The Heirloom Charging Cable

The last days of Summer are being more generous than expected. The countdown to the new iPhone has us all wired up. That made me reflect on the one hero that did not wear a cape this Summer. The forgotten, overused and at times overheated cable. Exposed, more often than not, to salty water, loads of sun, terrible odors emanating from my backpack at the gym, direct sunlight during the eclipse and... all to be dismissed and even forgotten at airports.

An heirloom cable is the potato of any farm, same level of aura: it is slightly too long, it has been repaired once with tape the color of bone, and nobody can remember which device it originally served. This is how objects acquire aura. Not by being new. By having survived a season of pockets.

Potatoes survive the worst of conditions, are looked down on by avant-garde chefs and somehow are always there to fill us up, to recharge us.

The lifestyle catalog wants you to buy a new braid in ‘botanical sage.’ Resist. The aura is in the scuff. A pristine cord says you unboxed your personality last Tuesday. A tired one says the farm has been working. It can't stop, it won't stop. Unless we leave it behind at the hotel. Or the library. Or the Uber.

Place it on the table the way you would place a stem: not centered, not hidden. Let it be the thing that makes the still life look lived in. Then go charge the thing you actually use, in the other room, like a person.