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Purely Subjective: Acquisition mode

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I come from a family of collectors. Not debt collectors, mind you, although my parents dealt with more of them than I care to remember. My father and I shared the same first name, and when I was young I'd often answer the phone and speak to those debt collectors, who didn't seem to realize they were dealing with a child until well into their spiel.

As a kid, I thought it was hilarious. I didn't understand why these people were calling or what they were saying. Besides, it'd gone on so long that it would've been stranger to me if they'd stopped phoning. Wasn't until I hit my early teens that I realized these calls actually were serious business, that my parents were broke, that the only thing my Dad could collect, beyond a too-small paycheck, was more and more bad debt. The phone rang and rang until my father's early death, and even after that some would call, sneeringly distrustful when told that he had passed on.

Insurance money helped drive them away. So did the sale of our family home. Even so, the ghost of those debt calls lingered, and my mother rarely hastened to answer the phone. With my Dad's pension and a small disability check, Mom managed to survive, but it wasn't thriving, and by the time I was earning enough to help out, she was heading toward her final curtain call.

It pleases me to think that she did get to go on a themed cruise with her favorite Southern gospel band, The Cathedral Quartet, whom she'd known since she was a child. Her brother had sung in a band with one of the founders of The Cathedrals, as they came to be known, and if her sibling hadn't died in the military, he might've become a Cathedral himself. Her brother's old friend lavished some attention on her during the cruise, even hiring a limo to drive her and my aunt around on dry land. She called it the best time of her life, although Dad was dead and couldn't join her, and it was clearly true. She'd never been much of anywhere beyond West Virginia, Pennsylvania, upstate New York and Niagara Falls. The sunswept Caribbean beaches, non-alcoholic tropical beverages and vast expanse of sea were the most exotic things she'd experienced. I only wished I had the money to send her off on more vacations.

I felt good, too, knowing that I'd managed to spoil her the tiniest bit — not nearly enough to compensate her for everything she'd done and sacrificed for me, but just sufficient to assuage a little of my guilt at often taking more than I gave back. One autumn as a young adult, I had enough money at hand to buy her new furniture and a large (for the time) television set. Among the furniture was an Amish-crafted wooden glider that sat on her front deck. She'd always had a wood swing suspended from the porch ceiling at the family's ancestral home. Her new place only had a deck, and she'd missed the feeling of swinging through the air as she watched the cars drive by. That glider I bought gave her everything but shade, and I was happy to see her use it.

The other thing I'd done for her was perhaps the best thing I've ever done for myself. You may not understand if you grew up well off, but for my family, extravagance was buying a new Sunday dress shirt from the clearance bin at Value City and treating ourselves to cut-rate pizza once a week.

We'd grown up having nothing and thus expected nothing. We joked that our family motto should be “Misery builds character.” When I was hired by The Oklahoman in October 1999, I knew that I wouldn't be able to spend Christmas with my Mom. I simply wouldn't have enough vacation time. The prospect of being alone on the holiday didn't bother me as much as the thought of leaving my mother alone on Christmas morning. All of my siblings had their own families and their own holiday obligations; I'd managed to be with Mom most Christmas mornings of my life. We had traditions to uphold. I worried that without me there to spoil her, she'd feel lonely and sad and depressed.

So even though I couldn't be there, I arranged a special gift for both of us. When Mom opened her presents that Christmas, she found an envelope containing airplane tickets and a letter from me. I was giving her about a month to plan for the trip, I'd written, but then she needed to fly to Oklahoma City to spend two weeks with me. Don't bring any money, I told her. Everything's on me.

I still didn't have much time off, but we made the most of the mornings, evenings and weekends. I took her out to restaurants. She cooked for me. Together we explored a state that was still new to me, and before our time together ran out, I asked her if she would like to move to Oklahoma and stay with me. I wasn't rich, but I'd be able to provide her with free room and board, just as she'd done for me, and her fixed income would go much further.

She promised to consider it, although I guess I knew she'd turn me down. Her grandchildren, church and friends all were back in Pennsylvania, and she'd rather live on meager means than turn her life upside down. I couldn't blame her. I missed the familiar streets of my hometown. I missed the rest of my family. So while she was here, while I had her to myself in Oklahoma City, I collected memories of her. I remember trying not to cry when I hugged her and kissed her cheek at the airport, wondering when and if I'd see her again. As it turned out, she only had about a year left in her, so those memories of her Oklahoma visit are all the more

I think that my siblings and I became collectors because we had so little growing up. In our way, we were like Depression-era children, so worried about doing without that we amassed as much of everything as we could. I didn't realize that about myself until I married my wife, who pointed out that if I found, say, a snack that I enjoyed, I'd buy 12 bags at once. Forget moderation. I might hoard my gains, but I bought as if I was stocking a fallout shelter.

Often my collections, like those of my siblings (except Becky, who I've always suspected is a changeling), are absurd. The first items I collected were books. I had comic books, but I mistreated them as most young children do. It wasn't until I started buying my own paperback novels that I became fierce about maintaining them in a pristine state. In part, that was due to practical reasons; a couple times I'd read all the way to the end of books from our home library, only to find the last 20 pages or so missing, torn free from the gluey binding and scattered to the wind.

Books with cracked spines were not tactilely or aesthetically pleasing; they felt weakened and diseased in my hands. So my books, even though I read them repeatedly, were immaculate. I read paperbacks with two hands; most others stretched paperbacks open with a single hand, the fingers pinching the bottom of the book from behind and the thumb stretching the pages wide. This put undue pressure on the base of the volume's spine, which could initiate cracks that would eventually stretch all the way to the top of the book. Broken books were useless to me. They still are, in fact. When I was in my early 20s I threw a punch at an acquaintance who purposely cracked the spine of a copy of Ernest Hemingway's “The Sun Also Rises.” Then I threw him out of the apartment.

I spent hours as a teenager adjusting and readjusting my books on their shelves. Sometimes I arranged them in alphabetical order by the authors' last names, and other times by the books' titles. Every so often it occurred to me to alphabetize books within genres, allowing me to group them by subject matter, but that inevitably led to inner conflict. “Should Robert E. Howard's novels be considered fantasy or adventure? What about my movie tie-ins? Should they be all together since that's a theme, or should they be divided among genres?”

If I was a bit over the top about it, I was no less so than my brother, who collected baseball and basketball cards. Somehow he'd devised a game based on the cards that utilized a handheld baseball diamond, a marble and a spring-loaded bat. He kept endless statistical logs based on the games he played for hours alone in his room. I saw them. They looked like the work of a deranged accountant.

My sister Anita collected rocks and made candles. Janet had a ton of books, too. Once we were old enough to move away and enter the workforce, our collecting turned toward obsession. Ron acquired 8-track tapes, cassettes and vinyl; wrestling memorabilia; James Bond collectibles and autographs by the hundreds, if not thousands. For a time he focused intently on scuba diving, then kayaking.

Anita, who unapologetically went to sci-fi conventions, obtained all kinds of “Star Trek” toys, books and magazines. She went to auctions and purchased historical objects from the time of the Civil War. (Once she bought a human skeleton at auction, apparently convinced it was a fake skeleton of the sort used by doctors and medical students; when she realized, some months later, that it was real, she freaked out and had her husband bury it on their property. I'm not sure that was the best idea.) For the past several years, Anita has roamed the Lake Erie shores, searching for “beach glass” — bits of old jars and bottles turned smooth by generations of waves. By now she has vast containers of glass divided by colors.

As for me, I've acquired and disposed of a wide variety of collections over the years. (In that respect I am like Ron, who generally loses all interest in one collection as he begins another.) As technology evolved, I collected video disks, videocassettes and DVDs. I had a bunch of bobble head dolls but gave pretty much all of them away. For awhile I had boxes and boxes of unopened, so-called collectible toys from my favorite films and television shows, such as “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “The Thing” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” They're all gone now. I acquired an assortment of fancy hats, which I wear, and too many shoes, most of which I don't wear. My wife and I have more art than will fit on the walls and a ridiculous amount of electronic gadgets for just two people. For the past four years I collected musical equipment, but I've sold much of the collection now, which means I spend my free time searching the Internet for nothing in particular, which is exactly how each collection begins.

Each of us finds “value added content” in our collecting. It's like those folks who went crazy over Beanie Babies back in the day. One moment they didn't even know stuffed bean bag animals existed; the next they were fixated on learning everything possible about the various toys and finding out which were the most valuable. Research and acquired expertise is the side benefit of our collecting. Anita can tell you just about anything about the Civil War. Ron has encyclopedic knowledge of all things 007. Over the years, I've learned so much about so many different things that it's almost as if I'm a student again.

I can't play a guitar to save my life, but I know which models are the most respected, where they're manufactured, where to find the best prices and how to sell them. I've read books and studied training materials related to motorcycles, so I can speak intelligently about them; I just can't drive them. My wife turns research-
related tasks over to me. I led our house search, doggedly learning about the whole process and constantly seeking out the best price in the best neighborhood. I belong to online forums about everything from African drumming to specific makes and models of cars, weapons, electronics and so on. During a research phase, finding out more about my latest area of interest consumes all my spare time. I rarely remain interested long enough to master a topic, but by the time I'm done with a collection, I know more about the subject matter than most people who've been at it for years.

I don't necessarily like living like this, constantly searching for the next item that will bring me a momentary flash of fulfillment, but I don't entirely dislike it, either. Sure, my siblings and I would have more money in the bank if we focused on collecting money, but none of us is hurting, either. Growing up poor is part of it. Losing our parents way too young is another. We learned to chase our whims while we can, and we learned that nothing lasts forever.

Eventually it won't matter how immaculate I've kept my books. I won't be around to watch those who inherit them, directly or indirectly, open them too wide or bend the corners of pages. If my wife outlives me, she says, she will crack those spines on purpose; as things stand now, if we want to read the same book, she buys her own copy so she won't risk damaging mine.

The point isn't acquisition, although that provides some slight satisfaction. It's all about the search.

Ken Raymond
