I have been fascinated by the phenomena of cities inviting artists to decorate a certain item and at some point I began texting my older daughter pictures of them whenever I came across them. Here are a few:
Large Adirondack chairs – Wilmington, VT
Guitars – Austin, Texas
Sneakers – Springfield, MA
Dolphins – Atlanta, Georgia – you have to look closely!
It is always a treat to stop at the Wagon Wheel restaurant in Turners Falls MA. In addition to the best bean burgers I’ve ever had, they win the prize for restaurant with the most collections. Their collections include:
Wagon Wheel Quilt Squares
Cow Creamers
Embroidered Flower Pictures (in one bathroom)
Old photos (in the other bathroom):
My favorite is this picture of two older men playing with trains:
The front room features paint by number pictures:
And the back dining room features souvenir plates and clocks on shapes (watering cans, football helmets, etc.)
A treat for the eyes as well as the stomach!
Wherever I go I pick up free newspapers and magazines and when we were in Memphis recently I picked up a magazine called “The Downtowner” which featured a column called “So It Goes”. In the June/July issue column “Her Stuff, My Junk”, Raymond L. Atkins writes that while he and his wife agree that they need to get rid of some of their stuff they don’t agree on what stays and what goes. He notes that his wife calls her stuff stuff but calls his stuff junk. For example he collects shot glasses and old bricks. He relates the following conversation:
Wife:You’re collecting bricks now?
Atkins: Look at this one! It’s stamped Ohio.
Wife: Will we be using them to break the shot glasses?
Mindy Grossman, CEO of HSN Inc., is quoted in the latest issue of Traditional Home: “I believe that one of the greatest human connections is the power of storytelling. Collecting and curating are what I love, whether they be family rituals, design, artifacts, or customs. I love the tradition of sharing stories.”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about people’s connections to stories as I read people’s reactions to the death of Will on The Good Wife and the ending of How I Met Your Mother. Sometimes I don’t like plot twists and endings but I’ve always thought it is the author’s (or in case of a TV show I guess it’s the creator or the runner) prerogative to write and end their story any way they want. Now thanks to the internet I find that others seem to feel that they own the stories. It seems that they think they have a right to dictate plot lines and demand endings that meet their expectations.
I first came across this phenomena when the Sookie Stackhouse book series ended. Although author Charlaine Harris said she ended with the romantic pairing she had envisioned from the beginning, people said she had gotten it wrong. That seems to be the feeling with the How I Met Your Mother ending too. The stories that people are sharing now are their stories of disappointment and disgust. And I’ve been thinking maybe I have a new phenomena to collect.
Well not really new, I guess. I have been rereading the original Sherlock Holmes stories and am reminded that after killing his hero off, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle bowed to public opinion and brought Holmes back. He went on to write many more stories featuring Holmes. That’s the power of storytelling!
An owl chair
Owl pajamas
An owl pillow pet
A dancing solar owl
An owl storage bag
and owl cookies and an owl cake!
Ampersand on front, “I like and better” on the back (from a commercial) and Mike and Ike candy.
When I bought the Robert Jr. Whitall picture of Buddy Guy this summer I thought it would go in the living room but it turned out to belong in the bedroom.
My niece honeymooned in Key West and returned with Hemingway cat gifts. The cat ornament on the wall was made by the artist who reconstructed the cat sculpture Picasso made for Hemingway after it was stolen and damaged.
We took the Christmas decorations down today and found places for our Christmas gifts.
A new glass sun from my husband’s brother and his wife is on display on the top of the china cabinet. They bought it on vacation near Portland.
We drove to Chicago for Christmas and since driving to Chicago means driving through Cleveland, I insisted we stop at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. The whole museum of course is full of collected items but one of the most interesting parts was a special exhibit: “Collecting the Counterculture: Julio Mario Santo Domingo, Jr.”. According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Santo Domingo (1958-2009) was a Colombian businessman who devoted himself to amassing one of the world’s largest private collections exploring man’s relationship with sex, drugs, the occult, social taboos, popular culture and rock and roll. Or as the Harvard website (which inherited his massive book collection) puts it “In very basic terms, his collecting centered on sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”
Santo Domingo kept his collection of over 200,000 books and other items (including the world’s largest collection of opium pipes) in an inconspicuous warehouse in Geneva, Switzerland. A placard at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exhibit states that he was more interested in the quest than the object and that has gotten me thinking about the importance of the quest.
I realized quite early on, after my initial excitement at the availability of so much stuff, that it is not near as fun for me to be able to instantly buy things on the internet than to find them while poking through stores on vacation. There is another aspect to this much easier quest – an antique dealer told me that some things especially old watches have lost value since they became more available on the internet – people realized they weren’t quite as rare as previously thought. Of course, if something is hard to find even on the internet that makes the quest even more exciting!
I was so pleased when my younger daughter located and purchased a copy of my missing Nero Wolfe book because sometimes it is not about the quest – it is about completing the collection! Thanks, Molly.
