Word: heirloom
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...Shaggy and Scooby's melodramatic mystery marathon, I first learned about hypnotism. In a twisted Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde sequence, for instance, Scooby would be entranced, and would alternate between babbling, snack-seeking "man's best friend" and blood-hungry canine demon. All with the swing of an heirloom pocketwatch...
...Piano Lesson (1989). An heirloom from a slave ancestor threatens to sunder members of the Charles clan: one wants to keep it as a reminder of suffering, another would sell it to buy the farm where the family were once chattel. Playwright August Wilson was the most important American stage voice to emerge in the '80s, and this piano is the most potent symbol in American drama since Laura Wingfield's glass menagerie...
...part of the first-grade catechism (Pilgrims, friendly Indians, a day for offering thanks) and rarely move beyond Care-Bears sentimentality. This built-in ickiness is a pity, since it tends to overshadow the symbolic significance of Thanksgiving, that most unrepentantly old- fashioned of American celebrations, that patriotic heirloom that nobody has figured out a way to ruin...
...even more worrisome reports. JAPANESE BUY HEART OF N.Y., declared the Dallas Times Herald. "The roll call of all-American icons falling into foreigners' hands added a new name yesterday," reported Newsday. "When the whole house is being sold off, it doesn't matter much that a cherished heirloom goes as well," sobbed the San Jose Mercury News. The Sacramento Bee carried a photo of "delighted" Japanese tourists gazing at the property now controlled by "their countrymen...
...Ballybeg, the clan in the big house on the hill is the nobility. But at Ballybeg Hall the members of that gilded tribe are keenly aware of a wider world and their piddling place in it. They glamourize the past: a tatty cushion or tarnished candlestick becomes an heirloom by reason of a (probably fictitious) anecdotal link to some bygone celebrity. They embroider the dismal present. They deny the looming future of dissolution and dispersal...