A Yen for Yesteryear

I don't like collecting things, but I do.  Things from Travels From Yesteryear end up in boxes and drawers, and I don't like getting rid of them, since they come from some memorable time in my past and it doesn't seem quite right to discard them [yes, this is a pathology], but I also don't want to keep them, per se, since I really don't have any practical use for them, or any need to "revisit" them on a regular basis.

But luckily, there's a solution, namely The Boys.  The lads come across my old stuff and want to keep it.  And since nearly everything in their daily lives has a certain shelf-life before somehow it moves on, this symbiosis actually works pretty well.  They get to keep my old stuff; I don't have to keep it any more, and eventually it moves somewhere outside of the center of our storage and maintenance systems.

So on Saturday, when Daniel came across a box full of Daddy's Old Stuff in our closet, he got right down to work.  Within minutes, he came across, requested, and quickly came to own, a Yen note acquired from Narita airport in Tokyo during one particularly memorable stop-over about eight years ago, when I was travelling with three siblings who love Japanese food and one sibling, among them, who loved "holding on" to other people's passports and not letting them get on a train to Tokyo even though they had a several-hour layover, etc.

Daniel was very excited by the Yen, and in short order, Ian was wanting some too.  Luckily the Box O' Bounty in my closet did not disappoint, and in short order he had his own currency as well.  But for Ian, this in-house scavenging is a more time-honored tradition, since he has had over two years longer to work at it than young Daniel, and he is surely the one who showed Daniel the Daddy-treasure-hunt ropes in the first place.  So when Ian came upon the Box of Yen and Other Things, he got excited, especially when he saw a metal bowl filled with coins, for this was a fond memory from his past.  I had once kept this  bown on a bureau, and used it to hold loose change from end-of-the-day pocket-emptying rituals, and it would provide for my coinage needs in days to follow, but not, it turns out, just my own needs for coins.

This discovery of this bowl brought back to Ian a memory from The Old House - the humble, lovable one where we used to play with trains, first Ian and me, then Ian and Daniel and me - in the basement many evenings.  This house, which the boys in our family remember with fondness and longing, turns out also to have been a house of Enrichment, as Ian recalled when he saw the old metal bowl:

"I remember I  used to climb up the bureau and take a little handful [of coins] when I was small."

(July 21, 2012)