Blade Rundown

  If you count each item in your home, what would the number be? We must have thousands of things in our houses, even those of us in modest homes, and on modest budgets.  Things just come in the door, over periods of time  and from various sources until every drawer is full, all cabinet shelves groan with acquisitions, and the surfaces of every table and stand are covered with accumulations.
   Could you explain or document how these items came into your life?  I myself think I could.  I recall that a little cast iron bank was handed to me in my backyard by a girl named Marianne Mahar.  "I have a new house," she told me and then took this little bank from her jacket pocket. She said she didn't want it, and though we were taught by our mother not to take things, I let her give me the bank, still have it.  It takes up very little room. But yes, it is a thing.  I may post a picture if I can find it.
    I also have a cast iron obelisk that was given to me by an old friend, and by now I mean a very old friend.  He worked one summer in construction, actually more demolition, and he found this obelisk in the ruins of a church they had torn down.  I know where it is at the moment, but can't disturb a slumberer.
  Our dining room set, split up in our small house between the kitchen and the living room, was donated to us by my husband's aunt and uncle who enjoyed a pretty lavish lifestyle and replaced furniture frequently. Their furniture arrived at our house in a Colonie Liquor truck the same week David was born.
    The jacket I wear most frequently, through  about nine months of the year, was given to me by my sister.  Coincidentally, we had each bought almost identical black hooded jackets.  I wore mine to my migrant teaching job, and it suffered a lot of hard wear, from being placed on the floor in school hallways when that was the only available workspace to being infested with various strains of fauna.  Dorothy replaced hers with a new one and she gave me her old one, which I still wear--after all these years.
   This train of item memories was triggered today by an item I use probably every other day.  It is a little green-handled knife, and I last used it a few hours ago to slash the cellophane on a Marie Callender's Steak & Potato Frozen Dinner.
It has so many other uses I can't enumerate them: suffice it to say it is a favorite knife, albeit having only a 2 and a half inch very slender blade.
    I bought this knife myself, at the old Stanley's Department Store in downtown Troy.  My daughter had an orthodontic appointment at Dr. Kessler's office on 3rd Street, and it must have been one of her first, probably an installation, because I was told the wait would be about an hour and a half or two hours.  Not wanting to spend that much time in his dimly-lit waiting room, I walked outside and crossed  over a block to about the only store left in the city at that time. I was prepared to shop, but the store was getting a little dated and seedy then, and I recall not seeing anything I wanted.  I went downstairs to the bargain basement, hoping to buy something, anything to justify my reason for being in that store.  In a  bin of miscellaneous sale items, I spotted this little knife, probably notable  due to its lime green plastic handle. The price was less than a dollar or two, and so I bought it. I remember wondering what on earth I would ever use it for, but I stuck it  inside of my knife drawer right next to the stove, where it has resided now for almost 35 years.  If I ever have to leave this house and have a limit to  my possessions, I would choose the little green knife as one to take with me.

 

  And the plastic ruler was from Dorothy's workplace.