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A quote: “Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many – not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.” ~~ Charles Dickens
I’ll start with a story …
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I was looking for some pictures mama gave me before she passed when I found the shoebox. There, on the shelf in the closet in the nursery. Funny, I still call it that, even after it became mama’s room and I moved Grace to the larger bedroom.
Gracie grew up fast that summer when she was nine and her meemaw was dying of cancer just across the hall.
Inside were some dried flowers and a couple of yellowed concert tickets and I couldn’t breathe. All these years and it’s like you left yesterday.
You were literally the “girl next door”, our moms were best friends. Hell, girl, we were every small-town cliché, right down to the church basement reception and a baby born six months after the wedding.
We poured everything into the ramshackle house your great uncle got us. We painted the nursery yellow, a cheerful color. Not that it made you happy, though. So, I scrimped, saved and got tickets to your favorite band. And I watched you more than the stage, seeing your eyes light up like they used to.
So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I woke the next morning to Grace’s hungry cries, and you were gone.
Maybe it’s a sign. Grace is packing for college, and I need to finally let you go.
I grab mama’s pictures and dump the shoebox in the trashcan.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
Lloyd says: Ahh….the life box. Here’s my intro lines for “Boxes”
“She was gone, and he was left with two boxes: One contained her ashes…the other contained her life!”
Wombat Lace says: The ticket changed my life.
I was a scrawny kid with an alcoholic dad. Mom worked nonstop to support us kids.We ran around the streets of New York, raiding fruit stands, picking pockets and occasionally fighting with other kids like us.
I usually lost those fights. We were all thin, but I had pneumonia my first year of school. Since then it seemed like I was behind in everything….running, schoolwork,chores. I usually gave up
One afternoon as I looked for spare change in the gutter, a white piece of paper caught my eye. October 26….Admit One…Seat A14..hey, that was today! The big fight I’d heard about nonstop on the radio -Louis vs Marciano! And I had a front-row seat ticket!
Watching Marciano that night persevere until that 8th round changed something in me. He had once been a scrawny kid with pneumonia. But there he was, with that killer right arm that had taken down a champ. And yet everyone said what a good guy he was out of the ring, would give the shirt off his back.
I found my way to Gleason’s the next day. They needed a part-time janitor. I watched, learned, and persevered with work and school until my janitorial service company landed the contract with Madison Square Garden.
You wouldn’t believe the mess people can make.
Cameron says: (Been busy. Now to post!)
“I don’t think you’d understand,” grandpa said. “You live in an age where going to the movies means a friend with a good theater system.”
“Is this one of those ‘Back in my day’ moments?”
“Hush, boy. You’ll understand when it’s your turn.”
“So this ticket?” I prompted.
He smiled. “I had been back from Nam for a few months and moved to this college town. One day, I came bought a ticket. And it was The Return of the Pink Panther so save your breath. Just as I was about to go in, I heard a voice call out to me. It was this group I’d seen on campus. One of the guys looked at me and said ‘Hey! You by yourself?”
“Yes. What of it?” I asked. Grandpa smiled. “I was still in fight mode by then but the guy said ‘Not any more. Come on!’ I went in with them and sat next to his cousin. That ticket was hers and I held onto it ever since.”
When he died the following week, the ticket was in his pocket and was cremated with him. I hope he and grandma are catching a movie on the other side.
(running late because demands of being a small-business owner doing two events in two weeks)
When the last waves of people fled Old Earth, they often had no personal mass allowance, just the clothes they were standing in. Yet many of them managed to bring the strangest thing with them, tucked in a pocket that wasn’t turned out on boarding.
Right now I’m looking at a ticket for a show. An actual paper ticket, which suggests it was a deliberately retro event, rather than something put on by those who were turning against technology. The writing on it is cryptic — a date and a seat — so it clearly was bought in a situation where there could be no question about what event it was for.
Why are both halves present? My understanding is that such tickets were torn in half by the ticket-taker and one half was put in a box and the other returned to the attendee. Did the person get turned away? But if that were the case, why were they given the torn ticket back, rather than it being confiscated?
The story behind it was lost in the chaos of that final flight. Many of the people involved in it were so traumatized they shut away the memories of their former lives and focused on building new lives for themselves on the spaceships that had taken them in, and refused to talk about Old Earth to their children, the first generation of shipborn.
But it was clearly precious to someone, so it will be saved here in the Museum of the Last Flights.
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