Did You Ever Cross the Line From Collecting to Hoarding?

When I was in fourth grade, my penchant for collecting took a strange turn and got me into trouble at school. Shame and fear of being ostracized tormented me. All because of some straws.

I had dabbled in collecting before then with stamps, stickers, and baseball cards. Things that were mostly given to me. I had a nice album for the stamps. I kept the stickers in a box and sorted through them weekly, admiring them. The baseball cards were meticulously checked against the team roster to complete the collection.

The straw collection started accidentally when I took an extra for my milk at lunch. I slipped the straw into my back pocket and put it in my desk in Miss Carlton’s classroom.

The next day, I took another straw. The day after that I took two extra, and soon I was taking three or four at a time. The seeds of an obsession had been planted.

My first mistake: the collection grew too big

Before long, I packed half my desk with straws. I had to arrange my notebooks and pencils and stuff to make room. I hadn’t really thought of how many I wanted, but I was certain I would keep taking them.

Don Hunt, thanks to the alphabet, sat next to me. He noticed the straws one day and asked about them.

“They’re straws.”

“But why?”

The question made me uncomfortable. I didn’t have to cite a reason for collecting Chiquita banana stickers at home, so why did I need a reason to collect straws at school? “I don’t know. I just like them.”

My unwanted accomplice

The next day, Don took extra straws from the cafeteria. But he didn’t just take a couple.

He took them by the fistful.

“Look,” he said, showing his sudden collection dumped in his desk.

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t like it.

It was like the nouveau riche, having come into money, buying a big house and lots of “art.” But instead of walls covered with Thomas Kinkade paintings, he had dozens of paper-wrapped straws in his desk.

I felt like he hadn’t earned the collection, and I knew it meant nothing to him.

My collecting as an expression of something else?

My banana sticker collection, for example, was an act of resistance that helped my self-esteem. My brothers had pranked me, telling me that if I collected enough stickers, Chiquita would send me a banana-shaped toy. Being ignorant and gullible (I was six or seven years old, for Pete’s sake), I diligently gathered the sticker from each bunch of bananas my mother brought home.

After a year, my brothers revealed the joke, but I kept at it. It had become my thing, and I was curious how many I could get (hundreds) and what different types there were (more than you realize). Eventually, I mounted them in protective sleeves and kept them in a 3-ring binder.

The stamp collection started when my grandmother, who was a Slovak born in the Austro-Hungarian empire, gave me a Czechoslovakian stamp she’d gotten from correspondence with the old country. I eventually took an interest in other stamps, but, man!, did I have a mess of Soviet-era Czechoslovakian stamps.

How the collections have held me back

Fifty years on, I’ve got a mess of collected things. Beer cans, GI Joe dolls, and all my unsold novel manuscripts and screenplays.

They take up space and I’m not sure if I’m ready to get rid of them, but someday soon I’ll have to decide.

What do you do with it all? Is that what my life is about?

Maybe I’m a Story Collector

It turns out a large part of my life is collecting stories. Some stories were given to me, some I lived, and some I imagined.

I’m okay with that collection.

In fact, a couple of months ago, I went to the Moth GrandSLAM and told a story about stories. I think I promised to share but never did. Here it is now. The audio is a little quiet, so you may have to crank it up to eleven. (Also, please note that the recording copyright is owned by The Moth and they have given me permission to share; you may not do anything else with it. But if you want to share, you can forward this email and tell folks to sign up for the Picayune!)

Finish the straw story

Back in the fourth grade, Don’s exuberant straw collecting brought our world to a halt. One of the teacher’s pets saw Don jam a handful of straws into his desk, and she ratted him out.

When confronted by Miss Carlton, Don pointed to me and said, “Well, Mickey has even more than I do.”

The little bastard rolled over faster than Mark Meadows when confronted by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith.

Miss Carlton didn’t know what rule we’d broken — technically, the cafeteria gave us the straws for free — but there were too many to ignore. Down to the principal’s office we went.

I was nervous to the point of terror. I’d never been to the principal’s office before. Was I on a path of criminality? Was I going to be paddled, expelled, or sent to jail?

(Fourth grade fears escalate quickly.)

The principal assigned us the task of picking up debris from the entire school property. We spent four hours walking around, bending, scooping, and collecting old candy wrappers and shreds of school paper.

At least now I know why I collected those straws: so that I could have this story to tell you.