7. This Week's Stories and Requests for Help We try to post stories and
comments from our readers each week. Send your story to newsletter@tias.com. 
With everyone enjoying the outdoors and vacations, we're a little short on new
stories. For now, we'll republish some interesting stories from past issues,
but we sure would love to hear new stories!

Here is another interesting reprint from 2002:

Things that a father keeps. Sometimes, it's the little things that a father
keeps to remind him of his family...  My father was hard working and through
the tough times of the fifties he supported a young family.  In the sixties he
succeeded well enough to build a new home just in time for his fourth and
final child and even "spoiled" his family with a built in swimming pool.

Though our father supplied us with materialistic amenities, he was not one to
show great emotion, a common trait among men who grew up in the thirties and
forties.  The seventies came and Daddy worked even harder, working nights and
weekends and during this period I moved into my own place, creating a greater
emotional distance.  Then the nineties dawned and the millennium was
approaching...but he would never see it.  Cancer would take him after nine
long struggling years.

As my mother and I began to clean out my dad's "junk drawer" we laughed at the
broken watches he hoarded, foreign coins that were never spent and ink pens
long dry.  "He was such a pack-rat, especially stupid stuff" my mother
claimed, explaining earlier she had discovered a box of our flip-flops from
summers long ago.  Then among the junk, a certain little box, too small, I
thought to myself, to hold anything important.  But how I was mistaken.  For
in the box was the tinniest ring I had ever seen. My mother gasped and took if
from me.  " I thought this was lost long ago" then turned it back towards me
so that I could see that it was initialed....my initials!  It was my baby ring
that had been given me at my christening.  He had kept a part of me to himself
all these years.  The ring now sits open to display on a shelf, next to my
baby picture and one of my father.....Dee Dee

If you have a story about an unusual collection, your best yard sale find or
how you started your collection, drop us a note at newsletter@tias.com.
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--- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Dada-2
 * Origin: Prism bbs (1:261/38)