Posted by Rick Hogan on Friday, April 26, 2002 at 11:43PM :
In Reply to: Sitting on the Tailgate posted by Rick on Friday, April 26, 2002 at 10:31AM :
My Lovely Wife, Beth, and I have gone steady now for a little over 25 years. When we took up, her father was very ill with heart disease and died only a few days later. I really never knew him in this life, but I know him in the things of his that I own and use, some on a daily basis. He was an inveterate collector of stuff(as am I) and had a two car garage crammed with it. When he passed away my future wife and mother-in-law set about to 'clean the place up.' Of course I was enlisted to assist the desecration. All went pretty well for a while until they realized that I was sorting from the piles I was supposed to be tranferring into the dumpster and filling up the bed on the ol' 41WC with oodles of cool supplies. I was ordered to desist and logically refused to be party to the summary jettisoning of such valuable commodity. I stormed off and was not to be found darkening their doorstep for nearly two weeks! It was --and still is-- the longest we have been apart since giving our hearts to each other. In reality, they were only thinnig the crop, and it wasn't too many years later when I got to preside over the final divvying up of Jay's loot. I got much more booty from that round than the first could have yeilded if I had kept it all. I am proud to have continued his tradition and kept the collection productive and growing. I know this situation is rare -that a man's collection would stay intact after his passing- and we never had children, not that his kept anything much he collected. So, I don't know what will happen to my stuff when I cross over. I won't need it, though, but it makes me wonder just what people will think about all the tools and things I have collected and what in the world I could ever have possibly done with them all:)