Thoughts on Collections
Link dashed off to his scout troop meeting cradling his backpack in his arms. Except the “dash” was more of a plod because the backpack was full of books, Legend of Zelda manga books to be specific. I suggested that he could wear the pack on his back, but shook his head and insisted that he did not want his books damaged. So off he went to learn about collections and to work on a collections merit badge.
Link returned happy and handed over the unfinished packet to me. I glanced down to see what work was left to do. Quite a lot. I flipped through the pages and was startled to see how adult-centric the questions were.
Discuss with your counselor how investing and speculation would apply to your collection.
What would you look for in purchasing other collections similar to yours?
What would you expect in return value if you decided to sell all or part of the collection?
Half the questions carried the implication that the value of a collection must be measurable in dollars. Link doesn’t care about the monetary value of his manga books. He collects them because he loves to read them. He keeps them safe and sorts them because he loves the stories inside.
This money-centric view of collections is common. I’m afraid I’ve fallen prey to it myself from time to time, particularly when I discover that one of my kids has decided to collect pea-sized dried mud balls which are disintegrating into dirt on the light colored carpet. (I confess to throwing out the mud-ball collection without worrying too much how precious it was to the child who made it and then forgot it.) Some of life’s most personally valuable collections are simply not salable. One year Gleek and Link collected a water bottle full of little air-soft BBs by scouring the gutters on their way home from school. Link has a box full of little twisted bits of metal he discovered the same way. Patch has piles of tiny paper notes he cut out himself and collected into a box. Kiki has porcelain dollar store statues that she still loves. I have pressed flowers. Howard has a stack of sour-patch kids cards lingering in a box in the garage. These things represent something that mattered to us at the time. Each item in the collection has a story, a memory attached. Even when the collection itself is long gone, the value of collecting remains. I still remember fondly the drawer full of snails that my friend and I carefully collected. I was so angry when his sister let them all go.
I don’t collect in the same way that I used to. I place far less value on physical things. But collections of things still come into my life, are organized and used for awhile, and then are passed on. I loved our collection of Sandra Boynton board books. We had them all and read them to our kids repeatedly. Over the years the books themselves were eaten, smashed, ripped, or otherwise destroyed. The few we had left were outgrown and given away. But the memory of that collection remains precious to me. I remember standing in the book store with Howard and deciding to splurge and just buy them all. While we had them, I enjoyed lining them up in a neat little row where the toddlers could pull them out. That collection added joy to our lives without having any resale value whatsoever. I still have those books collected in my memory. (Literally. I can probably still recite most of them.)
I think of Link’s box of twisted bits of things. Then I think of Shel Silverstein’s poem Hector The Collector. As a kid I read that poem and thought how silly Hector was to collect such pointless things. Now I read the poem and want to cry because I have my own little Hectors who all bring home treasures that others consider worthless. I have to be careful not to squelch their enthusiasm for discovery while also suggesting that perhaps we should let the roly poly bug collection go.
The letting go is important. We can not keep everything and yet somehow we try. I have sitting in my closet a pair of old Star Trek book and record sets circa 1975. They were given to me by a dealer at the first science fiction convention I ever attended. I have no use for them. I haven’t lived in a house with a record player for two decades. But I continue to hold onto these books, partly for sentimental reasons, (I remember listening to Star Trek books on record as a kid), but really I hold on the books because they are old and they might have value. They might matter to someone else. If I just give them away, then a piece of history may be discarded or destroyed. It is so easy to fall into this trap, to cart around things that take up space in our lives not because they make our lives better but because of an ephemeral “what if.” The thing is that everything is a piece of history and we can’t keep it all. We have to choose what we’ll allow to take up space in our lives. There is no point in maintaining a collection if it does not provide some sort of joy or satisfaction. I need to look around my house and figure out what else is taking up space.
Fortunately for us, Link’s scout leaders are good, sympathetic men. They did not devalue Link’s collection of books in his eyes. I will be similarly careful as we finish the packet. It will give Link and I an opportunity to discuss how some people view collections and collecting as a form of investment. How for some collections the monetary value is part of the point. This too is a valid reason for collecting things. I’ll just make sure that Link understands that it is not the only one. After that we can move on to discussing how even though we love the things we collect, sometimes we have to stop collecting. We only have so much space in our lives and in our houses and collections can over flow the bounds to take over. It will be a good discussion and I look forward to having it.