5. Childhood memory

My grandparents retired in the late 80s and moved to Hatteras Island in North Carolina. When I was five or six years old my Pop found a small dead shark on the beach and cut out its jaw for my brother and me. He left it on an anthill so the ants would clean it, but one of the local feral cats stole it. Weeks later he found another dead shark on the beach and cut out the jaw, but this time he hung it on the clothesline for the flying bugs to clean. Then he shellacked it (accidentally jabbing his fingers on the teeth in the process) and gave it to us. He died in 2001. I'm 33 now and I still have the jaw, and it's become a sort of talisman to me.