More Than A Day away By Mike Steely
Several years ago, I asked what Focus readers collected, and the answers ran the gamut. My wife and I continue to collect, and one of my favorite things is coffee cups.
Each cup in our wide collection represents trips, events, people and places we want to recall. A glance at just one section of our collection, sitting on two long kitchen shelves, brings back memories.
We have whale cups from viewing them from boats and when my wife petted a Beluga at the Atlanta Aquarium.
Our Knoxville Focus cup, given by the publisher to employees and advertisers, sits inside a plastic bag in a place of honor to remind me of my years of reporting and the newspaper’s history in Knoxville.
Our Quebec cup helps us recall a camping trip we made to Canada years ago, when we went to Montreal and the coast. It was a great and long venture.
Our Lincoln Memorial University Museum cup brings back memories of touring that informative building in Harrogate. It also brings back memories of a visit many years ago to the Ford Theater, Lincoln’s birthplace, and his grave.
We have a cup from Pickett State Park, where we walked through cliffs, rock shelters and arches. We’ve visited most of Tennessee’s state parks and will buy cups or buttons whenever we see them on sale.
We have a rather generic camping vehicle cup to remind us of the many camping trips we’ve made in various RVs we’ve owned over the years.
Among the large collection is a cup commemorating the total eclipse we saw in 2024, a Tabasco sauce cup from our visit to their plant in Louisiana, a London cup from a vacation there that my wife gifted our youngest son and me, and several cups from state and national parks.
I have never counted the number of cups, and the collection continues to grow. We have a few cups of places we haven’t visited, like our Alaska cup, but even that is on our bucket list. And there’s a box of coffee cups in storage that we either didn’t have room on the two long shelves for them or that they are duplicates.
In more than 60 years of marriage and almost 30 years living in Knoxville, we have collected other things as well, including tourist and political buttons, trinkets, keepsakes, Coast Guard hats, books, DVDs, 8-tracks and neckties.
I don’t think of our many collections as things but as memories.
