When I turned eight, my grandma gave me a little red plastic army soldier for my birthday.<\/p>\n
I thought it was a strange gift, but I thanked him.<\/p>\n
The following year, he gave me another one.<\/p>\n
And then another.<\/p>\n
By the time I started college, I had thirteen of them sitting on my bedroom shelf.<\/p>\n
I figured Grandma just loved army toys. I never wanted to hurt his feelings, so I acted surprised every year.<\/p>\n
Last weekend, my sister noticed the collection.<\/p>\n
“Have you ever looked underneath them?” she asked.<\/p>\n
I hadn’t.<\/p>\n
She picked one up and showed me a tiny letter scratched into the base.<\/p>\n
Every soldier had a different letter and a small number.<\/p>\n
We arranged them in numerical order.<\/p>\n
Together, they spelled:<\/p>\n
“LOOK IN THE SHED.”<\/strong><\/p>\n I immediately drove to Grandma’s house.<\/p>\n He smiled when I showed him.<\/p>\n Then he took me to his old workshop.<\/p>\n Inside a metal box were photographs of two young boys playing with the exact same green soldiers.<\/p>\n One was Grandma.<\/p>\n The other was his younger brother, Daniel, who had died in a car accident when they were teenagers.<\/p>\n Grandma explained that he’d started giving me the soldiers because he wanted to share something that had once made him happy.<\/p>\n “I figured someday you’d ask,” he said.<\/p>\n We spent the afternoon looking through photographs.<\/p>\n After all those years, I finally understood the gifts.<\/p>\n Grandma hadn’t been repeating himself. He’d been trying to share a memory.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I turned eight, my grandma gave me a little red plastic army soldier for my birthday. I thought it was a strange gift, but I thanked him. The following year, he gave me another one. And then another. By the time I started college, I had thirteen of them sitting on my bedroom shelf. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10652,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10653,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10651\/revisions\/10653"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storypulls.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}