Treasures

M

MikeH

Joined
Oct 18, 2001
Messages
4,611
My post about my fourth birthday knife on the bookcase next to my PC has me contemplating the other priceless treaures on that bookcase, things that would be considered junk by anyone else.

- There is an old ceramic faded orange coffee cup. It was the one thing I asked for from my late father-in-law's meager estate. He lived in an old mobile home with an addition built onto the back. During our visits there during deer season, one of my brothers-in-law would often pick me up at about 4:30 am to go hunting. Mr. Warren would always wake me up at around 4:00 am, with breakfast waiting, usually eggs, grits, and home-made biscuits. And coffee, which I always drank from that old orange cup. In bad health, he did not hunt, but he got out of a warm bed to prepare that breakfast for me. He and his wife also raised one of the finest young women ever to come out of Dallas County, Alabama, who I am fortunate to have spent my life with. I wanted that cup as a reminder of him.

- There is a small piece of the goal post that my son helped pull down after an Auburn victory over Alabama when he was a student there, as I watched in horror from the stands as a sharp, jagged end of one upright missed impaling him by about three feet.

- There is a large ornate Auburn decorative mug that my future wife gave me for the first Christmas I knew her, when I was absolutely sure that I wanted to spend my life with her while she had not yet committed to that proposition.

- There is my old, well worn Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers, which I keep now only for memory's sake, and my book of CRC tables, which is now a truly obsolete antique. If you know what CRC tables are, you are just about an obsolete antique yourself.

- The is a child's drawing of a large man and a small girl in a boat with lines in the water which was drawn by my daughter Kim when a teacher asked her class to draw a picture of their most favorite place in the world.

Next to worthless to others, priceless to me. I am rich. If you have been around a good long while, I'll bet that you have some such, also.
 
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Not a lot of things left from my other life as I refer to my life before kids to my son. When he graduated I did dig up a class pendant from my senior year to give him.
One thing I have that for some reason I have hung onto for about the past 45 years is a little man made out of rocks that my grandmother got for me at Rock City. His name is Rocky and I have never been able to bring myself to put him away. He sits on top of my safe watching over my geode collection.
There are some other keepsakes sense I have been married but for some reason stuff from before has seemed to go missing.
 
I have NOTHING that cool.... Yet. Hopefully I'll live to be lucky enough to own a couple such treasures.
 
The only thing I have is an old King Edwards cigar box that was my great grandpas. My grandma tried to give it to me a few months before she passed away and told me it was the only thing she had that was her dads. It was a weird feeling and I couldn't stomach taking it from her since I knew it was her way of telling me her time was coming to an end. A couple of weeks after she passed I asked my grandpa if I could have it and he was glad to get it out of the house. It currently sits on a shelf in my 4 month old son's bedroom.
 
I have an old Iver Johnson single shot twelve gauge I got when my grandfather passed. It's put meat on the table for at least five generations. Bought new by his uncle around the teens, pre ww1. Old crosscut saws and tools from the era. Some butter molds. Old scout memorabilia.

I have my grandmother's all American pressure cooker, which has canned thousands of jars of vegetables. Still use it every year. My wife has several of her favorite crochet hooks.

Everything has a memory. That's what makes them priceless.
 
Kind of a rough picture (see below), but there are three blades in it that bring up those kind of memories for me, and will never be sold.

The blade on the lower left, below the barkie necker, is a Dwight Towell custom that my family went together and commissioned from him upon my graduation from college. To say I was speechless is an understatement.

Fourth blade in from the right, my wife's Grandfather brought that blade home from Germany after WWII. He fought in Normandy, actually landed in a wooden glider. Never could get the whole story as Grandmother would cut him off although he was willing to talk about it some. Some people you are related to by blood, others as kindred spirits, and he was one of those kind, as fine a gentleman as you could wish for a Granddad.

The blade on the lower right is a knife my father built for my Grandfather on my mother's side out of a worn out planer blade from the mill he was working for at the time. I believe the guard is made from guide material, but it is different from what I see currently. I'm pretty sure the blade is M2, it is very hard. It used to be a bit longer, but my Granddad broke some of the end off working on an elk when I was very young. My father ground it back in for him. It was also my Grandmother's favorite kitchen blade, and she was horrified when Granddad broke it. She gave it to me after his passing some years ago and I took it to a local saddlemaker who built a fitting sheath for it.

It is impossible to handle those blades without remembering all those involved in their history. Kind of choking me up a little I guess, I miss those fine people who have passed. But I refuse to be anything but happy when I'm using any of those knives.

 
I have two pictures sitting there now. I have only had them for 18 months now but they are much older. One is of my mother as she graduated her nursing training in the early 1950s and the other is of her holding me as an infant. I had not seen either picture till August 2014. I first saw them when I attended hospital to see my aunt (my mother's only sibling) who I loved so dearly. I was there as she had been given less than 24hrs to live. As I entered the room she smiled and said "Oh Andrew, now you are here it is OK for me to go, you were the last one I had to see"... She passed about 36hrs later. As I sat with her over that time I saw these two pictures among others, she and my mother (who passed 30 years earlier) were very very close and my mothers death had been very tough on my aunt. During the time I was there many older ladies came and went (she was 83), I was surprised how many of them had trained as a nurse with her (and my mother as my aunt deferred her training for a year so she and my mother could leave the small country town they were from together). As these ladies came and went I had many tell me (not knowing who I was) that the picture there was her sister and she loved her so very much. I often smiled at this then told them who I was... I then got told how often my aunt spoke of me to them and some of the tales about me she told (apparently having a nephew who was a bit of a black sheep in the family was something of great pride to my aunt).

While I was there my cousins (her son and daughter) visited, they are both somewhat older than me, in conversation the photographs came up. They then told me that, along with the childhood pictures of them that were also present, those two pictures had lived on my aunt's bedside table for as long as either of them could remember. At her funeral they had the pictures packaged up for me to keep.
 
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