What's In Your Closet?

We all know the saying, "one man's trash is another man's treasure." And there is, perhaps, no better way of illustrating this point then to take a look at the kind of things people like to collect. I'm not talking about the big-time--things that are investment-grade. I mean the small-time collections people have throughout their lives that are seldom worth much monetarily, but hold a lot of meaning for the individual and become a kind of personal quest. Collections delight the collector and often baffle others who say, why the hell would he/she want a collection of that particular item even though they might very well be harboring a vast collection of, let's say, hand-woven Easter baskets, as they speak. Collectors ought never to criticize or look askance, lest the mirror be turned on themselves.

The beauty of collections is that anything will work. There is no end to the variety of items one might come to fancy. Even people living a meager existence can delight in collections--my grandmother, for example, collected buttons. That collection was partly practical because she was also a talented seamstress, but she must have enjoyed it because she had thousands of them and she would let us play with them--only if we were careful--when we visited her. My Irish-twin sister collects rhinos in all forms. For the Ambassador, herself (my other sister) it's turtles. For another friend, it's egg cups. Knowing about a person's collection and what items they do and don't have is handy when you are drawing a blank on gift ideas. For my own children, the girl and the boy, I started collections when they were little and added to them over the years. The girl got Snow Babies and the boy got Lionel Trains.

This group combines my interests in mechanical toys and birds.

Collectibles, things manufactured and released in limited numbers for the sole purpose of collecting and appreciating in value can be fun and I have a few, but in my opinion the best collections consist of items never intended to wind up as collectibles. And coincidentally, that phraseology brings us to one of my collections--wind-up toys. I have collected a number of things over the years, but the wind-ups are my most extensive and fun collection. The toys that started it all were given to me as little holiday gifts by my editor (and subsequent life-long friend) on my first job out of college. That little hopping Valentine's heart and twirling Christmas tree led to the acquisition of hundreds of other mechanical toys that perform amazing feats at the twist of their little white knobs. And that's the kind I like, the little plastic ones with the white knobs. They are relatively inexpensive, accessible and to me highly entertaining. Some of my collection dates from the early to late 70s. Others are fast-food kid's toys. Some of the best are advertising pieces, like the Geico Gecko.

Two old-timers. The elephant raises his rear legs.

An ever irresistible duo.



Babies

For years I kept the wind-ups stowed away, only taking them out occasionally for little test drives. When the boy came along, I would take them out--only if he was careful--and let him see all the funny things they did. Recently, I put them on display in my kitchen so that I could enjoy them all the time. It's funny to see people's reaction to them. Junk they would likely throw out, meticulously collected and displayed. Some love it, some are bemused or bewildered and others say things that are, well,  just a little mean.

It took awhile to find all the members of this group.

Knowing a person has a collection of some sort that they love makes me feel good about them. It gives me a sort of feeling of fellowship. Finding out what someone collects can be surprising and fascinating (and probably downright scary in some instances). It can also, as in my case, be just plain funny--or, ok I'll admit it, odd. Some people's collections I envy. Others, not so much.  What do you collect? I hope you'll write and share about it. I'd love to know.

Soldiers from the V & A Museum in London

2012

Here it is, another new year. And yes, I am excited! You would think that with 40 some odd new years under my belt that the whole "new year, new start, new me" thing would have worn off. After all, I never accomplish the grandiose self-improvement resolutions I make. Each year excuses begin and circumstances arise which I use to circumvent achieving even a modicum of physical fitness. I tell myself, just one more murder mystery or vampire book before I delve seriously back into the philosophers or open my mind to the principles of economics. I aim for a sleeker, smarter, more efficient, better organized me and though I don't fail entirely, I always find myself making the very same plans for the very same reasons the following January.

So why the hope? Why the excitement and sense that this year it will all come together? I think part of it, for all of us, is simply that the giant hurdle of "the holidays" is behind us. Physically, financially and for many emotionally, the holidays are as challenging and exhausting as they are joyous and sustaining. Once they are over, many of the musts of daily life can be replaced with more enjoyable pursuits. And there is something invigorating about the vast dullness of January through March looming ahead and providing nearly nothing to look forward to in the way of good weather or festive occasions. All that time, free from distractions good or bad--it's a pure luxury. It's you time.

Today, I feel like I'm in a good position to make my "me time" count. A lot of the avenues I will pursue, are continuations of last year's resolutions. Things well begun, but attended to less as the year became busier (this blog for example). I'll build on what I learned in the art class I took last spring. It wasn't a waste of time after all. I enjoyed it then and can pursue it again now. I'll keep going to that gym I joined, abandoned for months and rediscovered in December when I needed a mood lifter. Life does get busier as the weather gets better, kids get out of school, then there's back-to-school and the pace begins mounting toward the year-end holiday crescendo. If you recognize the flow, you can eliminate the feeling of failure associated with leaving off with things you want to do--things that make you happy. It helps me somehow to think of it as picking up and carrying on rather than starting all over. It also helps to make resolutions for the right reasons. Replacing the I have tos, I ought tos or I shoulds with a few great I really want tos makes a world of difference. All the other stuff gets done or not and ends up not mattering. But things you've always longed to do, or things that spark your interest now--those are the jewels of life. I'll only do something for any length of time if I really want to do it. It has to make me happy on some level. Maybe you're the same. If you find some of those things maybe you can make it a truly Happy New Year! That's my plan.

Flipped Flops

While I'm not proud, I'm probably not sufficiently ashamed to say that much of my life the past ten years has been lived wearing flip flops. Somewhere along the way, real shoe purchasing became too fraught and taxing (I do have insanely small feet). And flip flops, hundreds of thousands of cheap, easy to fit, easy to find flip flops appeared to eliminate the hassle. So pretty, so versatile--you can get them in every color and every material. There are fancy flip flops, rugged ones, simple and even silly ones. You can get a new pair to match your every mood. And I did, it seems. And for a very long time, it was good.

In the winter, I'd scrounge up a couple of pairs of closed shoes and a pair of boots to wear outside but my heart was never in it. I liked them about as much as I liked the winter itself. Once home, I'd slip back into my flip flops. I waited out the winter and celebrated spring with a few fresh pairs. My feet hurt all the time, but I never attributed it to the lack of proper shoes. After all, I wasn't wearing heels anymore!

Then, one day in April, my feet broke. There is no other way to describe it. One minute they were supporting me and the next minute they stopped. There was ugly bruising and months of recovery. I was forced to take stock of what I was doing to my feet by offering them so little support. I paid real money for some real shoes and found that my feet feel a lot better all the time. I found FitFlops as a fall back--extremely expensive but remarkably comfortable flip flop substitutes (I can't recommend them enough). The whole shoe shopping thing is growing on me (much to the Mayor's dismay) and I've amassed a nice little collection of shoes I can wear all day without pain and hobbling. I've become downright obsessed with winter boots.

But now, what to do with all these beautifully uncomfortable, painfully pretty, classic yet cruel, stylishly sadistic little decorations for the foot? I still kind of love them. It seems a shame to toss them, but they take up space and nobody wants anybody's old flip flops. I can't wear them now. Within an hour or two, the pain comes back and it's just not worth it. So, to the trash heap they go. Of course, I'll keep a few for pedicures and the sake of sentimentality. We've had a lot of fun together and it pains me to throw them away but, alas, not nearly as much as it pains me to wear them!

October Gave a Party . . .

Today is the epitome of a gorgeous fall day. Walk out the door and the world feels alive and electric. I've gotten more done effortlessly today that I do in a week of gloomy, rainy weather dragging myself from chore to chore. Days like this remind me of a poem I learned when I was a little girl. It started, 'October gave a party . . .' hence my title. And October always felt like a party month to me as I reveled in the weather and planned for Halloween, my high holiday, as I've always called it. It's usually a whirlwind of costume making, decorating, parties and some amazing weekends in Salem, Massachusetts.

But this year with the boy being too old to dress up, the main event party I usually attend canceled due to home renovations, and no Salem trip planned, I've got nothing! No agonizing over what to be, no fabric and make-up to buy, no sewing and gluing and swapping personas for a day! Nothing. I will have to content myself this year by looking back at pictures of some of my favorite costumes and handing out treats to the little princesses, ghosts and other creatures that come my way. A lot less work, but also a lot less fun!

Look at a few of my pictures with me and enjoy the rest of the poem:

October's Party
By: George Cooper

October gave a party;
The leaves by hundreds came—
The Chestnuts, Oaks, and Maples,
And leaves of every name.
The Sunshine spread a carpet,
And everything was grand,
Miss Weather led the dancing,
Professor Wind the band.

The Chestnuts came in yellow,
The Oaks in crimson dressed;
The lovely Misses Maple
In scarlet looked their best;
All balanced to their partners,
And gaily fluttered by;
The sight was like a rainbow
New fallen from the sky.

Then, in the rustic hollow,
At hide-and-seek they played,
The party closed at sundown,
And everybody stayed.
Professor Wind played louder;
They flew along the ground;
And then the party ended
In jolly "hands around."

Happy Halloween!

The Lost Art of Letter Writing

Since Ireland, I've been on some kind of personal journey back in time. I've been thinking about and trying to recover old music from iTunes. I've cleaned out and reorganized my desk and bookshelves and searched through hundreds of photos from childhood and on through the years. Ordinarily, I don't make time for looking back. I have no idea what's gotten into me, but I've decided to go with it because the net result has been reclaiming usable house space and, unexpectedly, lots of reminiscence both good and bittersweet.

The best rediscovery by far has been a box of letters and keepsakes that I had not opened in 20 years.  My own private time capsule. I'd saved report cards and papers from elementary school through college. Greeting cards, of course! Mementos from my high school days as a House Page in the U.S. House of Representatives. A Congressional Record signed by Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill. An autograph from Dudley Moore that he surrendered in FAO Schwartz where a crazy friend from Arkansas, my Irish twin and I accosted him one day.

Mom

But better than all these goodies were the letters. Hundreds of them. Despite the fact that I spent five hours straight going through them all one day, I've only read a smattering so far. My sister, herself, now a US Ambassador unwittingly created a snap-shot of history by chronicling her first tour of duty in Johannesburg, South Africa during apartheid in monthly letters to me. My Irish twin sister regaled me while I was away in Washington with hilarious anecdotes from home, highlighting the activities of my parents', our friends, herself and even the dog. Rereading the letters from my mother now, who we lost before I got married or became a parent, opens up a new understanding of the fervency of her love for me and the worries I caused her. In one note, she thanks me for not just loving her, but telling her so. Nineteen years gone and she's still making me feel good about myself.

Family you expect to be constant, but I am particularly lucky in that some of my very best friends in the world then remain as near and dear today. I think I will invite each one over individually to share these old treasures and see if we can recall the circumstances, the characters referred to, the love interests and the shared jokes even now with our minds addled by age. Other correspondents I've lost touch with, but may look up on facebook to see what they're doing. In an interesting twist, the least riveting letters now were the ones I'd have looked forward to the most back in the day--the all-important love letters!

One thing that struck me about so many of the letters was how well-written and genuinely entertaining they were. Writing letters and striving to make them interesting or funny was something we all did. A cliche like, "don't forget to write," wasn't just a joke. That IS how we kept in touch--male and female. Unfortunately, it is an art form that we have all but lost with the advent of email and cell phones. Few 20-somethings today will have a treasure trove like mine to open during their mid-life reckonings. In a way, it seems like life is a far more superficial enterprise altogether now. In writing letters, we shared a part of ourselves. We opened up and committed to paper our thoughts, observations and our feeling in a way that isn't imaginable today. In being apart from someone then, we might actually have become closer than ever through letters. Now, we just lose touch.

If you've got one of these boxes lurking around your attic, I encourage you to take a chilly winter's day and devote it to reacquainting yourself with your youth. You may find references to things you'd quite forgotten about yourself (I must have sent homemade cookies to people on a weekly basis, though I don't remember ever doing so!). If you're young now and the only correspondence you get comes via email, I suggest you print them out and put them into a box for safekeeping. Years from now and 10 PCs later, you won't have anything to look back on if you don't. 

Ireland . . . Forever

I've just spent the last week driving around the west of Ireland with herself, my sister, listening to Irish music and photographing landscapes, livestock and monastic ruins. The roads were hair-raisingly narrow, bendy and enigmatically marked. It rained much of the time and the temperature seldom crested 70  degrees except in the humid confines of our rather small rental car. Our flip-flops were inadequate, sunscreen unnecessary and swim suits completely irrelevant. Each night we were tired from a long day's slog, but each morning we soldiered on in the quest to drink in as much of the countryside as possible in the short time we had. Of an evening we enjoyed a bit of music, a bit of craic and I'll admit, a bit of whiskey. I realize this isn't the conventional picture of a great vacation, but I'd turn around and go back in a heartbeat to spend several weeks more doing the exact same thing. So, I know, would anyone who has been there and done the same already.

The plane carrying my corporeal self arrived back on Sunday, and it's Wednesday now. But, my thoughts and my dreams are still running to the wilds of Connemara marveling at the beauty of the low-hanging clouds on the hilltops, the flowing mountain streams and lush wildflowers. Either that or I'm on a clifftop in Clare gazing out at the ocean and feeling the uncompromising wind that trains the branches of the trees to point forever inland. It is an amazing phenomenon to become more accustomed than not to finding a soul-moving vista around nearly every bend. And it's an unwelcome adjustment when it all ends.

In Ireland, the west in particular, the terrain is so uncluttered that the map relates directly to what you are looking at out the car window. When you meander through the remains of a 12th-century monastery, it isn't so very difficult to imagine what it was like when it was up and running because essentially what you see from the now ruined windows is what was always here. You can travel a secondary road for 15 minutes without encountering another vehicle and in the more remote reaches, you might never see another one. Of course, we avoided the obvious tourist sites we've already seen--you can't avoid crowds everywhere. But it's easy to get off the beaten path and well worth it.

I'm excited about spending the upcoming week at the beach. The ease and sultry warmth of our American summer will be a welcome contrast to the rain and cool of Ireland. I ought to get packing, but I've frittered away my time the last few days fine tuning my pictures, captioning them and uploading them to share. I've looked up and read about the ruins we visited. I've dug out photos from previous trips, comparing, remembering and reliving. I've found my old cassette tapes and looked for my celtic favorites on iTunes. I have yet to reset my watch to the correct time. In short, I'm doing everything I can to resist getting back to normal. I prefer to wonder whether or not the cows in Ireland ever get to go inside than to think about what to make for dinner. Sorting out old photos really beats sorting laundry. Transporting myself through time to envision a bustling medieval community of friars beats transporting the boy to his various amusements.

But I am back and I must grab hold of myself. There are things to do, places to go and people to meet. For now, I will leave Ireland latent in my mind . . . until next time. I hope it's soon.

Boy Meets World

At a get-together last week, the day the heart-breaking truth of what had become of the little Brooklyn boy Leibby Kletzky came out, a discussion cropped up about a family--relatives, I think of my host and hostess--allowing their 12-year-old son to travel by train into Jersey City unaccompanied by an adult for a daily program at the same high school the boy will coincidentally be attending in September. There was strong condemnation all around for any mode of getting around by kids of any age and at any time of day other than riding in a car driven by their parents. For me, it was one of those, "hello, I'm sitting right here and can HEAR YOU moments," as everyone who was there knows the boy takes the train every day, too. Whether or not they were intending to send me a message of either concern or disapproval notwithstanding, I got to thinking about why I am willing to let the boy board a train in the 'burbs, transfer in Newark and land ultimately in Jersey City when others think it unimaginable.

My father tells me stories all the time about the various sights he'd see and adventures he'd have when at the age of 6 or 7, he would board a trolley in Jersey City all alone to visit his grandmother in Hoboken. By age 9 or 10 he was leading other kids on expeditions to Coney Island via Ferry and the NYC subway. To these stories, I react as my friends did--with disapproval of my grandmother's judgement. He'll say, but times were different. I'll think, but weirdos still existed. Then I remembered that I was riding buses in Jersey City with a same-age friend at age 10 and it didn't seem so outlandish anymore (OK, 6 or 7 still does).

Are there weirdos out there? Absolutely. By and large are they going to capture kids and dismember them? No. Will the boy encounter the occasional deviant, a menacing-looking stranger, an aggressive pan-handler, a would-be pickpocket, a dealer offering drugs? I think so. He has already. But I rode the train everyday as a young woman--aka a magnet for weirdos--and these encounters were scant and manageable. By and large, riders of public transportation are just people getting to where they are going. I think in the rarefied world of the suburbs, people tend to forget this. Kids are so insulated from the real world that a train full of strangers becomes a train full of predators. If the parents think so, the kids will certainly think so.

Both the girl and the boy will drone on about my overprotectiveness over the years. And yes, I've pointed out every scary edge they could fall off, every germ potential they might encounter and the uselessness of every lightweight coat they've ever worn. I can't think about the girl driving too much and feel like I should medicate myself when either of them are flying. The mayor and I were a wreck when the boy started riding the train last year. The mayor would call me when he spotted him heading toward the train, spying on him from his office window in Jersey City, and I'd call him back when "the package" alighted again in town. But, the boy never knew it. He felt the confidence we had in his ability to negotiate his expanding world, even if we didn't fully at first. And I think that is a part of our job as parents, to guide our children incrementally toward independence and self-confidence. In that regard (and in many other regards) we cannot help but revel in our success with the girl. She breaks boundaries and succeeds beyond our wildest expectations every day. We expect nothing less of the boy and are preparing him accordingly.

While I fervently hope I don't live to regret the chances I allow the boy to take, I prefer that risk to having him live to regret chances he was too timid to take because I made him that way.