My wife came home a few months ago with two identical tins that she found at a thrift shop for something like a quarter apiece. Like most women, she will often come home with things that we don’t need because they were on sale. She bought them thinking I would love them in the same way that I love Tastykakes. And I do like the tins; I just really don’t have the room for them. Consequently, these tins have been sitting in my living room ever since, trying to find their purpose in life.

On a similar note, I am expecting today a delivery of very spiffy storage boxes and supplies (for example, archival-quality polypropylene postcard sleeves, to help preserve the collection), so I will have some new boxes for all of the new postcards that have recently joined the collection. (Also, the boxes that Aunt Brenda kept hers in are getting a little ragged.)

When my wife asked where I intended to keep the new storage boxes, I indicated that I would put them near where these Tastykake tins are situated; she then came up with the brilliant idea of keeping the supplies in these tins.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose.

For those of you who have never heard of Tastykakes, they are the most fantastic single-serving cakes and pies on the planet, having been manufactured in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania since 1914. Growing up in New Jersey, my Aunt Brenda and I would walk to the nearest store to get them almost daily during summers off from school, and I could buy them in the school cafeteria during the school year. I used to be able to get them on a regular basis in Florida, but they had obviously been frozen for transport, seriously affecting their quality. Here in my neck of Georgia, it is rare to find them and, when I do, they’ve still been frozen.

A couple of my employees are expected to return today from a boondoggle in Pennsylvania; they were given strict instructions to return with Tastykakes in hand. If there are none on my desk when I get to work, I may have to fire somebody.