Things we find precious! Read this young people!

L6steel

L6steel

Joined
Sep 23, 1999
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The last couple days it's popped into my mind a time or two how little I have kept over the years of the things my loved ones have given me. It's not that I didn't appreciate them, I just never thought about it much plus I moved around a lot and things got tossed during moves.
I lost my brother in 98 and for the last couple days I've been thinking about it and the only thing I have that he actually handed me is a cigar he gave me when his first son was born. The only reason it has survived is because I left it with my parents. Amazing how important somthing as simple as a cigar can become!
We never were much of a card giving family or letter writers and the gifts we give each other are users, not keepsakes. Right after Ronnie passed away I took a wooden box I had made and declared it my "Memory Box". I wish I had done this years ago!
MORAL TO THE STORY​
Keep some of the things your loved ones give you through the years, one day they will really be a gift!
 
As I type this there is on the bookshelf to my left an old faded orange ceramic coffee cup and one unfired yellow Remington Express 20 gauge shotgun shell. To most people these just look like junk that ought to be thrown out.

The orange cup is the only worldly thing I wanted from his house when my father-in-law died. He was a non-hunter and debilitated from years of smoking. The guy really liked me, almost to the point that I was embarrassed around my brothers-in-law. Whenever I was at his house and one of my BNL's was picking me up before dawn to go deer hunting, he always got up about four oclock, made a big breakfast of eggs, biscuits, sausage, coffee for me and the BNL's, and then woke me up. If I wasn't going, they were on their own for breakfast because he was still in bed. For many years, for some reason I always got the orange cup from the cabinet for my coffee.
That old cup has the power to evoke memories of extended family and deer hunts every time I look at it.

The twenty gauge shell was the last of fifty that I gave my daughter when she was a teenager on what turned out to be her only dove shoot. I borrowed a single shot 20 gauge, and we got into a lot of birds. I will never forget the look of determination and desire to hunt on her face, as everyone else had left the field as dusk approached, I had put all my things in the truck, and she was still out in the field scanning the sky for one last dove.
For some reason I kept that shell. As she now suffers the aftereffects of a hit and run and serious brain stem injury, unable to walk or talk, the shell has become to me a representation of the fierce determination and will to prevail that has stood her in such good stead as she has recovered far beyond what doctors thought possible.

So, yeah, I know what you mean about keeping things.
 
This is a great topic.

My most prized possession is a t-shirt that I got from my grandfather. My grandpa was really like a father to me growing up. He was the perfect dad. :) Anyhow, whenever I stayed at his house as a child (which happened several times a week), my grandpa would always go the top drawer of his dresser and pull out a t-shirt for me to sleep in that night. I always had shorts there, but I never had a shirt. Why would I miss out on the ritual? Anyhow, since he passed away I have two of these t-shirts. One is completely thread-bare. You can see right through it. The other is just like new. I wear the new one a lot since the divorce. Everytime I put it on I worry about how long it's going to last.

My great-grandma Rose had this really odd assortment of piggybanks that she collected. She gave me a really gaudy looking dog bank when I was a younger teen. I kept that bank into my marriage. A week before finals during my first semester in law school, someone broke into my house and stole my laptop. I totally freaked out since all of my study materials were saved on that laptop. Anyhow, a few days after finals I went into my lingerie chest where I kept grandma's bank and realized it was gone. It took me some time before I allowed myself to accept what was right before my eyes. I felt so incredibly guilty that I didn't recognize it sooner that it took me a week to tell anyone about it. The bank was more important than the damn laptop. How did I not notice it missing? :(

Jeff Maclamara, a childhood friend, once gave me this black onyx stone. I really don't know why he gave it to me, but I always kept it. We had been standing in this store when he bought it for me. He acted like it was special when he gave it to me. He was killed in a car accident when he was 22 y/o. I still have the stone. If he had lived I know that he would have been a part of my life today. I especially missed him after the divorce. He would've come over to my new place and annoyed the living piss out of me. :D He would've taken my mind off of things for awhile. :)
 
One more:

I have numerous nice stone points that my dad and I found in the area around my Central Alabama home when I was growing up. It was something that we shared, but didn't make a big deal over. However, one is priceless to me, although it is just about three inches of tip from what appears to have been a stone knife.

About six weeks after he died, I visited his gravesite near the rear of the little rural church graveyard. I was really missing him, and had a lot of family issues on my mind. About four acres of additional space had recently been cleared from the woods, and as I turned to walk away to my car I saw something clearly out of place, a plastic bag (turned out to be a WalMart Bag) tumbling across the cleared area in the brisk wind. As he would have done, I walked the 30 yards or so on a line to intercept the moving bag. As I bent to pick it up, I was staring straight at the half-buried point. Tracking a moving object, I had arrived at the only spot where I could have seen the point. I am not very superstitious, really am kind of a skeptic about such things, but it was as if he was saying, things aren't all that bad, everything's ok, life works out.

In the three or so years since this happened, I have spent hours searching the field for other points, especially after rains which might expose them. I have never found another.
 
That's a grand story Mike!!
I don't have any arrow heads or spear points and the such but when I went to St. Pete for my brother's funeral I was walking around in his widow's driveway and saw some rocks that looked interesting to me. I took a couple of them and since then when ever I visit some place special I look around for interesting stones and take one or two as momentos. Maybe someday I'll come across a relic like you did!
 
Mine's kind of a current memory...

While in Cub scouts, I organized a trip to a local pit mine. Didn't find much in the mine, but went into the gift shop afterwards.

They had these little stone turtle necklaces, nothing special. My son and I each picked one out and bought them.

My son likes turtles, and although he never wears his necklace, I wear mine alot, almost every day. It kind of my way of keeping him close to my heart when we're not together.

Thanks for sharing these personal memories, everyone.

Glenn
 
When I was about two years old, my Mom, Dad and I lived with my Mom's parents for awhile right after my Dad got out of the Air Force. I had a little pair of blue sneakers that my Grandfather had bought for me, called "Scotties" that I wore all the time. I outgrew them after awhile and they really started to hurt my feet. So, Mom insisted that they be thrown out and they got me new ones. Naturally, I was heartbroken that I couldn't have my little Scotties, so my Grandfather saved them for me. He cut out the toes on them, just the tops, not the soles and let me wear them when Mom and Dad weren't around.

Eventually, Mom caught me wearing the sneakers and raised a big fuss about it and wouldn't let me wear them anymore. Boy, was I mad, but she was addamant about it and I lost my Scotties.

My Grandfather died when I was about 34 or 35. After the funeral my Grandmother said to me, "Come upstairs, Greggy, I have something for you." We went up to their room and she opened up a drawer in their dresser and pulled out, much to my amazement, those very same pair of little sneakers that I thought had been thrown away all those years ago. There they were, with the toes cut out and everything. I was so surprised that my Grandfather had saved those shoes all those years and when I saw them, I knew immediately what they were and remembered all the events surrounding my loss of them.

Just seeing those shoes reminded me of how much my Grandfather loved me and that he went to such lengths to try to make me happy. Then, he saved them in a drawer all those years. I still have them and I must say that they are my prized possessions. I like my knife collection, all my books, my few guns, etc., but those shoes are a link to my most remote past and the person who just might have loved me most in the world. Something like that is irreplaceable and I thank you, L6steel, for reminding me.
 
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