Another reference:

This is possibly one of my favorite comics of all time and I highly recommend it:

http://dresdencodak.com/2009/12/16/lantern-season/

Anyhow, in the first several panels of this strip Kimiko mentions "vital memories suspended by the mundane: a smell, a phrase, maybe an old song" or in her case the owl faced puppet. I was just thinking about how interesting it is that the ordinary is so frequently imbibed with our own personal, yet sometimes entirely irrelevant histories and experiences. We are associative creatures and its interesting to think about what happens to the ordinary when we make it into a symbol of something else, especially when the symbol is personal or intimate rather than archetypal.