If you want to keep a man busy for hours,
give him a new shredder and a lot of old documents.
For reasons too many to go into here, we recently began an overhaul of the stash in the attic. Live some place thirty years and you'll be surprised at the stuff you might accumulate.
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| Smell like a St. Bernard |
Now, some folks might call these treasures by their nickname, junk. However, each of these trinkets, knick-knacks, doo-dads and thing-a-ma-bobs have a story.
For instance, the St. Bernard was given to me by someone who knew I liked dogs and liked to smell nice, too. I guess they were out of Hai Karate.
a 'snoopy' hat and ceramic
Sixteen Inches On Center, an in-progress poetry collection about my father includes a poem "
Snoopy Hat" which is based on this or a similar hard-hat liner of my dad's. If you can wait, that poem will appear in the 2009 edition of
The Paterson Literary Review.
this bank is probably worth more than my house
One of my favorite TV shows to stop and watch when I spot it while zipping through the channels is the
Antiques Roadshow. That's the show where people empty out their attics and try to find some piece of junk they have that might be worth thousands and thousands of dollars.
We never had any kind of that stuff in my family. Even all our drinking-glass jelly jars and gas-station give aways have all gone their way. Heck, even our McDonald's Sesame Street glasses are on their last wash cycles.
But, if anything turns out to be worth money, it's probably one of these two coin banks. I don't know where they came from. The
Popeye bank just turned up in my box of stuff. Hey, until the Robin Williams movie about my favorite cartoon character, I never knew that Popeye was blind in one eye.
Shiver me timbers!
[Image lost]
The Bloomfield Savings Institution was always one of my favorite banks. I didn't lose the key until sometime in the past 25 years. I have a feeling it might still show up. Wouldn't you feel better putting your hard-earned savings into an
institution, rather than a
savings and loan?
who knew I was smart, and had a high draft number?
Well, as this week's worth of shifting, repacking, and tossing comes to an end, we suppose the biggest surprises were the SAT score sheet from 1971 and the Selective Service System Registration Certificate from Jun 13, 1972.
Would you believe I weighed in at 158 in those days? Funny thing is, I'm not much more than that all these years later ... if I was on the moon.
Another surprise was how much stuff from the 1990s had our
Social Security number printed in plain site. That's where the shredder comes in. In our case, Zamboni, who is not a St. Bernard, nor any kind of saint, actually, wants to help by eating the papers that miss the shredder.
Meanwhile, we stuff Visa bills, mortgage slips, old checks, cable TV bills, auto and house insurance policies, Bell Atlantic Mobile phone bills and all that rot into the shredder's maw.
Soon this vacation will end and
Zamboni will return to his daily sleep routine.
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