Written by Ray Ellis

A Zippo isn’t just a lighter — it’s an accoutrement that you selfishly guard. You might own several, with each one having its own back story, but you never throw one away. Each one reminds the owner of a particular point in his or her life — a bittersweet romance, an affair with a fast car, a little social victory — that dark rainy windswept monsoon night on a jungle hill top  position in Vietnam.  All sealed with that distinctive click as the Zippo is closed. There’s a little piece of American history in every Zippo.

You don’t get that with a Bic lighter, and you don’t get it with a novelty butane lighter emblazoned with skull-and-crossbones or crude feminine silhouettes. All those give you are frustrations and bad memories of misplaced adolescence. In our throwaway culture, that’s how we mark time. We paste over our past with fiberboard facades and call it progress. It’s not evolution, though — it’s surrender to homogenization.