Not long ago, as I was doing the dishes, I found myself scrubbing a copper-bottomed Revere Ware saucepan. I’ve washed that pan dozens of times without incident, but that day, that pan reminded me that when I was growing up, my mother had a set of the very same copper-bottomed pots and pans. Transported back in time, I spent several happy moments remembering the meals my mother prepared for my family back in the day.
Thinking about my mother’s Revere Ware inspired more memories attached to everyday objects in our kitchen: The pots and pans my mother bought me at the Sears in Pawtucket, R.I., for my apartment in graduate school, the cast-iron pressure cooker we inherited from my grandmother and the gold-tinted silverware I filched from a former housemate more than 40 years ago.
As is my standard practice, as soon as I finished the dishes, I wrote a Facebook post. My goal was to encourage people to think about the seemingly ordinary memory-bearing objects they might have in their homes and to experience the joy I felt when I was up to my elbows in soap suds.
Over the years I’ve gotten to be pretty good at predicting the responses to my Facebook posts. A photo always helps, and a photo plus a personal story often yields lots of blue thumbs and red hearts. Even so, I was bowled over by the outpouring of substantive responses to my Revere Ware post.
The first was from a local friend who said “I totally get this.” Another New Hampshire friend told me that she uses her Revere Ware every day, while a third told me that she still uses her mother’s set.
Indeed, the comment section of my post quickly filled up with multi-generational Revere Ware stories. A high-school friend told me that she remembered her mother’s Revere Ware, and five college friends contributed their own Revere Ware stories. A fraternity brother with whom I worked on the college newspaper said: “My mother had that set too!!!” He and I ran on parallel tracks in college, so I was thrilled to learn that we had something else in common.
A friend I met through her sister, a Sweet Briar student with whom I did archaeology, told me that she had received a full set of Revere Ware from her father as a wedding present. I happened to know that her father had passed away shortly before I put up my post, and I was pleased to have inspired a happy memory of her father, a wonderful man who I had the good fortune of knowing.
Another fraternity brother reported that he had inherited his grandmother’s Revere Ware which he later parceled out to his own children.
Perhaps the best multi-generational story came from yet another fraternity brother. He wrote about sharing an apartment with a mutual friend of ours whose mother sent him off to college with some Revere Ware. Those pots and pans hung on hooks in the kitchen, and the friend who responded to my post reported that when anyone in the apartment used a piece of Revere Ware, he was required to polish its copper bottom as soon as he was finished with it, per the instructions of the mother who had sent her son to college with such fine cookware.
I never know exactly what to expect when I put something on Facebook, but I was particularly tickled by the responses to my Revere Ware post.
For one thing, the post did exactly what I had hoped it would do. When I publish something — in print or electronically — I want to inspire people to feel something, to think something or to do something. With my Revere Ware post, I hoped to encourage people to have the same experience I had at my kitchen sink, recalling happy food-related family memories. And that’s just what happened.
As an offshoot from my primary mission, I hoped to help people find meaning and joy in the everyday objects that surround them, whatever those objects may be. It is easy to forget that utilitarian objects can be about more than what they are used for; they can sometimes be a key to unlocking memories.
Finally, the responses to my post demonstrated something that Facebook can be really good at. I never would have guessed, but was charmed to learn, that so many of my friends also have fond memories associated with the same simple saucepan. It always lifts my spirits to discover things I share with the people who are important to me.