Stuff, Private Space and Honesty by Florence Draper

My memory has never been very good so I would always try to save some small token of a momentous occasion to remind me of the event. Following are some examples of what I saved.
Back to an early hair cut when I was about three years old. I hated watching my hair fall to the floor so my sister Gwen gave me a little light brown curl to save so I would always remember the color of my hair when I was three. She gave me a little silver colored container about the size of a quarter. Maybe it once contained rouge. I am not sure. But the small curl fit into the space exactly. Fast forward forty years or so. I find the container empty. I knew our newly adopted son had no idea why that bit of hair was important to me and why after more than forty years of saving I felt bad because it was gone. He had no idea why I was unhappy about finding the empty container.

At BYU I had a number of pretty rings in my jewelry box. I also had many roommates during the four years I spent in the dorm or Heritage Halls. Now I don’t remember what the rings looked like or who gave them to me except for the silver puzzle ring my brother-in-law Loren, a pilot, brought me from a foreign country. It was one of the few puzzles I could put together. Sometimes a date would take a ring off my finger to "examine it" and I would forget about it and never see it again. At any rate when I graduated the rings were gone except for the diamond I only take off to clean and it remains on my finger more than fifty years later.

Back in 1955 when I was twenty-one years old my mother and I traveled to and from Europe via the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, the large ocean liners of the day. I saved two momentoes from that trip. One was a button emblazoned with the British Lion from the uniform of a young Scotsman about my age who ran one of the elevators. He gave it to me so I would remember him. He was astounded that after accepting an inviting with him to ride the elevator, when we stopped between floors I thought we were going to talk and get acquainted. I convinced him that I actually was innocent of his intentions and there was something to life besides women and hard liquor. Hence the momento from his uniform. I kept the button in my jewelry box for nearly fifty years when it disappeared.

Being on board ship was fun. Lots of dancing and game thanks to the recreation director. During one contest I was dancing with a young man from "Down Under." We won the prize for dancing the longest with a potato between our foreheads. I was given a small silver plated spoon with the Queen Mary logo on the handle. That also lasted in my jewelry box for some time.

While in Belgium visiting a few days with my brother James, there serving a mission for our church, in we were eating mussels in Brussels when I bit into a small pearl. It was a little larger than the head of a pin. Since it had been cooked it wasn’t a great color and wasn’t exactly round but I thought it amusing to be eating mussels in Brussels so kept that small pearl with the other memory helps in my jewelry box. It lasted there nearly as long as the button.

Back to my youth. My oldest brother served a mission in the Southern States. Years later a daughter of one of the people he baptized asked to stay at our house while she waited to accompany her Navel officer husband overseas. We were a three hour drive from San Francisco where she set sail after a month or so with us. She was fun to be with. I was about ten or eleven years old. Mother had purchased individual crystal salt and pepper shakers with silver tops. Mother set a nice table at Sunday dinners. When this new bride left our home we never hear from her again... or saw Mothers pretty little salt and pepper shakers. A shame she thought more of those than of us. Things are of very little value, not near the value of memories they evoke of people and special events.