Personal Experience
Do You Have a Collector in the Family?
The addiction that keeps giving
Collectors are people who can’t help themselves. They are hooked, addicted to assembling collections of everything. As children, they are the kids with bedrooms full of railroad cars, clowns, or Alexander dolls that have wardrobes to rival Ivanka Trump. Some kids have extremely boring collections of marbles, stamps, or whistles, but they tend to them devotedly. Send them to the seashore for the summer and they’ll return with collections of seashells or sponges.
As these children age into adolescence and young adulthood, they collect more pricey items. Guys experiment with colognes and gather an assortment of designer and commercial varieties. Or they go retro and canvass music stores for oldie country-western or rock tunes. If they’re rich, they collect cars — a Porsche here, a Mercedes there — or cameras. If they’re handy guys, they may get into tools, spending the day at Home Depot assembling a vast collection of pliers and buzz saws. Intellectuals and wannabe philosophy majors collect books about Kant and Schopenhauer they cannot bear to give away even years later although their interests have changed dramatically.
Women can be just as acquisitive. They may collect sweaters, scarves, rock concert posters, boyfriends, postcards, earrings, rings, lipsticks. The list goes on and on.
Sometimes these nouveau collectors put their addictions to entrepreneurial use when they realize they have to earn a living. They establish boutiques that specialize in one or two kitschy items or restaurants that have themes that correlate to their personal collectibles. To whit, there’s a restaurant in Flagstaff decorated with artsy-fartsy stuff all in an owl theme: owl lamps, murals, sculptures, paintings, glasses. You name it there’s an owl peering at you from somewhere.
But some adult collectors never merge their addictions with their careers. They are private people with closet collections. One of them is my husband. I didn’t know it before I married him but he was a collector-in-training back in his 20s when he didn’t know a fitted shirt from a T-shirt.
In hindsight, I realize he then had an unusually large collection of blue shirts and striped ties. Everywhere we went he would pick up a new shirt and a few ties. I couldn’t figure out if there was a method or a design to what appeared to me to be the purchase of the same tie times 100. They weren’t expensive so it never really bothered me. And I was in love. I didn’t worry during our lengthy engagement that he’d deplete our savings on ties. What I neglected to do was look at his family tree. Where there’s one collector in a family, there’s another at the very least.
His sister Bea had a penchant for antique furniture and went from flea market to flea market looking for just the right Queen Anne piece to fit into her living room. Then she moved on to antique dolls; still later the focus was miniature room furnishings. As far as I know, she’s still happily collecting tchotchkes.
Meanwhile, I was busy screwing up my life by choosing the wrong careers. Tense as I was, I still did not have even an iota of interest in collecting. My husband, however, safely ensconced in the world of legal wheeling-and-dealing, was busy expanding his love of collecting beyond his wardrobe to stuffed animals that he purportedly purchased as “gifts” for me. His peculiar tendency toward furry comfort bears was cute and low-keyed until we moved cross country from New Jersey to Arizona. Then it was as if a switch was thrown in his brain.
All of a sudden he got into bolas, which are the signature ties of Arizona. They vary from simple to ornate, from cheap to extremely pricey. He could wear them to work and no one would criticize him for being too casual because this, after all, was Arizona, window to the Wild West and all it offered. And because he could wear these bolas to work, this encouraged him to collect more and more.
And we weren’t talking the chintzy, touristy type of neckwear that sold for $10. Some of these bolas with their Native American crafted turquoise-and-onyx inlay in sterling silver could go for several hundred dollars. Pretty soon by way of trips to artsy tourist sites, pawn shops, and flea markets, my husband had put together a huge collection of bola ties. In fact, despite our short residence in Arizona, he probably ranked in the top five as bola collectors.
I must admit that as jewelry goes, it was an impressive collection. I hoped he would stop when he got to around 100 bolas, but for a collector one thing always leads to another. The jewelry aggregation didn’t end there. Soon he started collecting obscenely huge rings with differently colored semi-precious stones. He purchased them at mineral shows in the Tucson area or from catalogs. He would gush over them like they were puppies, and he’d ask what I thought. My thoughts were never complimentary
From rings and bracelets (yes real men — at least in Arizona — wear bracelets), it was a hop-skip-jump to relegating a room in our house to several different collections — of license plates, nautical artifacts, model ships, and planes.
In his work office, a few miles from our home, the employees also had to live with his collection addiction. There he indulged his aquatic-marine bent, and hauled in a 500-gallon tank with tropical fish and turtles. Of course as time passed he added more nautical pieces including a compass and diver’s helmet. Every inch of the office except for his desk and two chairs was taken up by collectibles. I never visited him because I got sensory overload just peeking in at the door. I don’t know how the secretaries stood it, but they were paid to tolerate it. I wasn’t.
Fortunately what went on in Las Vegas stayed in Las Vegas so our marriage didn’t hit too many bumps. The office collections didn’t encroach on our home except for the one room that we laughingly called his “exercise room.” Somehow amid the various collections he also squeezed in a treadmill and boxing bag. I never ventured into this chamber of horrors, mainly because I was afraid I’d trip and fall over one of his fishing nets or teak pelican statues.
What really irked me was that he wore eight rings at a time on his fingers, and he had small hands, which made the rings look even larger. Naturally when we went out for dinner or just to the supermarket, people couldn’t help but notice all the rings, This annoyed me no end because I had to hear the same stories over and over again — about how and why he bought these rings, where they came, what tribe or craftsman produced which piece, etc. While realistically speaking some of the rings were Native American treasures, I still hated them all. In fact the only piece of Indian jewelry I ever liked was a Zuni bola of a warrior. It wasn’t jealousy. I just didn’t have the collecting gene. If anything, I was a minimalist who liked bare white walls decorated with only a few family and dog photos.
I hated his many collections and told him so many times. But do you think that made a difference? Not on your life.
Still, our marriage did not run into trouble until my husband’s addiction started spilling over from “his” room in the house to our shared space. I thought I had made it clear that the guest room was off bounds, so when I saw that a few model airplanes had magically flown into the guest room, I was livid. I couldn’t control my anger, and it escalated until I gathered up each airplane and tore off its wings. He just gave me a quizzical look and put the planes back together, relocating them to “his” room.” Since he knew he was on the wrong side of the law, he backed down but managed to toss me his usual woeful pathetic victim-look that he had perfected.
But the piece de resistance was the iPhone. Actually I have only myself to blame for that debacle. I should have realized that for a collector, there are no boundaries, but I encouraged him to move into the 21st century and go digital. He was frightened of cyberspace and I would be his Princess Leia.
Of course iPhones have a million apps you can load. Theoretically you can collect apps until you run out of storage space on the phone or tire of paying for space on the cloud, whatever that is.
My husband was such a computer illiterate — he barely could use email — that I knew the apps presented no big problem. What I didn’t count on was that my collector-husband got off on the umpteen sounds that can be programmed into the phone. He took one look at the array of sounds in “settings,” and he was in seventh heaven.
He had to have them all. He currently has a ringtone for phone calls, tones for texts, new voicemail, new mail, sent mail, calendar alerts, reminder alerts, and airdrops (whatever that is). This may not seem like a lot of sounds, but every few minutes, it seems, his phone is alerting him to something. Mostly he ignores them while I silently fume. I think he’s pretending he’s the CEO of Google or Amazon. Or more probably he just likes having them all — the sign of the quintessential collector.
Until I spoke up, his iPhone was even sounding at night. I’d hear a bell or buzz and would wake up and think it was the fire alarm. I’d panic. After a few anxiety attacks I made him locate his phone in another room during the sleep hours.
Part of the reason we clashed over all the sounds is he is hearing-challenged and I’m normal. He won’t admit it, but he doesn’t hear all those beeps and whistles. I even have to hit him on the back when a phone call comes chugging in thanks to his “train” alert. But preserving his symphony of sounds is vital to him as a collector. I have to hope that Apple doesn’t come up with any other sound options.
Well this is my story. It could be worse. He could be collecting women’s shoes or roadkill, but from now on, I’m going to be more careful of what device or other potential acquisition I recommend. Good thing I never wanted children or we would have had a bushel-ful.
If there’s a moral to this story it’s that I’ve concluded the so-called tabula rasa or blank brain that scientists used to think children were born with does not exist. People come fully equipped to drive you crazy on the day that they are born. So when you pledge your troth to another human being, it’s anyone’s guess what you’re really getting.