grandpa's cabinets

One of the best things about being a little kid and going to your grandparents house is the occasional snooping that you get to do. I'm not talking about modern grandparents who are ruining a favorite grandkid pastime when they live in a condo on a golf course without any interesting old stuff to rummage around in. Old time grandparents like my grandparents had strange decrepit houses with creaky stairs and musty basements filled with a stained cardboard boxes and stubborn dresser drawers. If you got a chance to sneak a peak in their stuff, and you always did, you saw things that made you think your grandparents had been spies, criminals or were running an illegal landfill.

I still can picture some of those cherished moments of snooping. It was usually dark and dingy and I would carefully slide open a squeaky drawer and see foreign money with writing that looked Chinese, shotgun shells and Indian arrowheads. One of my grandpas worked at an amunition plant and he collected every kind of ammunition there was. When I opened his big old wooden cabinets in the attic it seemed to me that he had about 20 or 30 guns. Forget Narnia's woods between the worlds, this was a stockpile for the WAR between the worlds.

Still, it was the little drawers in those cabinets held the most fascination for me. They held cloves that smelled really good, stamps and postcards bearing trivial tidbits of information. There were pockets knives and watch fobs and strange looking razor blades, tools and fishing lures. It was a boy's paradise to look in grandpa's cabinets.

I've decided that I'm going to start collecting interesting odds and ends for my grandson to snoop out. What a travesty it would be to have cabinets that contained only fingernail clippers, half used tubes of Chap stick and a few pennies. What kind of lousy grandpa would that be? I want to be the kind of grandpa that evokes awe and amazement on grandchild snooping expeditions.

So I have a miniature replica of a mummified cat, a necklace with five sharks teeth, some interesting sea shells, an Australian penny (which is huge) rattlesnake rattles, a wooden cross, a few small motorcycle parts, just for starters. I can't wait till the little rascal starts to snoop and I get to call out, "Where are you little Z? You're not snooping in grandpa's cabinets are you?"