Suresh Menon: First things first? Not necessarily
Suresh Menon is a writer based in India. In his youth he set out to change the world
An uncle recently showed me the first currency note from the first salary he ever earned, over half a century ago. It is no longer legal tender, of course, but its value for my uncle is way beyond anything monetary. He will not give it away for love nor money.
My hope of being remembered in his will received a setback when I told him that saving his first ever currency note was a silly thing to do. For me, there is no great sanctity to the ‘first’ anything. If there was, we would have to save our first car, our first girlfriend, our first pair of glasses, our first set of false teeth – this is just a first list, and it already seems endless.
Is it sentimental or merely mental to save such relics? Can you imagine my emotions now if I was to look at the first tooth I ever lost in a fight with the neighbourhood bully? I would be tempted to drive to his house, take out my first golf club and clobber him so he becomes a part of my collection – the first man I ever clobbered. And these things could grow on you. Soon it might be the first man I ever clobbered while wearing a pair of jeans, and so on. Collectors are strange people, as are those who keep a record of their firsts.
Maybe it is a question of temperament. I think that you need to have a particular mentality to want to save everything. My uncle probably got it from his father, who saved a piece of the cake from his first wedding (unfortunately he didn’t manage to save the marriage though). Parents tend to save recordings of their children’s first words, their first lock of hair... their first nappy? But I think this is done to embarrass them later in life when they want to have a good laugh with their child’s first husband or wife.
The first book I wrote is the one-million-eighty-one-thousand-and-forty-third-ranked best-seller on Amazon, which is pretty good when you consider the state of mind of the author. I do not have a copy; it is out of print, and half a century from now it will probably be as rare and expensive as a first edition of an Ernest Hemingway novel. Or maybe not.
If I was offered the first pen ever made, the first aircraft ever built or the first watch ever manufactured, I wouldn’t know what to do with the gift. I would have been happy to shake hands with the late Neil Armstrong though.
I wonder if he saved a bit of the moon rock he brought back to earth...?
