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Well, excluding a couple of fossils and pieces of petrified wood, the oldest things I own are a silver kiddush cup (a Jewish ritual wine cup), which seems to date from about the 1880s: it belonged to my great-great-grandfather. Also belonging to him, I own a brass chanukiah (a "Chanukah menorah") from about the 1870s. Other fun old things I have: a commemorative coin from the 1892 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a siddur (Jewish prayer book) from around 1896, and a first American edition of "Dracula," published in 1899.
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Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.
(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)
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