The Paper Telly

A couple of weekends ago I finally decluttered and dusted the top of the hutch over the liquor cabinet. Most of the items on top of it needed cleaning, the space itself required rearranging and some items, well, it was just time for them to go.

I finally parted with the bottle that contained 40-year-old port that my dear friends gifted me back when I turned 40. I decanted the bottle caps that had been accumulating in the pewter mug Dad got as a member of the CFB Gimli "Corporal's Club." And I realized that a paper keepsake had become too dusty to clean or salvage, and needed to be recycled.

It was a tiny paper replica of a television Fenya had made when she was eight or nine years old. The 5" screen depicted a hockey game in a packed arena, with the words "Go Lemons Go!" displayed on one of the concourses, presumably referring to the team in yellow. Such was the attention to detail that the set even has a triangular antenna affixed to the top of it, something I don't think Fenya had ever seen in real life.

I don't remember the circumstances clearly, but she had made it for me out of scrap paper with tape and crayons when I worked at GE Money. It was not a job I relished going to, and I think she made it to cheer me up, which it did.

The paper tv had a prominent spot on my desk until I left the job about a year and a half after starting (to take a position where still I work today). I didn't have the heart to simply 86 it at the time, so atop the hutch it went. 

When I took it down, some of the structural integrity of the cube was lost due to the adhesive on the tape drying out over a decade and half. It was tragically dusty and unlikely to survive a cleaning, and I admitted it was time to say goodbye to this keepsake - but not before doing three things.

First I took a picture of it, no longer trusting my memory to maintain such things.

Next I called Fenya, and sent her the picture. I related the story as I remembered it, and she corroborated parts of it, not remembering many more details than I. I told her how happy the little tv had made me at work, the whimsy it would provoke when my glance fell upon it, the gratitude for having such a creative and thoughtful child (two of them, in fact). It got a little misty.

Lastly, I vowed to write about it here, to affix it a little more firmly in my memory, and give me a place to re-visit it periodically.