Happy Birthday, Erin (multi-page)

11. The story behind this knife begins on Erin’s first trip with me down to Georgia, where I’m from. We’d flown into Atlanta and instead of going straight down to south Georgia, where I mainly grew up and where my Mom was, we went up to north Georgia in a little town called Summerville, where I lived for a little while. While there, we spent a lot of time just going around and enjoying the nature. It’s really very green there with lots of rivers, mountains and beautiful nature to enjoy. Erin said she’d never been anywhere like it and we both really enjoyed ourselves. Some of my favorite pictures and memories of her are when we were exploring that area, which I barely remembered myself at the time, and she was just so beautiful and full of life during these days. Once, while we were driving around, we passed a yard sale and decided to stop and check it out. There were a bunch of old knives and we bought two of them for like $3, including this one. It was so ugly at the time, all grey and covered with oxidation or something, and I was convinced that if I spent some time polishing, it would look really nice. I’m sure she was rolling her eyes at me. Fast forward years later, I joined an honor society called Tau Beta Pi while I was in college and part of initiation was polishing this big brass watch key that was a symbol for the society. With all the tools and polishes in hand, I finally pulled out this knife and started working on it. I would sit there on the couch next to Erin while we watched TV or did whatever and I would absentmindedly polish it. The handle was brass and it started to look really good. One time I was sitting next to her on the couch with the knife and jokingly kept poking her with it in the thigh (I could be really annoying, sometimes). She went to playfully hit me with the back of the hand, telling me to stop, and I got scared she would hit the knife so I tried to pull it away really quickly. My hand pulling the knife away and her had slapping me came together at just the right point and I sliced open the back of her hand in a gash that was at least 3 inches long. There was a huge flap of skin hanging down and so much blood. I was staring at her hand, my mouth hanging open, and she didn’t realize at first what had happened. Without saying a word I just grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her into the kitchen to put her hand under running water. We got the flap of skin settled into place and wrapped it up tight to keep it from bleeding too much before we sped to the emergency room, trying to get our story straight so I didn’t get arrested for domestic violence. We laughed about it a lot after that and she had a huge scar on the back of her hand for the rest of her life.