The Things Ya Get

I recently inherited the rather good stapler my dad had at his job (complete with cool-oh, now-retired, super-seventies-mod university logo on top; which: awesome), and two plastic spoons. The plastic spoons are the last things he ever ate with.

They're purple.

I stuck them in a bamboo pencil cup along with a letter-opener my brother carved in the 1980s, some bent scissors, a few scrap pieces of copper from my old gutter system and a pencil with a jolly orange piggy-shaped eraser on it. I really wasn't sure what else to do with them. My family being what it is, trashing plastic spoons my dying father ate from before they drugged him into his final oblivion is a tricky option. While not on par with the memorial tape, or the portrait of Einstein he bequeathed me, they're still an artifact which was saved in the moment. I never knew they existed (per se) until this week. Now I am their keeper. I do this sort of thing. *Sigh*

But the stapler, now, that is awesome. Like my father's tools (dude, I have a heat gun in the basement ... how many women own their own heat gun??), like his shirts, which I wear constantly, like even his jammie pants, and that one red felt tipped pen (amazingly: still writes), the stapler is just not an artifact. It is a useful, happy-making inheritance.

I need to go get some staples to fill it with (it's running seriously low, and I actually staple things at times!). That this trip might take me close to like five antiques and curio shops is merely coincidental. I swear. Really.