Plus two more

These came to me very early this morning when I was about to go to sleep.

In the 5th grade, I developed a knack for folding paper cranes. One day, I ended up with a really small piece of paper, and given some free time for whatever reason, produced a crane about a mm cubed. To be honest though, it wasn't a true crane... it lacked the four folds around the wings that differentiate the more ornate crane from the functional flapping bird. But actually, if your fingers were little enough, you would be able to make the bird flap its wings. Anyway, I thought that was so special that I tried to repeat it, but while the cranes I made afterwards were still very tiny, none of them approached the degree of tininess of that first one. I was very proud of myself though, and showed Heflin the first. I was praised. Afterwards, I presented him with each new creation until one day he finally laughed and said "what's with you and making miniscule paper birds?" I think this puzzled me. Was this not what I was supposed to be doing? Wasn't good craftsmanship unconditionally cool? Do we need reasons for the things that we do? I still haven't answered these questions.

That first crane, though nearly lost on several very tense occasions, is still in my possession. I keep it in one of a set of little drawers that my dad brought back from one of his early business trips to Italy. I keep a lot of randomly valuable things in those drawers, including a penny for each year I've been alive to ensure longevity. In the 1st or 3rd or 5th grade... I don't remember when, just where the teacher was sitting in the room at the time, our teacher read us a book in which a little girl asked her 100 year old grandmother how she managed to live so long. The grandmother told her that if she collected 100 pennies, each minted in a different year of her life, in a box that was given to her as a gift, she too would see that ripe old age. The prospect of death before 100 was a very serious concern for me as a child, so I started collecting right away, thinking that if I could at least avoid physical injury, that the pennies would ward away death for a good long time. Also, I wanted to see if it was true or not. But anyways, I've diligently added to this collection every year or every two years as I remember, but haven't since we moved and I lost track of the drawers. If I survive until I get home, I should probably search it out and invest those last few years.