Misty Water-colored

I have this box.

 

 

My grandma gave it to me many, many years ago.  It belonged to her dad.

 

It's a cigar box.

 

 

 

And it's lined in cedar. In the Great Beyond, when I meet my great-grandpa, I'm going to expect him to smell just like this box.

 

I've always kept little mementos inside.  Nothing of real importance, just nice memories and little tchotchkes.  And I haven't looked inside in years and years, maybe since college.  But I needed it for my lesson this morning (a lesson that we got about 5 minutes into when someone asked a deep doctrinal question and we ended up in a swirling vortex of me saying a lot of, "I have no idea.  I suppose we'll find that out eventually.") So last night I took a peek. 

 

Here's a sampling:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have no clue where these came from but they're glass salt and pepper shakers and on the bottom is a little tag that reads, "HSK, child," written in my grandma's writing.  HSK can only be my grandpa and the thought of him playing with these little glass ducks as a child growing up in Watts is hilarious to me. 

 

 

A ticket stub for when I saw Les Miserables for the first time.  I went with Cynde and I think there were others.  Our seats were in the balcony so when Javert jumped off the bridge at the end our perspective was kind of wonky so it just looked like he was standing there flailing his arms about.

 

 

You guys, I graduated from high school TWENTY YEARS AGO!  And that thing has been sitting in there the whole time. Should I go to my reunion? 

 

 

 

This would take forever to explain but yes, it is a business card for a plumbing, heating and air conditioning company. A story for another time.

 

 

 

When my brother Casey was a kid, like 4 or 5, he used to ask us for stickers and then sell them back to us.  Enterprising, right?  He rigged up this thing where he would crawl under the table, or stand on the other side of the door and stick an empty paper towel roll at you and you had to put the money through the tube and then he would send the sticker and a hand written receipt back to you. Anytime I had friends over he'd hit them up.  Considering how many of my own stickers I bought off of him I'm counting on him being very rich and supporting me in my old age.