My Collections
I have always been a collector. When I was a kid, it was rocks. That didn't last very long though, as I realized buying pink rocks from the gift shop of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science was not really as cool as finding my own rocks outside. But I didn't much like being outside as a child, so, bye bye rock collection. (Other things I didn't like as a child: swimming, being near water, being near sand, and being told not to yell.)
When I was a bit older—but still not old enough to recognize a scam, apparently— my twin sister, Martha, and I would collect things from our older brother's "bin." Our older brother kept a bin under his bed full of random crap. Mainly this bin was replenished by McDonald's Happy Meal toys and prizes from those machines that take your parents quarters and spit out little plastic orbs with little plastic pieces of junk inside. In order to get something from "the bin," we would do chores for him. Eventually we collected so much useless plastic that we each had our own bins that we stored under our bunk bed.
While most of the items in those bins have been thrown away since my childhood, I still have a small pink rubber duck that glows in the dark. Martha had a matching one, but hers was blue. (As kids, Martha was always blue and I was always pink). I have no idea where these rubber ducks came from, or if Martha even held on to hers past the age of 16 when I decided to slowly start moving myself into our brother's old room. But my rubber duck still lives on a shelf full of random stuff from high school, in the closet of that bedroom at my parents’ house. I never brought it with me to a college house or apartment. I have never set it out in the open on my bookshelf or my desk. When it comes to that rubber duck, I have the object permanence of a new-born. And yet, every time I go back home, I see it there and I can't bring myself to throw it out.
I still have that rubber duck because I associate it with the first time my sister showed me something glowing in the dark. For me, it is representative of all the matching pink and blue items that ruled our childhood. It's a testament to the fact that 16-year-old me thought that little duck was important enough to bring into my new room, despite leaving a lot of useless junk behind under Martha's bed. When I see that duck glowing faintly in the dark, it feels to me as if the last glowing embers of my childhood are right there. And then I close the closet and don't think about it for another six to twelve months.
That rubber duck is the last piece of evidence of my childhood habit of collecting. As I got older, I stopped collecting stuff and started collecting memories. Ew, how sappy and cliché. I have a collection of first loves and teenage angst and dumb decisions made in college. I collected the sheer joy of watching a perfect tv show for the first time and bottled that feeling up so that I can cry at sitcoms in my adulthood. (That's a callback!) I've been collecting visions of New York through rose colored glasses, my youth and excitement making it seem like an idyllic dreamland even when a small family of rats runs over my shoes on my walk to work.
But old habits die hard, and in adulthood I've found myself collecting once again. There are four dimes on my windowsill, and the collection grows every time I clean out my wallet and find a loose dime. This collection exists because of a dime my mother found on the floor of one of my college rooms. She placed it on my windowsill and said something along the lines of, "when you find a dime it means someone who's died is saying hi." She didn't have to say who we both thought of. Maybe Martha was saying hi.
So, at nearly 24-years-old, I collect dimes like I used to collect rocks, because a small part of me wants to believe that my sister really is saying hi, that she's looking out for me somewhere.
Martha, if you are saying hi from wherever you are, hi. Wanna see the collection of loose change on my windowsill?
