Collecting
“I'm
not a hoarder, I'm a collector: if you have something you like, every
time you see it, you have a little happy hit.”
Douglas
Coupland
If
you could see my basement right now, you would swear I am a hoarder.
There are boxes everywhere, many of which are empty. Tables are
layered on top of each other and everywhere you look there are stacks
of board games, model kits, action figures or sports cards. It's a
mess, truly. Beginning next week, I will double my booth space at the
Bama Flea so I can move some of this stuff out of my house. I told my
son last night that if this business continues to grow, we will need
to rent a warehouse, and he agreed.
It
is, however a very interesting business. The collector's market seems
unaffected by the vicissitudes of the economy. Yesterday, I listed a
second infantry patch from World War II and it sold within ten
minutes for two-hundred dollars. After two years, I am still shocked
by the speed of cyberspace and the lengths some folks will go to get
what they collect. Lately, I've been listing Johnny West Action
Figures from the 1960's—even incomplete, even in pieces, they sell!
The old adage, “One man's trash...” was running through my head
when I woke this morning.
There
is a strange dichotomy in my brain between our throw-away culture, in
which the average American produces seven pounds of trash each day,
and the obsessive collecting of old things. Somehow the two seem
contradictory, but I can testify that they exist side-by-side right
here, right now. Of course, it is not only American's who collect. We
ship all over the world these days. People everywhere are gathering
memorabilia.
For
many of us, memorabilia is the right word. We collect things that
remind us of other things—our childhood, a person we loved, a time
in history that was especially sweet for us. We collect nostalgia.
Perhaps there was a time connected to that object when we were happy
and, like the quote says, we get a “little happy hit” when we
look at it—a rush of good memories. I'm sure there are people who
collect things for their intrinsic value, but for the most part, I
think the happy quotient is more important to us than the dollar
value of any given object.
In
a world where there is always grave darkness, a 'little happy hit' is
a thing of great value. Wouldn't if be nice if we could order off the
internet one day of peace on earth, one day in which no one died from
a gunshot or a bomb, one day when every person in the world had
enough to eat, one day of clean, pure water. Wouldn't we all become
collectors?
In
the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment