2006
all the tickets you couldn’t sell
maura @ 9:42 pm
Does everybody collect things? I think so, seems like it is just human nature. Gus has taken to collecting various things since his toddlerhood like a duck to water. And, despite my desire to clean and minimize and get rid of everything we don’t use, I’m a packrat and a collecting suckah, too.
Here are some of the things we collect.
Me:
– Watches: Some are Swatches but I also have a fair number cheesy cereal box and happy meal watches. I stopped wearing a watch when I was pregnant (thought it would help me chill out, which it did) though so now they are all in a big clear plastic tub.
– Bags: I’ve mentioned this one before.
– Pee Wee Herman stuff: I loooooooooooove Pee Wee. I have the talking doll, plush Chairry, a very cool Ice Cream Soup tshirt that I don’t wear anymore for fear of disintegration, colorforms and a plastic, 3-section dinner plate. Plus all the DVDs, of course.
Gus:
– Subway and bus timetables: He loves the subway, and he loves these timetables. We have planned entire days’ outings around riding a new line so we can acquire a new timetable, no lie.
– Corks: For some reason he loves corks. Whenever we open a bottle of wine he asks for the cork. Sometimes, if the neighbors are over for dinner, he and his friend will play with “Corky” as if it were an action figure or doll or something. Crazy kids.
– Anything from Nature: I’ve just cleaned up a whole pile of dead leaves from the coffee table. And then there was that time with the maggot last year (which, it turns out, was an acorn weevil). Right now we have “monkey balls”* (sweetgum pods) dropping seeds all over the house. Aahh, nature.
* Okay, when I was little we always called them monkey balls, but the website I linked to above calls them gumballs. What??? Preposterous!
All of us, separated by generation:
– Smashy pennies: Jonathan and I had collected these in a freewheeling, ironic way before Gus’ birth. We even have one from New Zealand, which we made on the ferry between the North Island and South Island when we were there on our honeymoon. We were sooooooo ironic and freewheeling about it that I even mounted some of the best in frames and hung them on the walls.
And then, Gus was born. And apparently there’s a whole big smashy penny industry out there just waiting to suck in the kids, because every damn zoo, museum and other cultural/natural institution has at least one smashy penny machine. Now we cannot leave the house on a trip to one of those places without being reminded to bring “one penny and two quarters for me please”. He keeps his segregated from his real money in a special, small bank shaped like a purple crayon.
