Ngahi Bidois: People can be magnets too

When family members travel, I buy T shirts, my wife tea towels, my son animals (not real ones although I think he would like to) and my daughter tends to buy clothes. However, together we buy a fridge magnet or a Christmas tree decoration - so on our fridge doors are magnets from all over the world ranging from Cornwall to California.

Each of those fridge magnets cost a few dollars to purchase but their real value for our whanau is not the time, expertise and labour it took someone to make them, but the memories attached to them and the good experiences they bring back. When we look at the Paris fridge magnet, we remember going up the Eiffel Tower, eating snails and trying to speak French to buy crepes to eat. When we look at the London one, we remember seeing Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, the River Thames via their "Duck" and going up the London Eye, which is the tallest Ferris wheel in the Western Hemisphere. Those fridge magnets are a vault of memories.

Many years ago, I remember taking my grandmother home after we had been at a tangi for a few days. While we were gone, a relative had decided to surprise my grandmother with a "tidy up" of her place - which was never untidy anyway.

However, as my grandmother walked slowly around her whare observing what the relative had tidied up, she became more and more upset and, eventually, sat down and started crying. She cried for ages.

It was quite awhile before she was able to explain her grief. I can summarise it with one part of the conversation. "Why did you throw out that little flower that I had in the little vase on the kitchen window sill just above the sink?" The reply was something like, "That flower had been there for years Nana, it was time to throw it out." My grandmother replied as tears started flowing again: "Well my dear, I wish you had asked me first because that was the last flower my daughter gave me before she passed away many years ago and, as I do the dishes, that flower reminds me of her."

I am sure you get the gist of the conversation. In short, my grandmother's "fridge magnets" had been thrown out by someone who had not realised the value of the various taonga. Fortunately, my grandmother had many other taonga in her whare which did not get tidied up by our well-meaning relative.

Things that might seem cheap and old to others may be worth more than gold to us. So what are your fridge magnets in your life? What are the things that you have in your life to remind you of good experiences and people? Do you keep them where you see them each day or are they hidden from sight and memory? When it comes to fridge magnets, it is nice to know they do more than stick to the fridge, they also help memories and people to stick to us.