We were fancy once.

Dear Friend,

I should probably tell you first. I'm not anymore. That doesn't mean that I might not still want to be. Perhaps that's why I hold on the the trinkets from times past. Two caviar dishes and a dinner bell. Strange trinkets in the estate of a divorcee in 1943. Stranger still in the house of a woman repurposing government cheese from people who "really didn't want it, and so she was kind enough to take it off their hands." But their family was fancy once.

My grandmother's favorite story? How her grandfather had sailed around Cape Horn in South American, made a fortune in the Gold Rush in California, and "spent not a dime," taking a train car back to Iowa, where he was able to buy the two very best pieces of farm ground in the country, and send for his entire family to come over from their native Denmark to tiny Fredsville, Iowa. My mother's favorite story? How even after her mother had thrown out "her bum of a father", hers had been the only family in the entire town to have a refrigerator, and all the other little kids got to have ice shavings left by the ice man, and she, sadly, did not. Later, I would learn, this was called a "humble brag."

Interesting, isn't it? How we hold on to trinkets and moments and memories, hoping to get back there, someday. Junk we file aware in drawers. Antiques we shove to the back of shelves. I'm wondering friend, what do you do with the gems and trinkets of your past? Are they simply going to inspire an awkward and uncomfortable attempt at a narrative someday? Is that really what you want for those that follow?

Or perhaps? What if? They become touchstones for the now. I hold on to this thing so that I always remember the God who...

Because after you are gone, one of three things is going to have power in your child's life.

The emptiness

The trinket

or

The God who...

Isn't that a narrative you'd like to have a hand in shaping?

Thus spake,

me.