I've been thinking about ash trays.
Not because I smoke. I don't and never have.
The thought occurred to me while I was sitting in a drive-thru with fifty-seven cents in change and nowhere to put it. The cup holders already had drinks in them, so without really thinking about it, my hand reached toward the place where every car used to have an ash tray.
Except there wasn't one.
For the first time since I bought the car, I realized it didn't have an ash tray at all.
I already knew it didn't have a spare tire. I discovered that months ago on the side of the road when I really needed one and found an empty spare tire well. No spare, no jack, no lug wrench. That was an unpleasant surprise, but I've already thought about spare tires enough.
This was different. Somehow the missing ash tray bothered me more. Not because I needed an ash tray, but because I needed somewhere to put fifty-seven cents. That tiny inconvenience sent me down a rabbit hole I hadn't expected.
I started looking around. There weren't any ash trays in my house. There weren't any at the office. I couldn't remember the last restaurant I'd visited that had one sitting by the front door or tucked discreetly into the corner of a table. It wasn't that someone had removed them overnight. They had simply become so uncommon that I hadn't noticed they were gone until I went looking for one.
I even looked in a couple of stores and discovered you practically can't buy an ash tray anymore. Insurance companies, real estate agents, gas stations, and used car dealers used to give them away. They sat on office desks and coffee tables, usually with somebody's logo printed across the front.
Now I can't even find one in town.
In fact, the only ash tray I can think of belongs to my Papaw. It still sits exactly where it always has on the end table beside his chair but now it holds peppermints. I don’t know when or how it happened. Did Mamaw decide that Papaw was either done smoking or wasn’t allowed to smoke in the house any longer and fill it with peppermints or did Papaw decide that peppermints were healthier than cigarettes? Either story is just as likely as the other, but I wasn’t there that afternoon or week or however long it took for the transition, so I don’t know how it happened. I just know that one Sunday afternoon, there were peppermints in the ash tray and no smoke in the air. Somewhere along the way, the ash tray quietly stopped being an ash tray and became a candy dish.
The object stayed.
Its meaning changed.
The more I thought about it, the stranger the whole thing seemed.
Ash trays didn't just disappear from our cars. They disappeared from our lives, but they did it so gradually that almost nobody noticed. There wasn't a national announcement or a final production run. Nobody gathered to commemorate the last factory-installed ash tray rolling off an assembly line. Manufacturers simply stopped including them one model year at a time, restaurants quietly removed them from tables, and offices replaced them with little bowls of wrapped candy or business cards. By the time we realized they were gone, they had already been gone for years.
Nobody held a ceremony. Nobody peeled off the old label and applied a new one. It simply acquired another purpose and kept right on serving. Smoking declined. Public spaces adapted. Manufacturers reclaimed the space for storage bins, charging ports, or larger cup holders. One little design decision followed another until eventually an entire generation grew up without ever expecting an ash tray to exist.
And the funny thing is that, for many of us, they had already stopped being ash trays long before they disappeared.
They held spare change, loose screws, parking receipts, and the occasional key you didn't want to lose. Some became tiny junk drawers with lids. Others accumulated guitar picks, mints, paper clips, and whatever happened to be in your pocket when you got into the car. Long before manufacturers stopped installing ash trays, many of us had quietly reassigned them to entirely different careers.
They had become tiny junk drawers with lids.
Then one day they vanished too.
I wonder how many other things have disappeared the same way.
Not because they failed.
Not because someone consciously decided they should be gone.
But because the world shifted around them until they quietly stopped belonging.
We tend to notice what's been added. Bigger touchscreens. Wireless charging. Backup cameras. Lane-keeping systems. Giant panoramic displays stretching halfway across the dashboard.
Those changes announce themselves.
The things that disappear are much harder to see.
You usually don't notice them until the exact moment you reach for one.
It might be a spare tire.
It might be an ash tray.
It might be something else entirely.
The absence remains invisible until your hand reaches for a feature that no longer exists.
Now I can't help wondering what else has quietly slipped away without me ever noticing. After all, if I knew what they were, they wouldn't have slipped away unnoticed.
Meanwhile, fifty-seven cents is rolling around somewhere under my driver's seat.