I am currently enjoying a beer out of a “Pete’s Wicked Ale” glass that is down to its last few letters. For those of you who don’t remember the brand, it was brewed by a couple of the pioneers of the American craft beer movement. The brand was discontinued back in 2011, but I have a few of the glasses left. Or I will for a while - the lettering wears off and soon they will be just plain pint glasses.
T-shirts are just as ephemeral - I have been losing Comic-Con shirts at a rapid rate due to wear, and finally had to retire my ARMS Benefit 1982 shirt when it disintegrated in the wash one day. Seems all the shirts from my concert-going days have disappeared into dryer lint.
On the up-side, while digging through a closet last month I found a box that contained, among other things, MY RABBIT!!! The worn, bedraggled, missing one eye stuffed yellow rabbit that my father got me on the day I was born. Amazing that it has survived all the years and abuse, but there it is.
Just ruminating on the nature of mementos and souvenirs…what have you found or lost lately?
I have a rabbit too! I got him one Easter when I was about four and he’s a bit worse for wear. He stays in the top of my closet so the grandkids can never ever play with him.
I also have the two beanbag Kermits which my brother and I played with as kids. My brother’s Kermit always wore the shirt from his Tonto action figure and mine went natural, so we could tell them apart.
My last concert T-shirt (Roger Waters) was used to wrap the body of my cat Lloyd, who died a few months ago. They are buried together in the back yard. The shirt had developed a few of those inevitable pinhole burns anyway.
I have two tee shirts from waaaay back that I keep folder in tissue in a bottom of a storage box. They are so fragile with age, I’m fairly sure they’d crumble into pieces if I tried to unfold them. But I do open the box and look at them occasionally. One is a team tee from my very first crewing team. We did great things together and I was so proud of that shirt. The other is for a band that I used to play in. We made up a bunch of tee shirts to sell at our gigs. The others were all sold or given away. This is the last one. Again, lots of great memories.
I recently gave away my other special memento - a little green stuffed dinosaur I had purchased the day I found out my elder son was on the way. It had always been in his bedroom until he got too big for stuffed animals, at which point mom packed it away. When I found out he and his wife were having a little boy, I got out that little dinosaur and gave it to them.
Cripes! I’m a “saver” and keep everything. Its kinda pathetic, actually. Rabbit? Check. It was my mom’s as a kid, and I still have it. Concert Tees? Check. Almost everyone I’ve ever owned, all packed up and waaay to small to ever wear again. The list goes on and on.
Somebody is gonna have a hell of a mess to clean up when I snuff it.
A bunch of my old AACA/antique car stuff. I had it in a cousin’s attic and they were cleaning it out and found it all. Some is meh ------- but a bunch of the mugs and dash plaques and stuff are keepers bringing back some great memories.
(The cars were just for profit ----- but some of the people we met through it were real classics themselves and a lot of great times I forgot were in that box)
I just retired my Kentucky Fried Chicken Bluegrass Festival t-shirt from 1979(5th annual festival). To be honest, it hasn’t been worn in some time. But I wore the sumbitch out in the five years after the festival.
I have the custom-made shirt I had made for my father in Hawaii. It’s one of the few Hawaiian shirts that’s truly a work of art, and he loved it, during the few years before his death. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit me.
A bit of a hijack because this wasn’t recent, but it was something believed lost then found. Around 1979 my then-teenage sister took her tape recorder and interviewed our younger cousins (cue lots of knock-knock jokes and childhood speech impediments). Not long after that, our cousins moved to another part of the country (which may well have been why my sister wanted to get them on tape) and my sister and I would often listen to the tape and laugh and then burst into tears. There was only one copy of the tape, largely because in those days dual cassettes were unheard of (at least by us) so the only way to record one tape from another was by sitting a couple of tape decks beside one another which resulted in all kinds of background noise. (It was really annoying, for instance, if the phone rang in the middle of your taping, or if somebody sneezed. We all had tapes like that. I had one where a cb radio came through with an extensive report on a truck driver’s plans for the evening.)
Anyway, one day few years later my sister’s idiot boyfriend decided to sell his pre-recorded tapes to a used record store, except it turned out the case also contained my sister’s home made tapes, including, apparently, The Cousin Tape. We believed for years that that tape had ended up in the hands of some terribly confused individual. Then, sometime in the early 90s my sister decided to retrieve a box of journals and unfinished novels (mostly derivative of General Hospital plotlines as I recall) from the top shelf of her old bedroom closet at our mom’s house. She undid the box and there, on top, was a single Memorex cassette. She and I both screamed. Is it? Could it be?!
It was. I think I actually recorded a copy even as we were listening to it for the first time in a decade, because we were so afraid it would self destruct. We discovered, as an added bonus, that the long-forgotten side 2 consisted of an extended conversation between me, my sister, and her best friend. This conversation largely consisted of critiques of certain boys, and me and her best friend singing jingles from beer and cigarette ads, like the conversation needed commercial breaks.
One of the most interesting parts was realizing that we once had much stronger regional accents. Oh my God, what a bunch of hicks we were.
I recently came across my football helmet from Little League when I was in 4th or 5th grade. It has a deep black groove on the back from where it had rubbed against the tire on my bicycle as I pedaled, unattended and perfectly safe, back and forth the miles to practice. Startling was just how flimsely it was constructed, cheap plastic and tiny little foam pads for cushioning. It you ever wonder about my posts, there’s your likely culprit.
Awhile back when my last grandparent had passed I received a couple of items they had kept from my childhood that I had made for them. One was a crayola drawing of circular lines with the loops colored in and another was a tiny, primitive tugboat I’d made with a piece of wood, a thread spool and black tape. I couldn’t have been more that 4 or 5 when I made either, but seeing them brough back faint memories of doing just that. They took me waaay back.