syntiche

        After my grandfather died, I took his most prized possession - the last fragment of family I had left - and planted it in the garden outside my apartment building.  It was an old brown shoe-box, corners wrinkled from years of fighting gravity, fingerprints eroded into the weak cardboard from endless hours of his cradling.  It was the trophy that sat proudly in the center of his fireplace mantle.          Once, when I was eight years old, I asked him about it.        "Grandpa," I said, "what's in that old box?"        A sly grin crawled across his old face, and he lifted the shoe-box off the mantle and sat it on his lap.  "Well,