On the shelf behind the sideways front seats on the bus, I found a full left arm brace with a steel plate in it. I have a disabled left hand, and can use it.
What are the odds?
I didn’t post this earlier, what with being exhausted and then Creamsicle getting sick and dying, so here it is now.
In addition to a bunch of quarters (I don’t know how many, but I’m guessing a couple-hundred dollars’ worth) one of the things I found in the last of the stuff I cleaned out of the trailer was a wad of cash. Five hundred and eighty-eight simoleons, including five C-notes. Where did I get that much? Why did I have it, all nicely folded? Why did I ‘put it away’? I don’t know. I guess I should take it to the bank eventually.
In my town’s little free book box, I found a first edition of Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying, complete with dust jacket in good condition.
Another thing I found was my sleeping bag from childhood. It used to be olive drab, but it’s quite faded now. A unique feature I’ve not seen on another bag is that the bottom side is covered in forest-green, leather-textured vinyl so that it can be used on wet ground. The zipper only goes to about halfway down the side. I’m not sure, but there’s a very good chance dad bought it at Sears.
I washed the bag in the washing machine, and a seam came loose. (Very thin fabric now.) I hope the dry cleaner can fix it.
While I was out visiting family this past May/June, my daughter brought a large framed object out of her closet to show me, telling me that it surfaced when she and her brothers were digging through all the shit that their mother had pack-ratted over the years, and asked me if I knew what it was. Indeed I do. It was a framed sampling of lace that had been tatted by my grandmother when she was a very young woman, accompanied by a photo of her.
I hadn’t seen this piece in probably 40+ years, as it first got buried in household shipments over the years and never hung up, then forgotten about, then buried in my ex-wife’s garage. In the interim, I’ve done a lot of genealogy research and so recognized my grandmother’s photo immediately. After getting home, I wrote up a biography of her, and put together a genealogy fan chart and sent them to my daughter to put in an envelope and attach to the back of it.
My daughter had also rescued a photo album containing a large number of photos that I took with my Brownie Hawkeye when I was a kid. Also a lot of old shots of my parents and sibs. They all smell of mildew, but I brought them home anyway. The plate blocks of stamps that I had collected as a kid and stuck in the photo album were hopelessly stuck to the pages of the album and not salvageable.
On the library’s free shelf, I found a book of essays on J.D. Salinger copyright 1962. An absolutely fascinating read in retrospect.
Look what this couple found while renovating their bathroom.
When my folks remodeled the kitchen of the house they’d just moved into they left a message on the wall behind a set of cabinets. It was Oct. 11, 1984, and they wrote about how on that day the first American woman astronaut to do an EVA was Katherine Sullivan.
When we remodelled the middle bedroom, we left a message: ‘Hi, from [Johnny L.A.] and [Mrs. L.A.] 2010’