Wednesday April 23rd.

A friend wrote me the other day about how the post of my cats staring at me as I woke made her think about our “moments” and how important they are and how we must treasure them. She told me to make sure that I kept that morning as one of my “moments” because it was such an awesome one. There are so many of those moments in each of our lives and too many people just brush them aside.

Memories are a very powerful thing! Our memories give us these “moments”! What makes us remember? For me, there are smells, there are colors and there are images that I store up in what I call my visual Rolodex. I consider myself blessed because I have a very visual memory. I can close my eyes and actually see many of the events from my life just as if I was watching a movie. Today was the full circle completion of one of those “moments” for me!

My father worked at a paper company, he was one of their salesmen. On the occasional Saturday my father would take me into work with him. As a 5 year old I thought it was so cool to see where my dad worked and to sit in the chair in his office while he finished up the few things that he needed to get done. We would walk past these huge machines that would be clattering and whirring away. One of the biggest things that I remembered was this aroma that was everywhere, it was this intense sweet smell, and a child loves the smell of sweet. This five year old, at that very moment, recognized that smell as the aroma in her father’s clothes. That was the way that he smelled when he came home from the office at the end of the day.

Every night when he came home he would empty his pockets, put his change on his dresser next to his keys (to this day I know the sound that his key ring made) and he had this “thing” that he used at work that I loved to play with. I now know that it was a tri-fold brass magnifying loupe. I would play with it for hours, looking at bugs and rocks and any other thing that I could think of. I loved that thing because it was small, fit into the nifty little leather snap case and it folded up really cool, the sound of it clicking closed was also very excellent.

I had forgotten about that smell and that brass gadget as I grew older. It was not till I went back to Dayton after a 10-year absence, as I drove past my fathers old paper plant and that aroma burst through my car window that everyone of those Saturday’s and the memory of that brass loupe came flooding back. I wanted to find that loupe more than anything else at that moment. I tore through my father’s belongings and could not find it. He had given it to my niece when she was about the same age as I was when I played with it and she had lost it.

Well, two years later, on a searching whim, I found one on E-Bay and I bid on it. The Quality Engraving & Electrotype Co. loupe arrived today. It is now all shined up and sitting among many other little treasures that I have around my house and I could not be happier knowing that I will get to see it every day. It is exactly like my fathers. Now I can close my eyes and see those Saturday’s sitting at his desk and I can see that loupe sitting on his dresser as this five year old grabs for it. I think it was a well spent twenty dollars.