I smoked my pipe and started on Robinson Crusoe. Less than five minutes have passed since I started reading this extraordinary book, and already stumbled upon a reassuring place: "Today we love what we will hate tomorrow."
History and documents. More often it usually happens that today we love what we hated in the past or what (this happens more often) treated with complete indifference. Here, for example, our past … Well, who then with joy and delight in his soul looked at the old grandmother's chests, if, of course, he had them? On turned wooden boxes covered with scorched patterns and drawings, on homemade boxes glued or sewn from greeting cards …
We treated this with complete indifference. We were sure that there, ahead, in the future, we would not need this rubbish, this old thing, because we hoped that everything would be new and completely different.
So, remembering my childhood, I can say that we had several chests, chests and caskets of the most ancient type in our house, and then a few more "historical caskets" were added to them, which I already acquired with my wife and which today are already pretend to be museum pieces.
One of the chests belonged to our relative, who lived behind the wall, in the second half of the house - Uncle Volodya. He was my grandfather's brother and a very aristocratic-looking person. He died in 1961, and we got his half of the house, and with it his furniture, wardrobes and chests. And then it turned out that he was a hoarder! We found a lot of packages, parcels and boxes, as well as packs of notebooks on which the year of their purchase was written. For example, there were notebooks from 1929, pencils from 1937 and coffee beans from 1949! Buttons from the uniforms of teachers, judges, police officers of the Russian Empire, a chain of judicial officials and even a chain of the leader of the nobility. A whole box! Another box with matches! And he kept all this until his death, and there was a lot of this.
He provided me with notebooks for all ten classes, although at school I was scolded for the fact that they were “not like everyone else's”, but with yellow pages, even if very beautiful: with portraits of Russian poets and writers, with their poems and excerpts from works on the back cover page.
The chest contained cuts of a beaver (the fabric is like that), twill, satin, gabardine, and even an excellent American Lendleut tarpaulin - then they sewed jeans from it for archaeological excavations.
I saw the second chest of the same kind in the next house, at my street friends - Sashka and Zhenya Mulin. Their grandmother slept on it, which surprised me very much, although my grandmother slept on the sofa in the hall. Only the death of Uncle Volodya gave us additional living space, and my grandmother, in her old age, found a real bed.
In addition to such large containers, there were a lot of smaller containers in all the houses of that time. I mean carved wooden boxes. Often round, turned on lathes. For some reason they were in the poorest houses. Apparently, people have always strived for the beauty of life and, of course, they found it. They usually held buttons, and almost everyone had them.
In our house, however, there were more beautiful things. But it was the merit of the Chinese and my mother. She loved beautiful things, always dressed brightly and catchy, which is not surprising for a single woman with a child. And she also loved to buy all sorts of beautiful trinkets. Well, the Chinese just in the 50s began to supply us in the USSR with excellent painted basins, very beautiful porcelain dishes, soft terry towels and lacquer boxes inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl. Then, in cinemas, Chinese films were often shown, and filmstrips about military heroes of the fraternal Chinese people were on sale for children. The name of one is especially engraved in my memory. It was called "The heroine of the Chinese people Liu Hu-lan", and it ended with the damned Chiang Kai-shek people sawing her with a saw. In the children's tape, this, of course, was not shown, but next to her there were goats for firewood and a saw lay, so I guessed what awaited her immediately, since I had been dealing with saws, goats and firewood in a private house from the earliest childhood … The most amazing thing is that this rarity filmstrip can be bought on the Internet today. Be that as it may, one such box, and even with a painting, my mother bought for her jewelry. And she kept them there, and I periodically asked permission to open it and see them. Everything that lay there seemed to me something magical and amazingly beautiful.
And then came 1967. A six-day Arab-Israeli war began, and the Arabs needed weapons, in exchange for which they began to supply our country with leather boxes painted with fake gold. And my mother immediately bought one and gave it to me on my 14th birthday so that I could keep my documents there. Surprisingly, she has survived to this day, although her constipation has broken, and she is a little worn out.
There were no fireplaces in our private houses then, but there were chests of drawers on which various trinkets were laid out, among which a beautiful seashell was almost an obligatory attribute. Some were inherited, so these are “ancient” souvenirs, many are over 100 years old!
Actually, this brand, "Cornavin", is Swiss, but they were not bought in Switzerland at all. And it so happened that my mother taught me the history of the CPSU at the factory-technical college, a branch of our "polytechnic", located just next to the Penza watch factory. Naturally, she was constantly invited there to lecture on relevant topics, and she read them well. And somehow, in gratitude for her good work, she was invited to the factory party committee and presented with this watch. And they said that the Communist Party of one country (it seems, Greece) needs to be helped, but it is impossible to transfer money directly to them. Therefore, they did this: they bought cases in Switzerland, they inserted our mechanisms into them (!) And sold them to a company opened by the Communist Party of this country. And, of course, they sold it almost at cost, so that all the profits from sales would go to the "world revolution".
Brooch with a bluish transparent stone and necklace. Mom always said that this is a "moonstone", an inexpensive, but still semi-precious, ornamental stone. When I read Wilkie Collins' novel "The Moonstone", for some reason I always imagined it to myself that way, although in the novel it was a yellow diamond. But I got a brooch made of bone from my grandmother. She is also over 100 years old: she inherited her grandmother from her mother!
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And what icons were not there only then! Apart from Oktyabryatskiy, Pioneer, Komsomol, university badges, there were a lot of just souvenir badges, first of all, anniversary and memorable ones. The lecturers wore special badges so that it was immediately obvious that they were “dissemination lecturers”. For each decade, universities also issued their own jubilee badges. But the icon with the letters PR is already from our recent past. These were awarded to the participants of the Olympiad at LETI in PR and advertising, and our Penza students also took part in these Olympiads.
And funny devils - the memory of 1977-1980. The middle one was presented to me by my friend, who later became famous throughout the country for making banknotes that did not go through the treasury, and the one on the right was my answer to him. I made them at that time for several hundred or more, and after that I went with my family to rest in Anapa. And there was a trail to the beach, where local citizens traded in everything, from boiled corn to dried crabs, varnished. Well, I got up with them … And these badges of mine were in good demand there, and thanks to this income we lived there for a month or longer, without denying ourselves anything.
Yes, the past is slowly disappearing. But the memory of him remains. It is preserved by both people and things!
