Collecting Dust
By Mary Mendoza

From the time I was old enough to walk I was encouraged to collect antiques. When I was six my mother gave me a cobalt blue-glass Shirley Temple cereal bowl, part of a 1930s breakfast set and said, “Go forth and seek, my child.”

The packrat, compulsive collector gene manifests itself on both sides of my family. My father accumulated a Leaning Tower of Pisa floor-to-ceiling collection of Time magazines that dated back to the first issue (1923) to the Watergate-era when he lost faith in the government. He also collected pressed back turn-of-the-century kitchen chairs by the hundreds and hung them from the walls and ceilings. So many he became known as the “Chair Man.”

The collecting bug bit my Mother at age 14 when she bought an antique clock at a tag sale for fifty cents. Over the years there are few things Mother hasn’t either collected or wanted to collect–except for Time magazines.

My sister Janie collected pre-Colombian artifacts, Makah Indian baskets and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass record albums. All are nearly impossible to find today.

My collections were so vast and diverse they could have filled a corner of the British Museum.

I collected antique hats and hat pins, vintage clothing (everything from Martha Washington ball gowns to flapper dresses); matching shoes, parasols and gloves; an odoriferous assortment of fur wraps and Persian lamb coats; beaded handbags; Harrison Fisher prints; silver souvenir spoons–one for every state in the union; antique dolls; “Frozen Charlottes;” 1950s era paper dolls; Scottie dog trinkets; buttons; perfume bottles; half-dolls (circa 1900 to 1930);“Buttercup” Spode china; old coins; stamps; Elvis and Sinatra recordings; two patterns of Depression glass; those little blue Delft houses filled with whiskey; Japanese and Chinese objects before they were called Asian; Bennington pottery; flamboyant jewelry; cookbooks; and princely paraphernalia. Yes, I still have it–the most exhaustive cradle-to-crown Prince Charles scrapbook this side of Windsor Castle. As a teenager I dreamt of marrying Charles and one day becoming The Queen Mary. How different the world would be today if my dream had come true!

Now, in The September of My Years (Sinatra, Reprise, 1965) my collecting habits have evolved to the point where I buy only practical items to enhance my home and help me “Use My Life” (Oprah, 2000). Towards this end, my clutter, er, I mean my museum quality collection has expanded to include Italian ceramics, pictorial plates, Mexican pottery and silver jewelry, vintage fruit labels, kooky hats, decorative goats and rubber duck noses.

My husband has become a packrat in his own right, hauling home treasures and oddities to enhance his workshop, carport and our rafter-filled garage. As he joyfully unveils a fourteen-foot portable chicken coop where he plans to store items that would never make the cut on Mission Organization, I assume my Queen Mary mode, nodding and smiling graciously.

“Oh, darling, what a wonderful chicken coop! It’s so large and roomy! If we were planning to raise chicks it would hold hundreds of them,” I cluck approvingly.

He beams with pride as he wrestles it off the truck and into the garage where he plops it down next to the dilapidated bookshelf he bought last week; the 27 Vincent Fernandez albums he spent fifteen years collecting; a selection of power tools second to none on the planet, an assortment of lawn and garden potions and poultices so vast and diverse they could fill a corner of the Fertilizer Museum; unused exercise equipment; half empty paint cans and 4,352 mismatched screws, nuts and roofing nails leftover from our many calamitous home remodeling projects.

Thank goodness we are not like those obsessive types who have 50,000 Mickey Mouse refrigerator magnets or a basement full of rusty bicycle pumps! My family and I collect only valuable and useful items. And that is why I shall never give up my quest for the entire Shirley Temple breakfast set for ten dollars, in mint condition, in its original box, signed by Curly Top herself!

Collecting Dust is from Mary Mendoza’s latest book Embracing Lunacy, More Adventures with Madcap Mary. For more information check out her fabulous Web site at www.madcapmary.com.

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