It started with a bottle of French wine. Like a romance? An affair? A hazy remembrance from a night in Paris? No. Just a label that looked different from the bottles of Boone’s Farm which we 20-year-olds passed up, laughing, and different from the Blue Nun which we usually bought, thinking that must be good, it’s foreign. What IS Liebfraumilch anyway, we pondered aloud over spaghetti later. And what was that other wine that came in a fun earthy brown bottle. Lancers. I don’t remember the wine, just the bottle. Oh and those Italian reds with straw woven around their glass plump bottoms. We kept them to put candles in and let the dripped wax accrete multicolored layers that whispered: fun, party, pleasure…pass the spaghetti, please.
The French bottle, an unexpected gift brought to dinner by someone wooing, looked regal by contrast. Simple. Macon-Villages. Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée.
I didn’t even try to understand the foreign words after I had a sip. It was different. A sliver of blue sky shining between two slim clouds: that was what met my tongue. My world was bigger, now, knowing wine could taste like that. So I collected labels from French wine bottles for years, soaking the glass in hot water and peeling paper off carefully to preserve…to preserve, what? I am wondering now.
What are collections, really? Little museums of experience? Pyramids we build, one rock at a time, to change what we most revere into a monument?
Cleaning out one’s possessions is talk show fodder lately. A Japanese writer blesses the joy of orderly closets, but it is a Nordic approach I turn to in the new year. Margareta Magnusson’s “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning” is a book that is truly a gift to your heirs. I thought it a brave title. “Death cleaning is also something you can do for yourself,” she writes, “for your own pleasure. And if you start early, at say sixty-five, it won’t seem like such a huge task when you, like me, are between eighty and one hundred.” Pleasure with throwing things out and confidence with aging. Looks good to me. How certain she sounds about the sweetness of decluttering before you are close to dying. Before you are feeble, it can be fun to mindfully sort your museum of stuff, while you still have the dexterity to pitch things into the waste bin, or walk cute baubles to the doorsteps of friends.
I have years of practice in casting things off, because I’ve moved so much. I threw out the wine label collection the first time I changed from city life to seasons in the woods with the Forest Service. But I still have the box my Fabiano hiking boots came in which has slowly accumulated the programs from every play I have ever attended, starting in school with student shows where festive program art celebrates plays by Wilder, Sheridan, O’Neill, Bombeck. I look through the seasons of the ASU Lyric Opera and remember that is where I first saw “The Tales of Hoffman” and have seen it every decade since, including productions at the Royal Opera in London, and the Met in New York City. That history accrues under my bed in the box that held my first real hiking boots.
I feel lucky I never felt moved to collect foreign sports cars, as thrilling as it was to push a Mercedes 190 SL to 90 across the Mojave desert or cruise across the Tempe Salt River bridge in an Austin Mini. Had they been my cars, I might have kept them, I guess, wanting to cling to extraordinary experience. It might be the very heft and bulk of solid things that is alluring. “One might want a collection of anchors through decades of highs and lows,” commented a friend. “So maybe keep every refrigerator you ever owned,” I joked. She said, “I know a woman with 11 typewriters,” and I blushed. “Windmills,” I murmured, defensively. “Mack trucks.”
I told her how driving across the USA one time, I came across an Oklahoma farmhouse with a collection of windmills. They looked planted like daisies along the road, I thought as I plucked details with my iPhone to keep them forever. Another time, noodling around a peninsula in Maine looking for a trailhead, I found a dead end road full of old trucks moldering in the woods. My friends were afraid a fierce guard dog would rush out to bite my ankles, but I had to take pictures. They seemed such a tender collection, all of the trucks those chunky Macks, a few with the bulldog emblem intact. A personal museum of steady workhorses. “It is a delight to go through things and remember their worth,” writes Magnusson. Good luck to the heirs of the Mack trucks, I think now.
Lucky the collector who thinks small. I knew a gal who collected those little stickers from bananas and tangerines. She filled notebook pages with them for years. My uncle kept matchbooks from every international hotel he slept in through a lifetime working as an oil engineer. I like looking at them now, although striking a match from the Hong King Hilton, you take your life in your hands: an amazingly risky conflagration! You do not look cool like James Bond leaning toward a pretty woman when the match explodes like fireworks!
Magnusson, dear old lady she is, confidently believes sorting through your stuff before you are feeble and infirm can be fun, a lovely visit through your decades as an accumulator of both things and wisdoms. But I don’t think she has in mind people who amass stuff in massive ways, or families in place for a hundred years who fill both attic and barn. Lucky me, to be content with matchbooks and theater programs and well, it’s true, typewriters. Whoever cleans up my “estate” one day can manage it with one cookout and a campfire: paper fed to bright coals, ashes raked up the next day to feed roses somewhere. A much shorter process than waiting for vines to reclaim big trucks! And the typewriters. Hmm. Anybody want one?
