Ooh, this week’s theme might open up a can of worms! Finally, you all get to see just how weird I am! (I understand some of you realize this already).
Things I Collect…
- Face Masks and Pottery Heads. This collection started when my best friend and maid of honor gave me a pottery head/cookie jar of a guy who looked like he might have been an extra in the original Mad Max movie. That led to me buying a second head by a different potter, which led to my sister-in-law buying me a funky face mask of a guy with huge red lips and sunglasses smoking a cigarette, which led to me buying a companion face mask from the same artist of a woman in hair curlers and an earring that says, “You’ll have to marry me first.” Which led to at least half-a-dozen face masks since then. I only have room for one or two more face masks above my desk, so I’m getting pickier.
- Weird Cat Statues. Okay, I have three floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and while I have a lot of books, they would look boring (to me) if they only had books on them. So I started collecting weird cat statues. I must have at least twenty of these statues in various places–on my roll-top desk, on my bookshelves, on top of my grandmother’s china cabinet–but I’ve heard about other folks’ animal collections, elephants and such, and I don’t think I’m too out to lunch with this one.
- Leather-Bound Classics. For years I collected leather-bound books, and I have about 110 of them on my bookshelves (but have only read about 50; gotta get moving on that again) along with contemporary hardcovers and trade paperbacks. I don’t keep many mass market paperbacks, just my absolute favorites. The books were the reason for the bookshelves, which then begged to be filled with cats and pottery heads and other stuff, such as…
- Unique Bookends. I have at least a dozen quirky bookend sets, and not all of them get to sit on the same shelf as their pair. I need maybe one more set of bookends so I can get rid of the last tin set.
- Wooden Body Parts. Yes, I know it sounds odd, but it’s not, really. I found this life-sized wooden foot in a store in Mexico, and it was a nice change from wooden ducks, etc., so I bought it. Then we went to Cuba, and I found a Cuban clenched fist. That seemed to go along. I have a couple of mom and daughter wooden heads my parents picked up in a foreign country ages ago. I’m open to more wooden body parts, so if you have some, send them along! *Note, I have no need to collect skulls. I will leave that to some of my relatives.
If you think my adult collections are a bit off the wall, as a child I collected:
- Pamphlets. Every time we went to a motel/hotel (not often), I would collect the tourism pamphlets. Then somehow I discovered that I could send away to companies for information on their products, and thus collect more pamphlets! I sent away at least twenty letters to places like Firestone, using up all my dad’s business stamps, just so I could get these pamphlets. I had a dresser with pretty skinny drawers, like a tallboy. One drawer was filled with pamphlets. I have no defense for this collection other than we didn’t have an encyclopedia set, it was before the Internet, I craved information, I craved words, I craved reading, I craved learning, and I craved what I would later realize might be called research. I just loved words so much I needed all the words I could find. I no longer have this collection.
- Bird Parts. Yes, I know this one is odd, and my mother put a stop to it as soon as she discovered the little wooden box in my closet with bird heads and claws that my cat left over after she finished eating a bird beneath my bed. They were petrifying nicely. This was around the time I wanted to be a pathologist, and the birds were already dead, it wasn’t like I was the cat, you know. So it made sense to me. But my mother feared collecting dead bird parts might lead to collecting, I don’t know what she thought. But I had to stop.
- Teeth. Yikes, I can see you running away. But, you see, there was a time I wanted to become a dentist. So it made total sense to collect my brother’s baby teeth as they were falling out. I had a couple of own teeth and put them under plastic wrap in my scrapbooks.
Just go ahead, tell me something weird you collect or collected as a child. Show me up. I dare you.