BURN BABY, BURN

I can hear you saying: Why is the cat looking at the matchbooks? I can answer you truthfully: I don't know!

Then I hear you saying: Why do you have a basket full of matchbooks? I can answer you truthfully again: I can't figure out how to get rid of them!

When Jer and I were first married, way back in 1975, we started collecting matchbooks from every restaurant, every hotel and every destination we went to. We had friends that were doing it, so we figured it would be a nice thing for a newly-married couple to do. If we wrote on the inside of the cover the date we acquired them and any other identifying information ... well, I don't know if we even had any special reason to do it. At that time we didn't think we would get old and use them as prompts for reminiscing (which we haven't done yet because we aren't yet of an age to really consider ourselves old, though 79 and 73 are getting close!)

Throughout the first 25 years of our marriage we added to the collection regularly. We kept them in a huge brandy snifter that sat on the floor in our den. Little by little we forgot to make notes inside the covers, and little by little because of the drop in cigarette smoking matches weren't such an automatic thing at restaurants and hotels. Eventually the brandy snifter broke, and we drafted this nice basket to replace it. As we downsized from large house to smaller house to large apartment to small apartment it became more and more difficult to find a suitable place for our collection. And to be truthful again, that collection doesn't matter so much now after 33 years of marriage.

But we had to figure out how we could retire our match collection honorably. Much thinking went into this. We couldn't get any of our kids to take it. We didn't want to change our wills to include the old matches as an asset to be distributed. We were sure the trash collectors didn't want to have a big bag of matches tossed into their trucks. And we were sure a fire department inspector would have a stroke if he or she saw them sitting in a corner of our little apartment eating area, where they reside now in their basket. So how to get rid of them honorably.

The answer came in two parts. One is that we could burn a lot of candles in our house. That we are doing, though you don't need more than one candle at a time in 790 square feet of living space. The other is that we could substitute burning a match for using a room deodorant spray when we frequented the commode. In case you've never heard of using a match for that purpose, it works much better than spray and is kinder to the atmosphere!

If you size up the amount of matches in the basket (20+/- individual matches per book or box), then think of how many bathroom and candle burnings it will take to honorably retire all the matches, this will give you an idea of how long Jer and I have to live. We want to be around to light the last flame.

Now why is the cat looking at the basket of matches? First of all because she is nosy, but mostly it is because I wanted something beside that basket that could give you an idea of just big that basket is -- and Squeaky obliged.