So there’s this old New England tale – the kind that gets passed along from one old fisherman to another, then handed down to me when I worked on boats and cooked on a wood stove or a diesel one, up at 4am and in bed at 11pm (the nights that prepared me well for newborns)…

The story goes that New Englanders are notorious about saving things – brown paper, all manner of jars, buttons.  One guy saved everything…[at this point one elaborates the story, piling items up and stretching out the story until dinner is ready]…and when he died, and people sorted through his stuff, they found neatly organized wrapping paper and boxes, one with other smaller boxes and maybe one with empty toilet paper rolls and another with nearly used up pencils and erasers, and another [and so on]…and finally, a box filled with bits of string and labelled “Pieces of string too short to Save.”

Dinner is ready.