The Art of Collecting
Welcome to the Bear’s Lair Times blog, where words always have their say
Star Wars action figures, that’s where my amateur career in collecting began. I was three-and-a-half years old when I saw Episode IV, already hooked on Lord Vader and all that when the good stuff hit the shelves. The care I took in preserving capes and blasters, replacing a busted or lost lightsaber with a colored toothpick, only to greet sadness when an arm on a character couldn’t hold an upright position anymore. Little did I realize that all those runs to Toys “R” Us and all that playtime were forming the foundation of something bigger.
I transitioned from that world to collecting music. Cassette tapes at first and then CDs, mainly hard rock and heavy metal. It was time to move the mind in a different way. I’m what’s known as a completist, a brand of person most likely in a relationship with OCD on some level—while it was difficult to own every Kenner figure, it wasn’t difficult to own the entire discography of Van Halen or Iron Maiden. I went deeper with bands, digging into the nooks and crannies of even the so-called filler tracks. That was my philosophy. Still is to a large degree.
Material goods congregate. They add up. They collect…and they often collect dust. We all know a guy who owns five jerseys of his favorite football team. We all know Disney collectors, Christmas collectors. Shoes. Professor Slughorn from the Harry Potter series collects, in essence, people—not an example of healthy collecting, I’d urge you to not do the same as Horace.
I collected comic books in my early teens. A friend of mine now passed got me back into it in my late thirties. I had a pull list at The Joker’s Child in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, for a decade, and a dozen filled short boxes sit in my closet in my daughter’s room as a result. Reading is fundamental. Cover to cover. Haven’t bought a single issue in a few years as my mind has, once again, found other ways to occupy itself. But the most recent stint with comics was when my kids were growing up, so just seeing the boxes puts a smile on my face.
We collect. We carry. The pressure can become too much. I’m 51, with a lot of experience behind me and lot of excitement yet to come. The collecting of laughs and tears and emotions and stories and time never stops. I’ve been selling off books and I plan on eliminating my CDs because I desire more simplicity, but these are not what make life less complicated once you shed the weight.
Which brings me to words. Books are beautiful, especially novels, but when you strip it to down to the core, they’re nothing more than vehicles used to deliver carefully curated series of words. I appreciate words and I’m immersed in them. At work I write, I edit, I manage content—I get paid, in part, to play with words. They don’t cost me a dime, and I learn. Whenever, wherever. I have game, but by no means am I a vocab maven like T.C. Boyle. Guess you could say I’m a collector of words.
And here we are.