Of Magnets and Memories

I’ve never been much of a collector; it’s hard when you move a lot. As a kid, I didn’t have any obsessive interest or a particular preoccupation that might have been the impetus for a collection.I didn’t encourage my kids to be collectors either. As an adult, I do have enough notebooks and coffee mugs, that a casual observer (or someone I live with) might say I’m curating a collection but I don’t think either of those count. I don’t move every two years anymore, and I still don’t want to START A COLLECTION.

For Elisabeth’s 21st birthday we took a trip to San Francisco. We ate sourdough bread, drank way too much coffee, slept in an incredibly small hotel room, and walked until our feet throbbed. On one of our last days we ate breakfast in a diner in the Castro and trekked up a residential street for a moving sale at the home of a blogger Elisabeth followed. It was a fun foray into the real world of San Francisco, people who worked and shopped and lived like the rest of us, well, kind of. Seeing inside someone else’s home is interesting, it both flattens and accentuates the differences. This particular home was small, designed for comfort and style. The thing that captured my imagination was the collection of letter “S”s that covered one wall. I’ve always loved text and am partial to the first letter of my name. I liked this graphic representation and my first (only?) collection was born.

When we moved into this house and unpacked our same belongings for the umpteenth time I came across the decorated storage boxes I’ve gathered over the years to hold a variety of memorabilia. They are usually stored away and forgotten until we move again. As I started to think about collections, my mind kept coming back to a small flip-top box at the top of my bedroom closet.

In the summer of 1998, we were moving from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Quantico, Virginia. It was our sixth move in 10 years. As I prepped the house to move, I gathered the magnets, the pictures, the miscellanea stuck on my fridge and stuffed it all in a ziplock bag. After a year in Virginia, we moved to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. I did the same thing each time: pack, move, repeat. Year after year. Eventually, all the plastic bags ended up in a fancy storage box, never to be thought of again– until now.

The box is a time capsule, even though it is no longer even a box; the adhesive was so old or cheap (or so both) that it just came unstuck. I bought a nice new box, but I kind of miss the old one. When I started to write this post last September, I pulled the box from its closet home and spread the contents across our dining room table. Elisabeth and Rachel, spent some time sorting through them and then before I could take a good look, I needed my table back. I was certain I took a picture before I cleared it but now I can’t find it. It’s been hard to look; sorting back through photos from a time that I’d like to ignore, to bury somewhere in the backyard of my brain, possibly to be unearthed some day or maybe not.

I got the box out again yesterday and began to sort through the decades of my adult life: notes from my mom, a picture of my sister, Leslie, senior pics of friends, school photos of cousins, Elisabeth’s senior year Letter to the Editor, kid art, kid crafts, magnets from libraries, Pizza Hut, military base agencies, schools, travel keepsakes, sports teams. I could fill the page with an itemized list, but I think you get it. Some have the power to make me cry, others are just random scraps from an average life that have meaning only in their supporting roles as reminders of a life that is mine but also seems to belong to someone else.

I don’t know what is on your fridge but it’s most likely the daily particulars you never think about. If the way we spend our days is the way we spend our lives, your place-it-and-forget-about-it fridge collection is probably a pretty good clue to who you are and how you live. We’ve become more cognizant of what is on our fridge now. We still let it be what it’s always been, a collector of the here and now, but we’ve started to curate, too. The last day of each month Lee and I choose from the photos we’ve taken that month and select one each, we take turns selecting a photo of Andrew, and, most recently, we added a photo of another family member no longer with us. I upload them to the Walgreens app, pick them up in an hour and install them into our fridge gallery.

My sister-in-law, Valerie, recently texted me a picture of a magnet Andrew made when we lived in Australia. It has been on her fridge for twenty years! Going through our magnets, I found a similar one from what I’m now calling Andrew’s Ocean Collection. What is on your fridge? Or maybe you have one of those stainless steel types that isn’t magnetic…what do you do then?What do you collect, intentionally or otherwise? Thank you for reading. So very appreciated.

Before you go…Elisabeth was probably the only one of our kids that had a collecting bent. In 29 Palms, as a Kindergartener, she routinely picked up rocks which we “displayed” on various surfaces, including many window sills. One of our neighbors made extra money cleaning houses and we hired her a couple of times. Eventually she asked me what the deal was with all the rocks. That collection was returned to nature when we moved to Guantanamo Bay. In Cuba, Elisabeth started a light bulb collection, also gathered along the window sill in her bedroom. To be fair, she wasn’t interested in every lightbulb, it was a nicely curated collection. I understood the appeal. It’s a miracle that it remained undisturbed by our cat, Butler, and her younger sister, Rachel! In a discreet ceremony, that collection was returned to its place in the trash bin when we moved.