The persistence of memory in objects

My dad died six years ago this month.  My mom in 1995.  They had both lived full and fulfilling lives.  Mom was 83.  Dad 99.  I had them with me in life much longer than most people have their parents.  This post is not about how they lived or how they died.   It is about how their lives live on, for me, in objects.   Objects that make me feel their presence.  Or spark memories that bring them back, if just for a mind's eye's instance, madeleine-like.  Right now there are two such object in my immediate world.  The first, Dad's last pc, has just been shut down and is being put out to pasture.   We gave it to him almost nine years ago.  When he died I inherited it and have used off and on ever since.  When my last laptop died, around 2008, I switched to this full-time.  It has become increasingly slow and unable to keep up its out-of-the-box speed as well as the speed with which data is now transmitted, something for which it was not intended.  I should have ditched it long before my wife gave me a new laptop this Christmas.  It couldn't hack it any more.  I kept it   because Dad used it.  Pure and simple.  It still contained some artifacts from his use and whenever I chanced across them, I smiled.  For one nano-second I felt him. And it was enough.  The second object, a small (four inches in diameter) styrofoam ball, that I carved out of a cube of styrofoam in Sunday school when I was five.  I cut off a piece of dark blue, velvety pipe cleaner, bent it, and stuck it in the ball.  It was transformed into a Christmas ornament.  Mom declared it was the most beautiful one she had ever seen.  Each Christmas after that, up until we had to make the horrible decision to place her in a home for Alzheimer's sufferers, it was, by her decree, the first ornament to go on the tree each year.  It became less rounded, a bit yellowed, but year after year took its honored place on her tree.  After she died I inherited it, or swiped it, and each Christmas it is the first ornament on our tree.  Mom loved Christmas more than anyone I have ever known and she still gets to celebrate it in our home every year with us.  When I place it on the tree I think of her, of past Christmas celebrations, and smile, warmly.    I am not sure why objects my parents touched mean so much to me.  They are objects, nothing more.   They are not imbued with some gift or magic.   Still, they mean that my parents resonate within me once more, in proper perspective, caught in the film of life that plays over and over in my mind. That film glows brightly again, rescued from the dimness of time and age.   It is like that also with photos of my boys in their youthful days, when I can see them, feel them, as they were.  It is not that they are not mature, good, decent people now.  But they were uniquely mine years ago and the sense of love and responsibility for these children of mine recalls a time in my life that was overflowing.  I just didn't know it then.  I touch the objects.  I feel their touch on them.  It is that simple.  Maybe they just let me turn my gaze back on the past instead of keeping always on the present or future.  Maybe that past is warmer, more wonderful in my mind that it was actually was.  I don't care.  For those brief moments I can drift back to what was, who was, and smile.