When my buddy Charles and his wife Hyunjin came to Front Royal for a brief visit last year, Hyunjin took one of my plastic shopping bags and made it into a cute little triangle shaped exactly like the little "footballs" that we kids used to make in school. Here it is:
Call me insane, but I have a hard time throwing away anything hand-made, especially if it's a gift. As much as I appreciate receiving store-bought cards, I fall instantly in love with hand-crafted items: those items, be they hand-drawn cards or knitted socks or homemade Christmas ornaments, represent a real effort made by someone on my behalf, and offer insight into that person's mind and heart. This fact makes such items doubly precious to me.
So I couldn't throw Hyunjin's football away, and I've taken it to Korea with me. It's sitting about a foot away from me as I type this, in fact.
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Oh, that thing! I didn't even know she made that. That's sort of a compulsive thing that she does. It's also a compact way of storing plastic bags. We actually have a plastic bag full of plastic bags in that configuration.
ReplyDeleteI never made the connection between that and those little paper footballs--that's why I had no idea what you were talking about. That's funny that you brought that all the way to Korea. I guess, in a way, it's a sort of spiritual homecoming for the bag.