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.   
   =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=   
   --------------------------   
      
   --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Dada-2   
    * Origin: Prism bbs (1:261/38)