Different things have different meaning to people, so there are rare occasions when someone gets rid of something and has NO IDEA just how meaningful it is to the person who ends up with it. That happened in my office this morning and, fortunately for me, I was on the receiving end.
My fiancee walked into my office and gave me an opened box of candy. "I don't need these," she said, "so you take them." People do this all the time, get rid of something that they don't want joining them on a scale at some point. No big deal. The world keeps spinning.
For me, though, it stopped for about three minutes while I once again got my nostalgia fix. She could have handed me a box of any one of dozens of candies--but she gave me Jujubes. These were my father's favorite candy. These little multicolored lumps will be forever burned into my memory in a small, 1/2 cup sized Tupperware container on the endtable next to my father's reading chair. He was the only person I ever knew who ate them regularly (hey, they're fat free), and I've only ever really associated them with him. If I asked nicely, I even got a few.
. . . like gems in a treasure chest of long ago. Now I have a whole box--well, half a box. I ate some.
