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A Christmas Memory

By David Feela

I'm not sure I can remember the exact age when owning a horse amounted to a full time thought, but I know when it occurred I spent my days from dawn to dusk thinking about it. I was maybe four, or five, or even six. Right now it doesn't matter, because that horse has been put to pasture for nearly 50 years. I also can't remember why I wanted it so badly, much less what I got out of the experience of having it.

Of course, it wasn't a flesh and blood horse. Some children in movies get those; mine happened to be molded out of plastic. It stood about eight inches high with movable joints and a saddle that could be attached, removed, and reattached by lining up little plastic pegs that conveniently fit into holes located somewhere at the top of the horse's rump. One of the pegs broke soon after I unwrapped the Christmas present. Two of its legs hung limply before a month was up. I'd have shot the horse and put both of us out of our misery, but another month passed before I wanted a toy pistol so badly I couldn't think of anything else.

And that's how things have gone for most of my life, one blinding urge to own something followed closely by an urge to own something else. I've tried to moderate my consumerism by shopping at thrift stores and yard sales, but in the end I guess I'm a useless materialist. The philosophy that less could ever be more sounds good, and I want to believe it, but when applied to me it's ridiculous. I believe that in the end the meek shall inherit the earth, but I suspect it will be only because all the good stuff will have been taken to other planets.

Still, for all the bad press that consumerism generates in America, useless things have their places. I mean, especially in what they make me do to acquire them. These passions to own new things get me up in the morning and off to work. They force me to persist when I'd prefer just giving up. They keep my attention focused on the world around me, the new, the revolutionary. In the end of course, no matter what initially excites me, I always end up being the proud owner of one more useless thing.

For example, one of my addictions is electronics. Atomic clocks, digital weather stations, GPS devices, battery-powered blackjack games, tiny flashlights, talking key rings, the list goes on. Just before the Pod people hit the streets, I thought the mini disc was the next revolution in music technology. What is an MP3 player, after all, if not an expensive solution to a trivial storage problem. Walking around with more songs than a radio station owns makes me think I should have been a disc jockey. I rationalized my first MP3 device purchase, thought, If I owned one, I could get rid of all my CDs, but no, not likely. I haven't tossed out music equipment since the Beatles arrived in America. I even keep cassettes, just in case the CD gets scratched. And now that LPs are deemed "collectible," I found a very nice turntable to replace my crippled model, one I never could have afforded back in the vinyl era. On the plus side, I've given up buying 8-track tapes.

It seems the products these days are being manufactured with an eye toward an early demise. Even the plastic feels cheaper, and plastic is the main ingredient of a useless thing. Other characteristics to help define a product's uselessness include an unusually glossy finish that attracts the eye, a secret compartment for batteries, and a set of instructions that claim to be written in English.

In these days of economic woe, especially during the holiday season, I think that maybe, just maybe, I'm doing something constructive for America. While the auto makers are begging for $34 billion worth of stocking stuffers, and the banks are playing with their Monopoly money as if they could put another hotel on Boardwalk, people like me are facing the crisis and spending a few of their hard earned dollars on hope. Naturally, the manufacturers are providing a new line of useless things: Black boxes to usher in the digital era, gigantic plasma and LCD HDTV, Blue Ray technology to create a completely new layer of stuff that won't work on the machines we already own, and a stock market that goes up and down like a roller coaster. All of it costs much more than a plastic horse, and isn't it crazy?

I still want it.

David Feel writes and writes from Cortez, Colo.