It's Cyber Monday: Time to buy stuff online. Twenty years later the same item you buy today will be highly sought after by your grown up children or grandchildren—in a worthwhile attempt to relive priceless childhood memories. That's the ephemera business cycle.
If you're lucky, you have lots of stuff from childhood that triggers warm, happy thoughts.
If you're a parent or grandparent, today's the day to seek out that game or toy that'll be the "thing" that triggers a sweaty eBay search twenty or thirty years hence. It doesn't have to be high-tech or expensive to have an impact. I remember playing the very-low budget card matching game, Memory
, with my grandmother. Memory (also known as Concentration) was a card-centric game in which all of the cards are laid face down on a surface and two cards are flipped face up over each turn. The object of the game is to turn over pairs of matching cards. I loved playing Concentration. And, lo and behold, it actually improved my memory and concentration skills. I learned something, by gosh. And, best of all, it brought me closer to my grandmother. I'd love to "buy back" that game—to bring back memories of my grandmother and those filmy, Kodachrome, watercolor days of the mid-70s.
If you're in the Cyber buying spirit, please click through one of the links on this blog to eBay
or Amazon
. I get a nano-fraction of the action, which helps sustain this blog through the year.
Photography by Erik Mallinson.
