Bernie, you ol' skinflint! I am truly surprised at you, you who go about doin' all the do-gooder stuff, helpin' folks what need helpin, pattin' hands and such. And here is poor Dano, cautiously pokin' his nose into your thread, wherein you were expounding on the generosity of a fellow TG member. My good friend Dano, the same Dano whose giving heart drove his decrepit, scabby, wretched body to craft each of us a painstakingly wrought, gleaming, golden masterpiece of functional beauty in the slender, sinewy forms of osage selfbows, offered you safe storage space for some of your treasures, which are amassing right rapidly these days, I might add. And did you show him even a crumb of human kindness, a glimpse of a giving heart, a smidgeon of gratitude?
For shame, both yours and mine. O, the ignominy. I sank into a black morass of despair.
Somewhere around the third mug of Scotch, I got an idea. I cannot save the world. I cannot save you. I cannot even save me. But I
can save a bit of that child's heart within me that still seeks goodness and justice, generosity of spirit and a love of humankind.
Dano, I started sending you boxes today. I have been on this earth for fifty years, amassing things, and for what? These memories of my childhood and later should not just sit here gathering dust, no matter the joy that I get from their periodic perusal. They have a greater mission in this world, bringing happiness to a fellow human being. So I spent the weekend packing them up in boxes and addressing them, Hawaian knick-knacks from '59, a bronze coin commemorating some Navy function in Yokosuka, Japan in '62, the dirndl skirt that I made when I was twelve, my brother's Boy Scout bugle that he has forgotten about, my stick collection. Dano, Dano, what a lifetime of happiness will start arriving on your doorstep any day now! Calendars marked with the days of my years, boxes of paper memories, all the cards given me by my husband on anniversaries, birthdays, Valentines Days and Halloween, various writings, including my college thesis, "The Advantages and Disadvantages of Government-Controlled Castration of Horses" and also an unfinished, unstarted tract featuring The Itty Bitty Litter Lady under my pen name, Norma Leigh Lucid. Pencils, pens, crayons from a collection I started in the second grade, beads and trinkets, (loose) and numerous old shoes saved for their leather content, some of which I found on the street.
The furniture will follow, starting Wednesday. After twenty years, the sofa doesn't smell like chihuahua pee anymore, unless it gets damp.
Killdeer :D