there when we needed it

Our exceedingly lengthy remodeling offered me many opportunities to examine a wide variety of items that had been stored away, out of sight. It also furnished us with the opportunity to give at least one item its moment in the sun.


During our prolonged exile from our home we lived in two different apartments, neither of which had adequate (for our needs) kitchen facilities. Much of the time we almost didn't cook at all, but we were lucky to have saved an electric frying pan which had been passed down to us by friends about fifteen years earlier and had (since then, at least) seen only very limited use.


The frying pan was about thirty years old - very old by modern standards of planned obsolescence. We recalled that the friends who had given it to us had related an interesting history of ancestry, but my attempts to verify the story that I remember being told didn't ring bells with any of the parties related to that story. And anyway, the history wasn't really important. The important point was that we'd saved this frying pan for many years during which it primarily sat on a shelf, though it would more logically have found its way to the trash.


And then it was suddenly useful. As we used it, we saw its life seeping from it - it heated only sporadically, and the thermostat ultimately stopped working. But it had served its purpose, making some basic cooking possible when other facilities weren't available, and once again, saving something that should logically been thrown away had proven worthwhile.