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"...Here a scrap, there a scrap, every where a scrap scrap."
That's what I think every time I go into my basement. What am I going to do with it all? Why do I keep trying to make something worthwhile out of these things? Why can't I just throw them away? Why do I live with the desire to save and make records? I'd begun to think I indeed was infected with an incurable curse, and then I became acquainted with the writing of Joan Didion's, "On Keeping a Notebook". Finally,...FINALLY, I didn't feel like the only one of my species on a foreign planet anymore. Some other mortal understood this irrational drive. Didion's are collections of entries in a notebook. Mine are just collections of notes, or pictures-or programs-or letters-or anything that triggers a memory.
If I changed Didion's word notebook to my word collections, I could have written her paragraph, "Since the note is in my notebook [collection], it presumably has some meaning to me. I study it for a long while...Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook [collection] at all? The impulse to write things down [collect] is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write [collect] things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks [collections] are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted at birth with some presentiment of loss."
There it is--another human being besides me, who feels a compulsion to perform a task often perfectly meaningless to anyone else. Didion is a "someone else" in this world who has bits and pieces of life scattered about on scraps, or in her case--notebooks, and is totally unable to make sense out of the hobby except to call such collectors "a special breed" who connect life through word pictures, or objects, to some "strange presentiment of loss at birth". I related to Didion's description as she went on to connect this hobby with life's ironies, boredoms, and depressions. When I studied art at Drexel Hill University, my instructor commented that my art projects were always outstanding symbolisms of the irony in life. My writing has been the same: "The Purple Toilet Seat Cover", "My Father's Bull". Didion said it all when she described her notes as, "...loves and betrayals alike, that which was whispered and what we screamed." My collections remind me, too, of my days of loves and betrayals alike. As a child I had an incorrigibly rare disease--a condition I deemed "Happy Heart". My "Happy heart" caused me to love everybody and everything around me. The world was my playground, and everybody in it was important to me. My 1940's Valentine collection evidences my belief that I will never outgrow the people that have been important in my life. These valentines make reality of friends dating back fifty years ago, who thought I was important enough to share their treasures. Looking at their signatures reflects warm memories, so while looking at them, I can vividly describe what it feels like to be consistently happy.
Years down the road, I gained a description of what it feels like to lose this "happy heart", to begin to feel life is hard and something only to be tolerated--to feel trapped, fettered, and isolated. As I became aware of others caught in this whirlpool, I related to why the caged bird sings. I have all that in my collections, too. I saved these things trying to understand what life is all about. I honestly don't know if this happens to all children passing into adulthood, or if I am an extreme case. Nevertheless, my collections harbor contrast.
I am not a collector of things just to "own" things. In my years long search for an explanation of collecting behavior, the closest I ever came was that of being a war baby. In my earliest years, recovery from the war and the depression impacted my life. I remember sugar and gas stamps, and my mother keeping every piece of string that came into her possession knotted together, rolled up in a ball, and stored carefully until such an item was re-needed. I remember being required to unwrap Christmas presents carefully so that the paper could be saved and reused the next year. I was taught to give infinite care to every possession that even hinted it could become part of our household. My first 4-H dress was made from feedsacks. My cut and paste books were outdated Calendars, and the artists pallet for school plays and Christmas decorations was the cardboard box. I even remember winning the Halloween costume prize for cutting cardboard into the shape of a tree and tying to it hundreds of dry fallen leaves--reds, yellows, and browns, so it rustled as I walked.
But no, I was never a collector just to be an owner. The plastic container stage of my mother's generation nearly drove me insane. How I despised the odd shapes, colors, and sizes collecting on our shelves. Being a matched-set person myself, I loathed containers and lids cluttering the counter, and I despised the cups--those horrible calf suckle measuring cups--endlessly coming into our home like leaves after the first fall freeze. Oh, how I hated drinking out of those calf suckle cups. Why did I have the misfortune to have a rancher father?
No, collecting just to be "owning" was not my forte at all. Every item I saved was because it had a virgin memory. Like Didion, I seemed to be striving to hang on to what it felt like to be me. I would record or save because I needed to, "...do what I was supposed to do, write [collect]". Why did I have that need? What was my strange presentiment of loss at birth? I can remember writing a response to one of my students about my lonely nagging hunger that never goes away. Younger people call this homesickness, a break from parenting, but in my case, the homesickness has lived on through thirteen moves and the death of my parents. It has never gone away. To Annie I wrote:
"First, I must tell you that I think you will never be free of the lonely feeling you have described. I know this may sound very discouraging, but it really isn't. Try to remember how it feels to desire the part of Hong Kong that became a part of you, and how you yearn to be there once more. You will also yearn for some parts of your Ricks experience after you leave Rexburg. One always takes the good things with them wherever one goes and will find oneself longing for those very things later in life. Is this bad? I don't think so. It's all a part of loving. The person to feel sorry for is the one who does not take anything with them because they haven't loved enough.
Now consider that the veil between you and your Heavenly Father is really very thin. You had a Heavenly experience before you came here. Do you think it still might be a part of you and that you feel it through the veil? Do you think, because your very makeup is divine, that maybe some of the homesickness you are feeling might be for your Heavenly home? I never considered this as a young woman. I always thought I felt these lonely feelings because I was homesick for my earthly home, but at my age, I "am" my earthly home, yet I still feel the homesickness. My parents are dead, my children are my family, and they come to me for nurture. My life is full of richness with the gospel, a good husband, and children, so why should I still long for anything and feel the same loneliness that you do? I believe it is my Heavenly home that I long for. It was there that I knew peace. Peace is not on this earth because the earth is our testing ground. I think perhaps these longings are what guide us toward righteousness as we are being tested. Our purpose here is to gain a mortal body and learn to discern right from wrong--and to gain knowledge. This must be a knowledge of all things.
The scriptures talk of the faithful as being able to know the voice as a hen gathereth her chicks. I doubt you have ever raised chickens, so I will tell you a little about chickens. When all the hens and all the chicks scratch together in the barnyard, they will get totally mixed up until you think they will never be a family again. One low cluck from the hen and the chicks fall into line as if a military man had shouted an order. It has always amazed me that the chicks know which one is their mother by the sound of the cluck, but they always do. I think the loneliness and longing that we feel are God's way of allowing us enough memory of our Heavenly home to keep us listening for the voice of righteousness. He has provided us a way to be sensitive to the cluck. If this were not so, righteousness would not fill us with peace as it does. Do not interpret this as negative. On the contrary, it is a very, very positive thing. It keeps us walking the direction we need to go to get back to that presence for which we yearn. We should welcome these feelings as a sign that we are still sensitive to the Lord. The real danger is with the people who endorse self-fulfillment and satisfaction, so that they begin to live their life without hearing the cluck. Hearing no cluck, they begin to live without the counsel of the Lord. When they begin to pick out their own trail, it is easy to get lost. It is much wiser to follow the trail of the one who knows the way."
Was I explaining to Annie about Didion's strange presentiment of loss at birth? If so, I suppose my writing gives me away, too. Didion claims that it is true that our notebooks [collections] do give us away, but are polluted with memoirs where only we know the meaning, and sometimes even we have a hard time sorting out the meaning. I used to write descriptions of people setting on the benches in church. Why did I do that? I have no idea. I thought I was going to present the descriptions to the subject as a sort of bonding thing, but I never gave away even one. I discovered the writings were only a shroud for a manifested quality which I wanted to emulate rather than a compliment to the subject. Rereading them made me feel what it was like to want to improve me. Didion, being a note writer must have shared this same experience, too. She writes,"We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-efficating. ('You're the least important person in the room and don't forget it,' Jessica Mitford's governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inner ear.) Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people's favorite dresses, other people's trout."
Is it wrong to be in touch with what you really are or used to be? I don't think so. Didion agrees with me in this respect, too. She states, "I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us...I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks [collections] are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebooks will never help me, nor mine you."
If all this is true, I can accept my collecting nature without apology. Others may think of me as the one with the junky basement, but another great truism states, "One man's junk is another man's treasure." Could saving pieces of me be a way of self-preservation? Could remembering "how it feels to be me" be a way to fortify a trembling foundation? I think so.
And what would cause stable-as-a-rock me to have a trembling foundation? I had no governess to take me to parties and tell me to attend to everyone else in the room as more important than I. Why then would I mirror a hollowness from rejection? I have no idea, but it does exist, and it does cause me to hang onto fragments of my collection that tell me I am important. Maybe I just have a super-sensitivity to eternal loss, the homesickness explained to Annie. Maybe as a nursing newborn, I grew fearful when turned over to a stranger, my Aunt Leona, who burnt the inside of my mouth with hot milk while mother had emergency gaul bladder surgery. Maybe my six months stay at age four in an overfilled and understaffed hospital as a polio victim left me with a presentiment of loss from my earthly home, or the confinement to a bed with hot towels wrapped on my body appendages for the next six months while my sister and brother were free to play made this impression. Possibly, I was one of those teens in current research that retreated inward because my physical maturity blossomed before others my age, and I resented carrying the most weight, the shapeliest curves, and the widest shoulders. Whatever the reason, somewhere along the way I, too, learned that everyone else in the room is more interesting than I, resulting in my despise of comparisons.
I loath being compared to anything or anybody. This has made me a fierce competitor. I fight to remain on top because I dread the bottom. I hate rises and falls. I know that the higher you climb the farther the fall, and I don't survive falls well. I'm always afraid I will fall too far and not be able to recover, so I compensate with the mastery of an even temperament. Oh, what an even temperament!
I once took a University of Northern Colorado class that required a psychological analysis of self as part of the course. My scores were returned to me with the comment that I scored as the most stable person ever tested not only by the University, but by the test administered anywhere. A normal person has points above and points below the 50% line and the wider the swing, or more number of swings, the more interesting the personality. My line was straight across the page dipping down only in one category, nuturancy. My nuturancy score was 3%--almost off the bottom of the page. (High nuturancy scorers make good kindergarten teachers because they like to nourish others.) Aside from that extreme low, I had no colorful quirks at all. I like peace. I like to observe. I like to meditate. I do not like to be the center of attention. Actions frightens me.
I suppose I was attracted to Harvey as a mate because he lived for this action I refused to furnish myself. Harvey's highs and lows are so dramatic that he manages to keep everything off balance. He keeps things so churned up that I am delighted when he leaves town for short periods to allow me to establish what I call genuineness. It's a breath of fresh air for me--sheer contentment, to run things my way for a change. In such times I fill my home with order, cleanliness, good reading and fine music. Our mutual friends have commented that it doesn't seem like our home when Harvey is gone because the doors are open with fresh air flowing, the concerts are blasting through radio or recordings while I work, and the lights are flooding the orderly rooms that smell of lemon. When Harvey arrives home, we return to impulsive chaos, disorder, and news broadcasts or nature editorials. Some, however, interpret this erratic behavior as interesting and fun. Once Harvey was gone for an extended time, and my own children complained that it wasn't fun anymore without dad because everything had become boring. I hate the idea that I am a bore.
Though I am a fierce competitor, I like to win as little as I do to lose. I loath being in front of people which is why I quit competitive swimming (as good as I was) and also why teaching has never been comfortable for me. I really hate doing a dog and pony show for students every time I walk into their presence. Perhaps this is why I develop so many interesting ways for students to interact with each other--which actually helps them to gain more anyway. Since I am into that "achieving more" thing, I pay the price of unreasonable additional hours committed to my work to assure that overachievement is present.
I always push to overachieve because it is rewarding. Those for whom I sacrifice generally shower me with appreciation while onlookers such as my husband praise me for devotion, loyalty, unselfishness, and all the good qualities that make me a hero. But sometimes my push to overachieve--to feel of value, is like shooting myself in the foot. Overachievement intimidates friends and children. I have to guard against this because it causes distance, and if I sense distance in relationships, I tend to disbelieve compliments. Often I disbelieve compliments so intensely that it is difficult to be gracious when given them. When this suspicious self-esteem dips too low, I retreat to my safety net, the collections, and I spend my time rereading cards and letters from students and friends who have taken the time to make a permanent record of their positive connection to my life. Somehow this allows me to recover some self-worth during low ebbs. This is why I keep a "Friends" book in my collections.
My inability to handle rejection or failure of any kind is so keen that I often relive actual situations over and over again when they haven't gone well. A bad class is a disaster for me? Why do I torture myself? I have no idea. Sometimes I blame it on chemical or hormone imbalance. Sometimes I blame it on the insecure and servitude lifestyle I have been forced to live. Sometimes I blame it on the endless evasion of financial comfort. Sometimes I just blame it on being tired, and overachievers get very, very tired. Regardless, it has been at these times that I find myself working on scrapbooks or other parts of my collections. My "pieces of me" give me a region of pleasure, a chance to understand how I fit into my world. They allow me to protest my sadness without being a wet blanket to those around me. They allow me to savor the warm times. Every time I look at my stuffed childhood companion, Cutie, I see a friend snuggled next to me in the dark. When I look at Muddy Ball, Raggedy Ann, Holly Hobbie, or Mickey Mouse, I see little arms reaching out for the same comfort. This box is placed in the same closet with the left over dresses. When I look at them I see endless hours of dreaming, struggles, creating, and gleaming eyes delighted with the creations. Do these things take too much room? Is collecting a bad hobby? I think not. I have cursed myself that my collecting is filling the spare corners of the basement, and been criticized by others that this hobby may consumed the whole of it. But so what if it takes the whole of it, if my curse is not really a curse at all but a way to keep in touch with myself. It takes less space than canoe building, animal raising, or automechanics. Is my curse of any less value than these?
Yes, I owe a lot to Joan Didion for her written expression. I've finally faced up to the reality that collecting is my chore, a curse I will probably never disown. I suppose keeping in touch with self is what all grandmas do when they share hidden contents of cedar chests with kids, or grandkids. I have simply overachieved at this as with everything else. Through Didion I have realized that even my faithful reading of student journals is probably reviving "glimpses of me" through their writing. I kept little memorabilia of college year feelings because study and papers were all I could handle back then. Besides, I was keeping in touch with myself physically in those days. I could know what every cell in my body would tolerate with a good swimming workout. I liked that physical feeling of control--knowing of what my body was capable.
With age, the lack of physical activity has created a sort of window pane--window pain. That which lives within me burns brighter now than ever before, but my individual cells don't do what I tell them to do leaving me to look out of this window much of the time. The window directs me to view and review within my collections. At present, some things are being abridged or eliminated while others are being drawn out in writing attempts such as this. I don't know where it will all end, but my new friend, Joan Didion, has helped me not feel guilty about my collections anymore. Through her I can see myself better--and, of course, I have the flashbacks to help.
Flashbacks have always accompanied my experiences and, fortunately, have been abundant in my life, too. They are the other thing that helps me to feel safe. What about these flashbacks? Well, they are the other half of living, and I suppose I should comment here how they fit with my curse of collections. But, like Didion says in her closing statement, "...that is, as they say, another story."