Requiem for a Mirror Snake

One of the characteristics of hoarders is the tendency to attach deep historical and emotional meaning to any object, no matter how mundane. It's why they can't throw anything out.

I'm not that bad (I think), but I'm a sentimentalist and keep a lot of useless stuff around because of history.

Case in point: My mirror snake.

It's a cheap stuffed animal I won from a crane machine during a high school Key Club leadership convention in the Poconos in 1988 or '89. Ever since then, it's been wrapped around the rear-view mirror arm of every car I've owned.

Yesterday, I had to move it ("it," since I never named it) to check the serial number on my EZ pass transponder. (FYI: The serial number is 11 digits. The number you get when you check your online account is a 7-digit transponder number, with a 3-digit agency code that's actually a prefix, even though it displays after the transponder number. The clever among you will note that this only makes 10 digits. You need to add a leading zero to the 7-digit transponder number to get to 11. None of this is mentioned on the web site.)

After 20+ years of temperature extremes and direct sunlight, it fell apart, splitting in four places.

I'm not that much of a sentimentalist that I didn't throw it out.

But not before taking a picture, and memorializing it in a blog post.

Sic transit gloria mundi.