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There was a crash of breaking glass from the living room. My first thought was: Oh, no! Not the blue vase. I like the blue vase. Pretty blue vase.

No, Barry was on the other side of the room, and one of the table lamps was on the floor. My thought was: Oh, well. We need new shades for those lamps anyway, maybe we should just get new lamps. I bought those to go with the furniture two sofas ago. Not a big deal.

But Barry said “The lamp doesn’t appear to be broken. What could have made the noise?”

Then we saw the ashtray on the floor. And my thought was verbalized:

Oh nooooooooooooo.

The ashtray is merely ornamental. We don’t smoke or allow smoking in the house. Occasionally I’ll fill it with Hershey Kisses or some other foil-wrapped candies, but mostly it just sits empty on the end table. It’s green, bowl-shaped glass, a smooth, modern-artsy 50s design.

I can remember my parents using this ashtray in the early 60s, in our first home, before the Surgeon General’s report caused them to change their habits. It’s the only thing in my living room that was in that very first living room that I knew, with the white vinyl Danish Modern chair and the sectional sofa and the piano with sheet music from the 1940’s in the bench.

Had the ashtray disappeared from my life decades ago, I’d still remember it—in fact, I’d asked my mother about 20 years ago if it was still around, because I remembered it so vividly. I thought it would look great on my new mirror-topped tables (which it did). She was concerned that I actually needed an ashtray, but I assured her I only wanted it as an objet d’art. Had she told me that the ashtray was long gone, it would not have been a big deal.

And had it truly broken today, it would hardly have been the end of the world. Fortunately, today’s fall only shaved a sliver of glass from the bottom. You can hardly notice the damage. It already had one small chip in the edge, so its value as an antique was already compromised. But it’s not its monetary value, or even its aesthetic value, that accounts for its hold on me.

Any object can have value if the associations are strong enough. In the film “Throw Momma From the Train,” the character played by Danny DeVito shows his coin collection to the character played by Billy Crystal, who is baffled by the collection, which consists of perfectly ordinary quarters and dimes and pennies. DeVito’s character explains: this quarter was the change from the hot dog my dad bought for me at a baseball game, this dime was from the time…

This ashtray is a relic of a place and time and people who are long gone.  And it is not just my father, dead now for 12 years, who is long gone. It is also the 5-year-old toddling around that living room, and the mom with the jet black hair sitting in a teal chair and smoking a cigarette. We are still alive, but those two people are long gone.

But the ashtray is still here.