A Collector of Rare Items
A collector of rare items. That’s what my father used to call me. It sounds so much nicer than pack rat. But I suppose a rose by any other name collects junk all the same.
Lest you think this puts me in the same league as those weird eccentrics whom you read about in the paper whose homes are packed to the ceiling with newspapers and trash, allow me to set the record straight. My trash is out at curbside every Thursday. I only keep things of sentimental value or which may prove useful at some later date. Granted, the distinction between trash and treasure is often vague, but it’s a highly personal matter. I promise not to cast aspersions on my memorabilia if you accord mine the same courtesy.
What determines the worth of a particular memento is your reaction when you look at it. If it makes you smile or brings large chunks of memories flooding in from your past, letting you relive it as though you were there again, then it is well worth the space it occupies and should be kept and treasured.
For example, wrapped in tissue paper and tucked away in a box I have the following:
-A hairpiece made with the long locks I was forced to have cut when I was thirteen. I used Stanley glue to fashion three banana curls attached to a bun. The nuns may have forced me to cut my hair, but for 30 years I have kept it. A small gesture of defiance perhaps, but it helped ease the pain.
-A red ribbon from second grade, worn by the student who placed first each week. God only knew if I could repeat the feat again in this century, so I kept it. When I take it out I remember the lovely young nun whose method of teaching was to encourage curiosity, and how we learned measurements by being allowed out from behind our desks with rulers to measure various items around the classroom, and the joy and wonder of the first lending library located on one shelf in the classroom closet. If Sister Mary Jacqueline Rita knew, I feel certain she would have approved my continued possession of the ribbon and the memories attached to it.
-The white flag fashioned by my father and Sue Frechette’s father from and old bed sheet in June 1955 when my old Girl Scout Troop 39 went camping in Albion. The rusty little pin holes where it was tacked onto its wooden pole are still visible. Throwing that out would almost amount to desecration.
-A wishbone from a Thanksgiving turkey cooked sometime in the 1950’s, kept because you might really need a wish some day and it’s nice to know where your next wish is coming from.
-A religious picture card given to “my beloved parents” with a letter dated February 9, 1951 and signed “Yours sincierly, your dauter, Rhea R. Bouchard” lest they confuse me with some other “dauter Rhea” of their acquaintance.
-A Santa Claus whose arms and legs jerk up and down when the string is pulled, cut from a wooden cigar box with a little hand saw by my father when the cardboard one from the back of a cereal box fell apart and I felt bad. It was hand painted with auto pain at the garage where my father worked, and it is undated, but I was very young when he made it. It tells more about my father as a parent than I could ever describe with words.
-Genuine black felt Mickey Mouse ears, representing a flight of whimsy the summer I was fourteen. My sister Joan, our friend Yvette, and I all wore them. The last hurrah of the childhood we put behind us that year.
-The pink rosary beads I received from Pope Pius XII with a nice little form letter thanking me for the letter I had written when I was around nine years old, wishing His Holiness well. I can still remember my mother’s shocked “You wrote to WHO?” She was used to my corresponding with my aunts in upstate New York and my uncles in the Navy, but this was a total shocker, especially when I mentioned having written it in pencil since it was neater than ink.
I have Current Events newspapers from 9th grade, Newsweek magazines covering the Vietnam War and the Watergate years, Girl Scout craft projects, the earrings I wore the day I became godmother to my cousin Joey, and several report cards.
However, the most deeply moving keepsake of all is the diary given to me by my friend Jackie at Christmas 1955. It covers the year 1956, a year of transition for me from a thirteen year old kid to a young woman a few months shy of fifteen. The year of greatest change in my life, documented in ink, each page sealed with a lipstick print to make it official. The first romance, the first kiss, the first dance, the first party, the approach of the first heartbreak. Not so much in the words written, but in the unspoken volumes between the lines. To read it is to live again in that most fragile of times.
