Take a look at this ashtray.
It is a relic to be sure, an advertisement from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines dating by my guess from some time in the 1950s. It is made of utterly clear and transparent glass and it weighs fourteen ounces, almost one pound. If it were to drop on your toe, it might actually inflict some harm.
I think it got into our house as one of the many incidental estate items from my late in-laws. My wife's uncle had been a corporate attorney who sometimes traveled overseas and who also smoked.
In those days, one cigarette company asked why doctors chose to smoke their particular brand, another wrote about cigarettes that would soothe one's "comfort zone" and so on. There was an elegance and panache associated with killing yourself in the use of their products.
Getting back to KLM, in those days, travel by air was something different than it is today and this souvenir ashtray is a reminder of that.
Back then, if you were going someplace by air, you were expected to dress nicely for the occasion. Gentlemen would be expected to wear a jacket and tie. Trans World Airlines (TWA) put out ads showing a glamorous woman standing on the tarmac in front of a Lockheed Constellation three-rudder airplane while surrounded by a set of elegantly matching luggage. Additionally, your loved ones could accompany you right up to the passenger gate for one last goodbye hug before you would board.
That was the world in which substantial artifacts like this ashtray were given out but it was NOT, as some would claim, a simpler world than we have today.
Back then, there was the "red scare" courtesy of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, there was the "missile gap", there was the advent of the hydrogen bomb, there was the Suez Canal crisis, there was shelling of the islands of Quemoy and Matsu, there was Sputnik, there was the payola scandal, there was the "mad bomber" George Metesky and so on. In those days there was plenty of worrisome complexity and finding this ashtray brought it all back.
Still, for all of the c__p that has gone away and been replaced by new c__p, something of value has also been lost, something that has not been replaced.
Maybe it's time to pause and think about that for a little while.