The Tribune

By DIANE PHILLIPS

On Sunday, I threw away a Scrabble box that was more than 50 years old. It was hard to do because my parents’ hands had touched it. My mother died in 1965, my father the following year. That Scrabble box was one of the few remaining things I had with a trace of their DNA on it.

I had dragged it with me from home to home after they passed, later country to country, new house to new home, room to room and shelf to shelf. Its corners were held together with masking tape that had turned brittle. The inside lid held the basic RULES FOR PLAYING SCRABBLE with examples of words and how you could add an ‘s’ and gain more points by doing words in two or three directions. I never did get to use the word xylophone which, if I ever had a Scrabble goal, that would have been it, though x was only worth eight points and z worth ten. It would have taken extraordinary luck because xylophone has nine letters.

It’s amazing, the stuff we keep. Hundreds of photos from the days we printed them and they did not live inside our phone, dozens of letters from decades earlier when people poured their hearts out in hand-written words, shared wisdom, worries and wishes, licked the envelope as if it held life-giving secrets and trusted the slight package to a postman to deliver.

We keep those letters penned before the world of e-mail enabled us to hit delete and wipe out worries and wishes in a flash. We keep mementoes from days when we were still astonished that information could move from a distant location to where we were, instantly, by fax, though non-commercial facsimile type equipment had been around for more than 100 years. Once Xerox made it commercially feasible, the quick transmission changed our expectations, paving the way for changes that have come barreling at us so fast ever since. Today, information flows through our lives like water through a sieve.

Maybe that is why we cling to remembrances we can touch. It is those hard copies that are the most difficult to part with.

I have gold-rimmed wine glasses that were my parents’ for the rare entertaining they did. No one uses a wine glass that holds two ounces anymore and I would happily give them to a collector if I knew they would be appreciated for their beauty. But there is no emotion tied to wine glasses as there is to old books or a Scrabble box whose decrepit state you forgive. The gold trim, even if it is real, will never be the jewel of a hand-written letter from my father when I was in college. It will never equal the photos, my dad picking an orange off a tree when we first moved to Florida, my mother in one of those bathing suits with the wide straps and little skirt that will one day come back into fashion as poolside leisure wear.

What we choose to keep evokes emotions we need to stoke. What we keep triggers our senses. It is said those who have a weak sense of smell are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s. That seems a stretch to me, but I am not a scientist and have never researched smell or failing mental health. I would much rather research how safe you are with a single application of spray sunblock while spending time in the water or something equally important that requires spending time at a beach.

But if I were postulating seriously about one of the critical senses, here’s what it would be. The sense we pay the least attention to, the sense of touch, plays a greater role in our lives than we realize. It deserves more appreciation. Why is it that when we go into a store and we are just browsing, we have to touch everything? We touch a purse we have no intention of buying, we run our fingers across a rack of dresses on sale though we really came to look for slacks; we pick up a frying pan in a home goods store and look at the bottom. Why? We are not even interested in a frying pan. We came to find dish towels or cilantro or a coffee maker that knows how and when to clean itself.

So our oft-overlooked tactile sense that fuels an emotion contributes to what we choose to keep. Touching a picture is different from looking at a picture. Touching a worn book that a loved one read is different from reading the same story on a Kindle. Computers changed our lives for the better and we would never go back. But neither will we ever keep them for sentimental reasons. Their software and their monitors do not touch us, they are merely useful tools.

Our technology moves so fast we forget how recent its development was. It was only a few decades ago that a group of engineers, conservatively dressed in the requisite white long sleeve shirts with narrow ties, worked away in then small town of Boca Raton, Florida, developing the personal computer in a building that was an architectural marvel but mysterious to everyone on the outside. IBM employees on the cusp of changing the world could not talk about their work, they could only say they worked for IBM.

The campus included all the amenities that made tedious research tolerable, one of the early gyms, a tennis complex. The building, coincidentally, was used in the famous car scene in the movie The French Connection. It and the 125-acre campus it sits on, no longer shrouded in secrecy, just sold in April for a reported $179.3m and will become an expanded and update office park.

Against the backdrop of how fast the world moves and how fleeting our hold on the present is, we become gatherers, clinging to more of the past we can touch, parting with packaging of what we bought today, latching on to a box that held the first award we won or ring we were given. And we look around us and wonder, how did I ever accumulate all this stuff? What am I supposed to do with it now? Am I better off for keeping it or has the time come to downsize the contents of my cabinets, shelves and drawers?

Before I threw away the Scrabble box (and I will confess not all of it), I researched the game’s history. It was actually manufactured by a New York company called Selchow & Righter and copyrighted in 1948 for the Production and Marketing Company. I had never paid attention to the box before I got ready to throw it away and I never heard of Selchow & Righter, but it turns out they also created Parcheesi, never a favourite because it was more luck than skill. Maybe if I had been luckier I would have liked it more.

But anyway, the company created nearly 20 games and then changed hands a few times. It was purchased by Coleco Industries in 1986 for $75m, a sale that included the games but not the company trademark which apparently remains under the control of the Righter Family. Three years after that purchase, Coleco declared bankruptcy.

Hasbro, the largest toymaker in the world, bought Coleco’s primary assets for a reported $85m and as I write this June 5, Mad Money’s Jim Cramer is advising listeners to hold on to Hasbro stock despite Toys R Us, a massive distributor, having gone bankrupt. Holding on to Hasbro shares may satisfy the practical but it will never hold a candle to the memories re-ignited of a family sharing laughter and challenges around an old-fashioned board game on a snowy night when children were allowed to stay up just a little bit later.