Chocolate Box Treasures

When we moved, we had to pack up a lot of my mother's things and get them ready for storage.  But a few things got packed with our belongings and I came across one of them today.  An old chocolate box with mementoes my mother kept.  And inside it were some old photographs that I had never seen before.  One of them was a real treasure.  Because it was my grandmother, grandfather and my dad when he was a little boy.  I never met my grandmother because she passed away not long after my father was shipped overseas during World War II.  Not being able to come back home, he had to deal with her loss alone with his regiment buddies.  But my Pop-pop, as we called him, lived with us when my dad came home again.  I remember him as a slight man, with a full head of hair.  It remained dark until the day he died.  I have no idea how he got his name of Pop-pop but as kids it was of no concern to us.  He was who he was.  I was about three or four and I can remember my dad and he working on an old car out back of the house.  I remember him sitting on the couch with his legs crossed, and reading the newspaper.  I, also, remember him scraping the butter paper for every last morsel of butter there was.  He told my mother that it was a waste of good food and money to throw away the least little bit available.  A real scrounger he was and tight with his money.  It seems funny now, but that was the era that he grew up in, when things were tight and you made the most of what you had.  Too bad some of us can't learn the true value of things today.  And the unimportence of material things.