The Collector

            From a book about collecting things I read a snippet that went something like this: “Collections give a person purpose. Whether a person collects expensive antiques or cheap buttons, that person is forever searching for something and often finds more than he or she was looking for.” Unfortunately, at the time, I was paying little attention to the title of the book, and now I may never know what it was called, but that one excerpt made such an impression on me that I’ve thought a lot about it in the last three days.

            I’ve always wanted a “field book” – a book in which I can compile my collected sketches and notate my observations about nature as well as paste any interesting specimens of flora or fauna. When I was young, I had a notebook that served as a sort of field book, though some animals I drew ended up with a banner over their heads reading, “Party Time!” If I could only revisit my 9-year-old brain and discover why I decided to portray jellyfish and cougars as party animals, but not buffalo or dinosaurs, I would probably understand more about myself. I still have the book and plan on turning it over to the Natural History Museum of Utah someday when I really need money. Surely my collected drawings (especially the festive animal ones) will fetch a pretty penny.

            I once had a rock collection that I kept in an old metal lunch box. My collection was rather extensive – I had iron pyrite and tiger’s eye and amethyst and rose quartz. Then one day my mom gave me a book about the rocks native to Utah, and I realized that my collection didn’t even cover a fraction of all the rocks in Utah, let along the world. My original plan as I began collecting rocks was to amass all the rocks in the world. I knew from the beginning that I may need to upgrade to two lunch boxes to house them all, but that was a price I had been willing to pay. Well, my new book extinguished any hope I had had of completing that goal, so I gave up and I think my little brother inherited the lunch box and its contents. In the end I probably saved a lot of money from not purchasing another lunch box every time my collection outgrew the old ones.

            Sometimes we collect things because we have an emotional attachment to them, and other times we may just have OCD. No matter the reason, collecting gives us some sense of accomplishment with every new item that we add to our collection. Gathering stuff from nature is especially rewarding, because we can learn from observing whatever it is we’ve collected, and usually it’s free. This year I’m going to start collecting old cars that I find in riverbeds and at the bottom of cliffs. Could be fun. I expect that I will not only assume an extremely satisfying hobby, but I will also learn a great deal about each car’s history and how it wound up in such a sad state.

To all you fellow collectors of things out there, good luck finding more treasures in the future. May your collection bring you joy and many more learning experiences!