If it ain't broke, don't replace it -- even if it is avocado

Persons who spend too much time online -- a group that probably includes you inasmuch as you are reading this (it certainly includes me) -- will recognize this meme from Facebook or IG or, as Bill Belichick might put it, Snap-Face:

I can't credit the originator of this work, but I tracked this image down this morning on a site called MemeZila.com.

In The Free Press this morning Walter Kirn offers a more literary, and therefore lengthier, take on this fundamental truth. In Kirn's essay, O Holy Crap, the indestructible appliance is a citrus juicer, not a sickly green refrigerator (marketed as "avocado").

But the idea is the same: After introducing us to his immortal juicer (it dates to about 1940, he has determined), Kirn recounts a host of appliances, large and small, all purchased with the best of intentions and often from the very tip-top shelves (Kirn has enjoyed some material success as a novelist) that have wound up consigned to the local landfill, exposed as mere gewgaws and gimcracks, and all too soon. He writes:

It’s important to get to the essayistic part, where I ask what it means when the objects in our lives demoralize us in a blizzard of malfunctions that seem to be hastening by the month. But it’s also important—to me, emotionally—to bury the reader in details of the unceasing material disappointments I’ve faced. Disappointments of the sort we will all be facing en masse in a few days. Merry Christmas!

I could also cite several examples of my own seemingly indestructible appliances, surviving long past their freshness date. I won't, of course, because, well, karma. Don't tempt fate; that's my motto.

But I have to admit that the idea of older things lasting longer and working better than their newly-minted, would-be replacements is one that has become increasingly appealing to me as time goes on. I can't imagine why....