Life is just collecting things. It starts with toys and then, later, other things like postcards, shells and cars.
The process evolves into a need for kids then memories and just dust in the end.
Collecting: Process of Living
Tag Archives: collecting animals
Buying Secrets from the Past: NHL Action Players
I spend a lot of time digging into my memories. I look at pictures of me as a boy – fishing on the dock, beside the Christmas Tree, with our dog Celeste – trying to access that momentous time. I have also tried to searched out childhood things like Checkerboard Ice Cream and Pantry cookies, both of which I cherished in those days and both of which have vanished.
It seems somehow possible that if I could just taste them again, I would rediscover a key note to my uncluttered mind, like the magic of holding the tin or the feeling of my bare legs against the kitchen linoleum. But I have not been able to find either.
Something I have found is the NHL Action Players Book from Loblaws grocery store.
I collected these stickers from the Loblaws grocery store, furiously opening strip after strip to fill the booklet, trading for missing stamps, finding out who had found the un-find-able ones. There were dozens of Larry Carriere and Walt McKechnie and so few of Guy Lambert and Don Awry. It was impossible to find those.
And then Doug Crosby, a rich and somewhat simple boy in my class, bought the completed book from Edward Etchells for $50. The class bully Andy McAlpine mocked him. “You idiot! That’s not how it’s done!”
I realize that the whole thing was about the experience of collecting things, but why not do it Doug Crosby’s way? Why go through all of the hassle of bartering for the rare stickers when you could just buy the whole thing in one shot? As much as Doug seemed to have missed the point, Andy totally misses it. It’s not about scamming the system but learning from the experiences of the thing, be that finding Don Awry or eating Checkerboard Ice Cream.
Anori Outtake: Self-Made Trap
An outtake from Anori, the first book in my science fiction trilogy:
The glacier rumbled behind, a low deep shift of ice and snow, and then another rumble after that, further away. She watched the smoke and steam from the launch, the rocket nosing out of the valley, the bright ball spitting out beneath, arching up steadily in a thundering blur.
She wondered how she had come to this ridiculous moment, collecting creatures, ready for the next disaster, or pretending that this was so, that there wasn’t a cloth hanging down disguising the true intent, their responsibility for this, their predicament in this self-made trap and looked down at a cluster of pink and purple flowers in the shape of a one-armed girl, her chest thrust forward like she was being pulled to heaven.