CharlieBrown

By CharlieBrown

Life in objects / transitional objects (not exactly Teddy)
or ... ‘seeing into the life of things’...

I can’t remember when but at some point I beat the living daylights out of this grater. It was at some point in the dark depths of grief, anger, frustration. Poor grater, it hadn’t done anything to deserve that.
Memory is a funny thing. I remember doing it. I don’t recall the actual trigger. I remember the feeling of impotent rage ... and then the hopelessness and despair.
The net result is that for some years I’ve been living with a mashed grater (which is worse than it looks here but it was impossible to photograph its universally mangled state from just one angle).
So, to add insult to injury, I chucked it out today.
It has been replaced with a very pristine one from mum and dad’s.
It didn’t seem right to chuck it out without recording it.
I’m not quite sure what I’m recording.
Honouring it’s sacrifice? ... a sort of last post for those lost in war ... the collateral damage.
Guilt? It hadn’t done anything to deserve being the punching bag for my emotional outburst so I feel I ought to fess up so that, while it languishes on a landfill somewhere, it’s story is out there in the ether. There will be an acknowledgment of its part not just in all the vegetables and cheese grated and fulfilling its function but in going above and beyond what any grater should have to endure. Where most graters may be passed from parent to child (I resisted the urge to say mother to daughter ... the gender conditioning is strong), down the generations with a family lineage and stories to be told, mine has a darker tale.
Or, maybe just marking its passage. It’s passage through its life, through my life and it’s passage through my grief.

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