A radio host was bemoaning the fact that his wife was sending him into the garage to clean it out since much of what was in there was his. He attempted to argue but she had two words to stop him in his tracks: sports equipment. He had to admit the garage was becoming overrun by items purchased every time he tried out a new sport.
He asked listeners to message him admitting items they had too much of yet continue to collect. Shoes, mugs, kitchen gadgets, tools, t-shirts, electronics and holiday decorations were some of the responses.
Although I honestly don’t believe I have too many, my family long ago took to blocking me from aisles that have baskets on display. I love baskets. Any shape, size or color. I get asked what I think I would do with yet another one. Rest assured, I can find a purpose.
My husband showed me a video of a man in a big box store who picked out a very large basket and brought it to his wife to have a look. He wondered if she wanted to buy it so she’d have a basket to store all her baskets. I think she and I could become fast friends.
My other Achilles’ heel is books and mementos related to the British royal family. It started when I was a teenager and has been enabled by family and friends through the years. I have far too many books but anytime I come across a new one I need to have it.
My impulse to buy baskets or books is pretty unremarkable when compared to others. While I purchase what I happen to stumble upon, many are avid collectors of all kinds of specific items. Coins, art, postage stamps, trading cards, comic books, vinyl records, antiques, postcards and refrigerator magnets are collected for fun, or for their investment potential.
Some collections are indeed valuable, while others fall into far more eccentric categories. A dermatologist in North Carolina collects back scratchers. A man in Great Britain has more than 30,000 banana stickers. An Italian man collects different bottled water labels—not the bottled water—the labels.
A far more fun collection for me would be the 10,000 Winnie the Pooh items amassed by a woman in Wisconsin. Or imagine being married to 78-year old Paul Brockman who enjoyed buying his wife new dresses to go ballroom dancing. They began downsizing after the collection reached 55,000 garments.
In the ‘eww’ category is the man who collects celebrity hair and boasts the locks of Edgar Allan Poe, Marilyn Monroe and Ludwig van Beethoven, to name a few. Then there’s the man who has collected 22.1 grams of his own belly button fluff. There’s also the team that has compiled more than 30,000 toenail clippings. Before we say ‘eww’ again, in this case it is for medical research.
We each see value in different things to be sure. As a summer student working in a university’s Communications Department, another student and I were given empty office space and then directed to a storage trailer and told we could take anything that would help us set up an office.
We couldn’t help but laugh as we climbed over desks, tables, chairs and cabinets piled several feet high. It was a treasure hunt that had us asking what we really wanted or needed, and what we were willing to haul across campus and carry up a flight of stairs.
But the laughter continued throughout the summer as we fielded question after question regarding what was going to happen to the furniture when the summer came to an end. Fulltime employees wanted to put dibs on it and we even had two department heads drop by claiming ownership come September. Items no one had wanted and were relegated to a heap in a storage shed were now seen as valuable. Something they didn’t even know was there now became hot property, but not until we pushed past the clutter of discarded items to dig through what could be put to use.
Not everyone will see worth in what matters to you, but that’s okay. I may not understand the thrill of amassing Beanie Babies or bottle caps, any more than someone would want to replicate my pull toward baskets. That’s okay. If we each appreciate what others see as valuable, maybe we can look deeper and see the inestimable worth of those doing the collecting as opposed to the collection. That is where we find the real treasure. That’s my outlook.
