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In my previous post, I shared a lot of information about my family and our fascination with the television show Twin Peaks. In the series, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper stays at a hotel call the Great Northern Hotel.  His room number is 315. Many key scenes in the series take place in the hotel room including the season one finale where Agent Cooper is shot.  There are several scenes where references are made to Agent Cooper’s room number 315. In the reboot of the series, the key and keychain for this room play a significant role in pulling the story together. The reboot was filmed about 25 years after the original series and is supposed to take place 25 years after the events in the original.  When the keychain, with the promise of paying the postage if dropped in a mailbox, shows up in the new series, it is a throwback to simpler times before the advancement of hotel room technology. 

When the television series Twin Peaks originally aired, my wife and I were instant fans.  Our interest in this David Lynch related series came about because we were fans of his film Eraserhead. We watched the first season and were hooked.  We bought the book The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer to read over the summer between the first and second season. We read any books or articles related to the series.  We were excited to watch the episode of SNL with Kyle MacLachlan as the host.  We had good friends that were also fans that lived in Memphis.  It seems like we had recorded much of the series and binge watched it with our friends.  When the series was over, we met them in Memphis to go see Fire Walk With Me.  Over the years we purchased the series on Laserdisc and several different versions of DVD and Blu-Ray.  

My son had his first birthday a few months after my family moved to Middle Tennessee.  His sister was 3.  We moved to a community where we didn’t know anyone.  We started attending the Methodist church in town and soon made friends there.  One of the ladies that the got to know from the first was Joanne.  She worked in the nursery and fell in love with our kids. She was big intimidating woman with a sweet spirit and a heart of gold. My first impression of here was that she didn’t look like the kind of person that you would want to entrust to take care of your children.  But there were other people in the nursery that looked like they were more responsible that would keep any eye on her.  She didn’t keep herself that well, appeared to be relatively poor and was probably not very well educated. But she was dedicated to taking good care of our kids and she did a good job.

One of the items that you will find in our printer’s drawer is a playing card. The back of the card is printed with “Wheeler and Steele”.  The Steele family lived across the street and a couple of doors up the hill from us when my family lived on Vine Street in Alamo.  My earliest memories are of the houses we lived in on Vine Street and my parents playing cards with the Steeles on Friday and Saturday nights.  Their daughter Nan and I are the same age.  We would spend time together playing while our parents played cards.  Their game of choice was canasta.  I never understood how to play the game and I understand that they didn’t play by the official canasta rules.  But they wore out many decks of cards over the years.  At one point, they ordered a deck of cards with their names on the back.  This deck became the official deck.  They played with it long after the cards were worn out.

Printer’s drawers were originally used in the printing business to store the type that was used in the presses.  When printing technology changed most of the type was melted and repurposed for other things.  Many of the drawers from the type cabinets were sold to antique stores where they were sold as knick-knack shelves.  We have one of these in our music room.  But there is a story behind our printer’s drawer that makes it special.