At 10:24 PM -0800 12/28/04, Cuyler Page wrote:
> I won't donate stuff to a museum because they don't use the stuff that is
> donated, they just stick it away in a box or put it in a glass case to be
> looked at.

Yah, absolutely right.  Also, it would be better not to waste all that ink
on pages of books too since all you can do is read it with your eyes and
mind.

'Tis fine to use the ink on the pages, just don't then put the book on a
shelf, out of reach, where it will do noone any good.


>  If I was to give them a hammer I'd
> expect them to use it to pound nails when needed.

Sounds like a good thing for a living history site where they classify
some items as "expendable artefacts".   Some of us are feeling a bit like
an expendable artefacts these days anyway.

Oh, I have felt like an expendable artefart for quite some time now



> I am using kitchen utensils
> everyday that were my grandmother's & probably my ggrandmother's as well.

The best place for them is in your hands, because you care, and they care.
Carl Jung instructed his housekeeper that she had to say good morning to
all the kitchen pots and pans each day when she arrived to work.   They
have feelings too, he said.

> However, I will give my grandmother's pressure canner to the local museum
> because it would be dangerous

Oh yes, museums are great places for hazardous materials.   You should see
some of the stuff I discovered when I moved into my current job where
nothing in storage had been dusted for twenty years.   Going through the
old stuff is a HAZMAT lesson.   Very thin glass ball fire extinguishers
from the 1890's in mint condition with the caustic liquid soda still in
them (you were supposed to throw them into a fire), stored in an unlabeled
open thin walled cardboard box on the top shelf where you couldn't see what
was inside until you tipped the box over a bit.   And then there are the
old medicine bottles, full of who knows what.   And the pickled snakes in
jars with big dried up corks that have shrunk so if you tip them the
formaldehyde pours out.   And then there was the stuffed bear cub in the
lobby that all the little kids loved to hug and sit on and pet and
kiss, and that everyone thought it had dandruff because there was always
little white powder crystals on the floor below it at the end of each day -
- - - - arsenic used in old style taxidermy.

Cuyler,  I didn't know you had been working at Putney Historical
Society!!!!!  We haven't found any things quite like you describe but then,
we've just begun to scratch the surface.

I have several bottles of "Lord knows what" in the old medicine cabinet in
the downstairs bathroom.  I wouldn't get rid of them for love nor money.
They've been there for 60 plus years why get rid of them now?


You are right, though Ruth, the stuff was never designed to be in glass
cases.   However, ice on lakes was never made with natural lines in it to
mark out hockey rinks either.   The human mind does wander when it has a
little leisure time.

cp in cultural bc
very far away from Plymouth Rock

Ruth, of the frozen north, where it's now thawing at 9PM




--
Ruth Barton
[log in to unmask]
Dummerston, VT

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