The Great Hunter is a packrat. When we got married in 1997, he came with clothing that he hadn’t worn in more than ten years, a crate-sized box of socks in all patterns and colors of the rainbow and tax returns and cancelled checks from the 1970s.

I have a large bedroom in the basement that has been handed down from one child to another, so when there was only one child left at home, he moved from his small upstairs bedroom into the more spacious and private basement bedroom. When he did, the Great Hunter claimed the small vacant upstairs bedroom as his man cave.  Over the years, his “treasures” in his “man cave” have grown to the point that his shelves and walls are overflowing.

I don’t clean his man cave, except to vacuum, but I’m not above nagging him about the layers of dust that cover all the surfaces and the shelves that are crammed full of who-knows-what. One afternoon last year, I gave up and decided to tackle one of his bookshelves, and oh, the treasures I found. I found a musical cuckoo clock I’d given him one year for Christmas and crammed in the corner was a box of books I gave him for another Christmas.

The Great Hunter is a voracious reader and I’ve always supplied him books either through the library or gifts or now on his Kindle. This box of books, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, was a special gift as it was a set I had cobbled together through various Amazon purchases.  I had read all these books back in the 1980s. They’d always been special to me because they had been suggested to me by my oldest brother, Darrell, who himself was a writer.

In the series, Travis McGee is a former college athlete and soldier. He lives on a houseboat named “The Busted Flush” at Bahia Mar Marina’s Slip F-18 in Fort Lauderdale. Think of  a blond Tom Selleck type character in Magnum P.I. then you’ll get who Travis McGee is. McGee finds lost things for other people while getting caught up in love affairs and general mayhem.

In a perfect life, Darrell would have been someone like Travis McGee.  In the early 1970s Darrell decided he was going to attend college in Florida. He packed up his little Miata, drove to Florida, only to find out he’d gotten incorrect information about out-of-state student tuition and he couldn’t afford to attend.

I sat on the floor and opened the box of books and inside there were eighteen paperback books, mostly originals. The Great Hunter didn’t even remember I had given them to him and I encouraged him to give them a try. Over the next several months, he read and enjoyed them and this past Christmas, I gave him the remaining three books in the series.

So today, I was sitting in the recliner in his man cave, talking to him and staring at the mess on his bookshelves when I saw an old newspaper sticking out between some file folders. I pulled it out and I could see it was about the earthquake that struck San Francisco during the World Series in 1989. When I flipped the paper over, much to my delight, I realized it was a St. Louis Sun newspaper. When the St. Louis Sun went into production in September 1989, my brother, Darrell, was hired as its Entertainment Editor. Short of being a sports writer, it was his dream job. As soon as I saw the date of the paper, October 18, 1989, I knew I would find something inside he had written. He’s been gone for thirty-three years and the anniversary of his death was just a few weeks ago, so this was something really special.

After I found the first newspaper, I looked a little further in the mess on the shelf and found another one. What a treasure! Each paper had one or two articles that Darrell had written. It’s strange how something someone wrote can outlive the person who wrote it and almost bring a part of that person back to life; as if a tiny piece of their soul lives in those words. (I wish I could take credit for that last sentence, but it was so perfectly expressed by Olivia Ford in her novel,  “Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame” p.3 that I had to steal it). But Darrell’s soul was definitely in his writing.

So now the newspapers are out of the Great Hunter’s pack rat stash and into mine.