On one of my trips through my mother’s home town in Upper Michigan, I stopped by my Aunt Eleanore’s house. She was lying on the couch propped up by pillows, eating candies and enjoying the hell out of just having had surgery. After her delighted and horrified narration of symptoms, emergency rushing, and waking up, she directed me to Exhibit A on the mantelpiece: a plastic bottle with four liver-colored wedges. Her gallstones. I was impressed. They looked mystical, like some kind of alien dice for a game of chance involving the fate of empires. I spent the rest of the day bathing in the light of her celebrity. She died several years ago. I’ve been meaning to ask my cousin what happened to them.

Through the late sixties we saved the shrapnel Al tweezered out of his thighs and arms. By the mid seventies, unless the slag was of a considerable size, you know, like as big as a malformed pencil eraser, not much was said and if he kept them, I never knew. But in those early days of gratefulness at being alive and pure, unadulterated awe at the amount of uncontainable laughter (not to mention good sex) still to be had — despite the fact half a leg had been left in The Gulf of Tonkin — we kept every small, dark bit of foreign substance that surfaced. It was fascinating, how it would just keep coming. The creamy white skin of his thigh, clear of any blemish on Monday, might be pebbled with peppery-colored floaters just under the skin by that same Friday, or a month later, or six. We just never knew. And then quite suddenly they’d be there. Usually only one to three in number, but sometimes the shrapnel surfaced like a flock of small birds flown up from some deeper branch to try to break through the sky of his skin.

For years we kept all those bits in a small prescription bottle for some pills we had worn out; and kept the bottle in the nightstand drawer. I can remember it rolling around inside when I’d sling the drawer open too fast or slam it closed too fiercely, even after he died. Especially after he died, I suppose. Don’t ask me where the little prescription bottle with its flesh-tearing souvenir b-b’s has gone. I don’t have a answer. Or where the nightstand went either. I’m certain, if I thought about it all long enough I would recall what happened to the nightstand–but why?

I was packing up a long lock of hair to mail off to Locks of Love and started thinking about all the pieces of human bodies that we save for sentimental purposes. Picasso is rumored to have saved all his hair and nail clippings and even cataloged them with dates. He was afraid of witchcraft. I have all my children’s baby teeth. A little baby food jar of bloodied gems. I saved them because I pulled them and when I handle them I can still feel the cringe that grasped me each time I plucked a sharp little tooth from their mouths.

My mother was a nurse in the forties. She and her whole graduating class divied up the skeleton they studied by. She got a toe. She keeps it in her jewelry case. A stranger’s toe for which she harbors a strange reverence. On the other side of my family there is a story that a bar of soap came here from a concentration camp. It so bothered the wife of the soldier that she buried it in a home made ceremony in her back yard. It is most likely a myth that the soap was of human origin but the tale is there just the same. It’s the tale that makes it real, so I want to hear your body part stories. Don’t just tell me that your mother has all your baby teeth or your first lock of hair. I want to know the who, what, where, when and why of all those skeletons in your closets. Along the way, I’ll tell my stories.

It struck me that there are millions of us who keep parts of family members, pets, even strangers for unspoken reasons. Is it reverence? Love? Religion? What is your reason? Is it akin to keeping a religious relic? Nothing is too strange or too normal to discuss.

I know someone who buried her pet in a foam ice chest so that she could exhume the remains when she moved. There are people who have their dear pets taxidermied. Some of us keep things that doctor’s remove from our bodies, gall stones, kidney stones, parasitic twins.

Don’t just tell me that you have a golf ball sized kidney stone that was made into a ring. Tell the story. Have you visited places that hold human body parts as relics? Lets stick the spade in the ground and see what turns up.