely), but it always offers another experience, merely with the simple opening of a book or turning of a page.

But I'll never be able to go back to that beach or back to the time before my first kiss. And that piece of sea glass will never give me any more insight on what would happen after that day on that beach. And the rose will crumble into dust, both leaving only memories. But pop culture mementos are portals to both the past and a completely different present. 

- Sis