Collectors, Part 2

The emails are coming in fast and furious, and I just had to share. I had posed the question “what do you collect?”, and whew! some of the answers are wild! Personally, I collect coins, linen handkerchiefs (yes, that’s a strange one), porcelain hinged boxes, and blue and white china. Now, here are the answers so far–

The most popular items to collect seem to be silver spoons, thimbles, shot glasses from vacations, china tea cups, lapel pins from ski resorts and beads from an assortment of Mardi Gras events.

Next are hub caps, comic books, angels, Nancy Drew books (I have those too, as well as the Hardy Boys), Christmas ornaments of a certain type, and the magazines Playboy and National Geographic.

The oddest (so far) are pop tops from soda cans (someone has over 9000 of them!), wrist bracelets from different medical operations, human teeth (?) and photos of headstones in cemetaries with the same last name.

I’m always interested in what’s out there…….

Collectors

I got into an interesting discussion with a man on a late night flight I was on this weekend. He was going through that “Sky Mall” magazine with all the weird things in it, looking for golf balls. He collects golf balls from everywhere, and said he had about 3000 (really!) of them that were displayed in his house. (which leads me to wonder where he keeps them, and who dusts them?)

Anyway, we got to talking about collections…..and my question to you is “what do you collect?”

Gifts from God

I’ve heard parents say that their children are “a gift from God”, but never heard an example quite so poignant as I did this weekend. I met a woman who had one child, and she and her husband desperately wanted another. They tried and tried, to no avail. Fertility treatments, still nothing. Finally they decided to give up on adding to their family, and to move on with life. They planned a wonderfully exotic trip to Thailand, complete with side trips to several islands–something they had wanted to do together for years. As the date approached, they became more and more excited. And suddenly, the woman found out she was pregnant. A miracle! A gift from God! But wait, there’s more. Because she was an “older mother”, she was forbidden to travel. The trip had to be canceled. They were crushed. Their departure date came….and left. Life went on. And then the tragic news of a tsunami that hit the exact area that they would have been staying. Had it not been for their (yet unborn) child, they would have been there.

They named their daughter Caris (from the Biblical “Charis”, meaning “grace”). I have no doubt that she will do amazing things in her lifetime.