At the beginning of time, some cave person bent over and picked up two sticks — and a collection was born. Ever since, we’ve been hunting, gathering — and stalking Goodwill outlets all over town.
At least, that’s what Robrt Pela’s been doing. The longtime Phoenix journalist and KJZZ contributor is helping launch a new series, devoted to the things we collect. The Show will take you every place from swanky museums to dusty thrift stores — beginning with Pela’s dish cabinet.
The other day my friend Mike texted me.
“I thought you should know I have moved from collecting Christmas ornaments and Fiestaware,” Mike wrote, “to vintage glass hen-on-nest salt cellars.”
“I can no longer be your friend,” I texted back, and then we both LOLed because, well, we’re collectors.
We like stuff. Like most collectors, neither of us is all that interested in why we collect. What we know is that, when something takes our fancy — a particular type of ceramic ashtray, 19th century etiquette books, matchbook covers from small towns in Ohio — we like to create piles of those things.
With me, it’s dishes. Boontonware and Franciscan pottery and Taylor-Smith-Taylor china. Also record albums: The Love Generation and Leonard Cohen and old shellac 78s by Sarah Vaughn. And chalkware Infants of Prague. And midcentury amber glass. For a while there, I was collecting thrift store oil portraits of strangers.
I suppose if I had to, I’d say I fill my home with my favorite possessions as a protest against the passage of time. Owning a box of dishes from 1947 is kind of like owning a bit of the past. This came in handy when our lives turned inward during the recent pandemic. The past felt like the most natural place to go because the future was unclear and the present was kind of scary.
But really, it’s just that I like stuff. I enjoy the acquisition of things; I enjoy organizing objects or turning to find them sitting on a shelf. “Hey, there’s that cool thing I bought the other day!”
I’ve done some reading on the subject of collecting, and apparently there’s more to it. There’s the theory that collecting is about unloved children seeking comfort in accumulated belongings. That piling up things is an existential anxiety; that our collections are an extension of our identity that live on when we can’t. And there are evolutionary theorists who say collecting is left over from primal times, when men attracted potential mates by displaying a talent for accumulating things.
But that was ancient times. Today it’s considered better not to own things.
Decluttering as a form of self-care is trendy; the Swedish death cleanse is the Bikram yoga of the 21st century. I’ve read a half-dozen essays about how Millennials are minimalists who aren’t interested in grandma’s china. Cable TV shows warn against letting a collection become a hoard. And then there’s Marie Kondo, who wants us to thank our inanimate objects and then get rid of them.
No, thanks. My stuff isn’t taking over my life or my home. I don’t want to either talk to it or give it away. You won’t find boxes of old desk lamps piled in my hallway; I don’t rent a series of storage units to contain a hoard of stuff I’ll never see or use.
And if I’m nothing more than the sum of all the object I’ve amassed, that’s fine.
I’m content with having done nothing more important than gathering a roomful of records and dishes and first-edition hardcovers by authors no one remembers.
Owning, protecting and preserving the past is enough legacy for me.