Page 10 - ISI_185_DecemberJanuary
P. 10
10 HOME & LIFESTYLE IDAHO SENIOR INDEPENDENT • DECEMBER 2022 | JANUARY 2023
It’s Not Hoarding
if You Have Cool Stuff
BY AARON PARRETT
A friend of mine called me recently and
asked, “Do you still collect 78 rpm records?
Because I have a pile in my garage you can
have if you just take them away.”
To a collector, that is music to the ears—
literally and figuratively.
The older I get, the more I think about
collecting, collections, and our uniquely
human quirk to amass whatever interests
us. To those not afflicted with the urge to
collect, my floor-to-ceiling piles of books
and records must make me seem like one of
those eccentrics on the TV show Hoarders.
But as my daughter likes to point out,
“It isn’t hoarding if you have cool stuff.”
Why do people collect things? A psy-
chologist might say the collector is trying to
recover something of their childhood, which
makes sense, I guess—except my collection
obsession started in my childhood.
I remember spending whole winter
afternoons by the wood stove, arranging Aaron Parrett with his Modern Library book collection. “The older I get, the more I think about collecting,
my hundreds of comic books into various collections, and our uniquely human quirk to amass whatever interests us.” Photo by Nann Parrett.
piles, sorting them according to genre or
character. My favor- notion that one can complete a set of some
ites were the Uncle sort. What Beatles fan, for example, would
not want to acquire all their music? But the
Scrooge comics, espe-
cially the classic Carl true collector goes much further: these are
Barks stories, but I
the people who seek out, not just the music,
also had a lot of Archie but a copy of every release—British and
comics a neighbor American—or they get on eBay and look
had given me in an for associated material, like ticket stubs,
old apple crate. fanzines, and bootleg recordings.
Going back fur- Other collectors are even more laser-fo-
ther than I can really cused. Believe it or not, there’s a guy
even remember, my out there who collects only copies of the
mother tells me I Beatles’ White Album—and he has hundreds
collected things. of copies.
Once when I was 3 In my own case, I’m not exactly sure
or 4 years old, she why I collect things, but I have concluded
was doing laundry it isn’t the objects themselves that delight
and couldn’t figure me, but something more like the thrill of
out where all the the hunt.
socks had gone. She How do I know this? To take just one
discovered I had example, I have collected at least three
“collected” them all times in my life practically every 78 rpm
in a pile in my closet. record that Hank Williams put out on the
I vaguely remem- MGM label. I listen to them, of course, but
ber being obsessed eventually I purge the whole set—selling
with spent brass from them on eBay or trading them to some other
the old impromptu collector for whatever my latest interest is.
But then I’ll find another Hank 78 at a
shooting ranges you
could find somewhere garage sale and start the whole process over
along almost every dirt again. I’ve realized that it’s the seeking and
finding that excites me, and not so much
road out of town and
imploring my parents the actual possession of the material object.
I’ve realized also I’m not a “completist,”
to drive me out where
I’d fill coffee cans with either, which is the term describing col-
lectors who don’t stop until they have
.22 shells.
everything on the list.
Part of the com-
pulsion to collect I met a surgeon in Savannah, Georgia,
probably also stems once who invited me to his house to show
from the idealistic off his collection of books, which was one
