28/1/00

The Mad Collector

I understand my girls' need to amass and organize: they inherited the penchant from me.

    I needed a box. In the farthest reaches of our storage room, I found a shoebox. Perfect size, but it wasn't empty. I reached in to feel for the contents, and ...
    YEOW!
    I asked my daughters.
    "It's a snake skeleton. It's from our collection."
    Oh.
    They were collecting dead animals, exploring the neighborhood for small corpses or parts thereof. Every so often they'd come running home with a new specimen: croaked lizards, a bygone bird, bits of butterflies, things like that. A beautiful ladybug they once captured was unfortunately as yet undead, which really disappointed them, because they had to let it go.
    They had actually started out by collecting live animals, but found they just died in our captivity, and my girls are opposed to killing animals. They came to believe you can enjoy dead pets longer.
    They have also collected stones. And seashells. Marbles, coins and stamps. If they get more than one of something, it's officially a collection.
    I have high hopes for their interest in stamps, the best of all hobbies. I got them started with the duplicates from my own collection, and they're quite avid, probably because I appealed directly to their soft spot: I gave them lots of stamps of animals, and got them to collect topically.
    When they were toddlers they collected pictures -- photos, postcards and greeting cards. That was an inspired idea: you don't want to chuck 'em, but you don't want to keep them forever; our solution was to play mailman with them. Two girls go into the closet and push the cards and photos between the doors to the third. Later, the pictures were snip-snipped to make huge montages.
    The marble collection was taken away when they started firing them at each other in anger.
    I think the coins should be taken away from them too, and invested. I can't believe how much money they've got. If you ask me, kids should be allowed to have only as much money as they can count. (And maybe adults too.) "Daddy," they'd say, "we have 20 piles of moneys. How much is that?"
    And then they'd feel sorry for me, because I didn't have piles of moneys on my bedroom floor, so they'd offer handfuls to me. And then I'd feel sorry for me, because I had to say no.
    By now, at age nine, they seem to have gone from collecting to amassing. All the hobbies have merged into one heap, a sort of collection collection. Schoolwork takes up most of their time, and a new interest consumes them: they're creating a virtual animal farm.
    It's all on paper, including the management hierarchy (Odelia is the CEO; I'm in charge of the sheep); what's missing is the $500 billion I estimate they're going to need -- land the size of the Negev, and a private sea to accommodate their dolphins -- and the animals themselves.
    So far, they have two cats and three hamsters. We're in the market for "nice animals" (anything that doesn't bite little girls) including unicorns and Loch Ness monsters. They are willing to pay piles of moneys for good specimens.
    The girls can't believe I support their "pet project." Sure, I tell them, you can do it; of course I want to live in the farmhouse they're promising to build for me. Money? No problem, I assure them. But no, I won't buy them a Lassie dog just yet.
    What I did buy them is the book ג€œAnimal Farm,ג€ which I've been reading to them at nighttime. This has convinced them not to have any pigs on their farm -- not because they're unkosher, but because the girls are worried about a beastly rebellion led by commie swine.
    By the time we get through the book, I think we'll have a revised perspective of our plans, and perhaps agree that the best idea is an animal skeleton farm.

I WAS ALSO a collector when I was a kid, but there was one strict rule my mother imposed: nothing that is, or ever was, or could become alive, enters the house. There was enough room outdoors for all the grasshoppers I could possibly gather.  
    I was truly a mad collector, and in the most literal sense, if you include my ג€œMadג€  magazines (dating from 1956 to 1981, when I made aliya; sorry, I don't lend them out). 
    At a Montreal Expos game when I was a kid, I caught a foul ball hit by Tony Perez, so I began collecting major league baseballs, but I never got another, and ultimately moved to Israel, where I have little hope of ever again catching one.
    I still have that (one) baseball, and the (300) ג€œMads,ג€ and my (35,000) stamps, and the only complete collection I ever accumulated, the 1964 set of hockey cards -- it's stored in that safest of places, Somewhere Or Other.
    I have one large chunk of asbestos left over from my rock collection (now a paperweight), one dump truck remaining from my Dinky toys (my kids got it), and a few autographs (Somewhere Or Other).
    I remember the day I stopped collecting autographs: it was the first time someone asked me for mine. I had written an article about my favorite hockey player, Pierre Bouchard, the first piece I ever published. Proud as punch, I went looking for my hero to show it to him, and get him to sign it. Bouchard was the worst player on the best team ever, so I was probably his only fan; I must have had the world's largest collection of Bouchard autographs. Anyway, when he finished reading my article, Bouchard -- who had a wonderful sense of humor -- grinned, said I was a fine writer ... and he asked for my autograph.
    There were hobbies I started later in life, such as books on van Gogh, and historic newspapers.
    My weirdest hobby was the collection of lists.
    My parents bought the World Book Encyclopedia when I was eight, and I was seized by encyclopediamania. I would have been happy to quit school and get my education from its 20 volumes. I went through it from the first page to the last -- four times -- and compiled lists. I sought out other resource books too, and did the same.
    Each list was a collection, and eventually I realized I had amassed a collection of lists -- which obliged me to make a list of the collection. (First on this list of lists was, naturally, "Page one: List of Lists.")
    My brain's hard disk seems to have lost most of my memory from that era, so I recall only a couple of these accumulations of knowledge that so consumed me. There was "Jewish Communities of the World," which I laboriously typed up under headings of "Countries" and "Cities." Thus I was one of the few 9-year-olds to know there were 22 Jews in all the Northwest Territories.
    My most outstanding list -- I happen to remember this one, because my parents still chide me about it -- was "Famous Samuels." I spent God-knows how much time leafing through the World Book only seeking famous people named Samuel, from Adams onwards. And precisely where I would have been included alphabetically had I been famous, I added "Samuel Orbaum." Go ahead, laugh.
    Another list I recall was a compilation from somewhat later in my life: Female Conquests. I would be embarrassed to admit this, but let's be honest, giddy young men do that, and for all I know, maybe the giddy young women I conquered did too. (What marked me as a bit odd was that, while others may have maintained a mental list, I typed mine in a neat column, in chronological order.)
    Of course, I was much younger then. And not mature, like I am now. And I never imagined I would ever tell anyone. And I stopped doing it.
    That list, like all the hobbies I outgrew, was eventually bequeathed to professional collectors.
    No, not the National Archives.
    The garbage collectors.