Clocks, Cameras, Cracked Doll Faces: The Confessions of a Serial Collector

“[E]very person deserves a museum of his or her own life, because every life is so irreducibly strange.”
–Samantha Subramanian, “Letter of Recommendation” (The New York Times column)
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It began with clocks. Then old dolls with cracked faces, typewriters, cameras, Victorian scrap books, animal skulls, and California pottery. Last month it was cobalt blue bottles. Currently, it’s “death assemblages,” communities of different organisms fossilized into a single rock. I’ve been digging them out of the sand at the beach since the last storm. Some of these rocks are covered with beautiful calligraphy in a strange language I can almost decipher. These are the ones I take home.

While my collections might seem random, there is a unifying theme. Every object holds a story. Each has passed through some sequence of events before it came into my possession carrying within it the latent memories of its history. My impulse is to coax forth the ghosts of the past that inhabit them.

When I hold up a crizzled blue medicine bottle, I imagine a young mother in a 1920’s New York tenement pouring liniment onto her palm to massage the chest of a wheezing child. I imagine this doll with the crazed face was once carried everywhere by a girl with matching ringlets before the porcelain fingers chipped off and it was tossed into a basement: its eyes clouding over, the wig made from human hair beginning to mold. Or this clock, stopped at 7:03. The exact day and time when no one ever came back again to wind it.

I’ve always loved junk stores and flea markets. But for most of my life, if I didn’t “need” something, I wouldn’t give myself permission to acquire it. I was a single mother, always cash-strapped, and junking was a way to save money. I only bought what was essential. My entire work wardrobe was sourced from used stores way before that was acceptably trendy. I furnished my home with sturdy flea market finds and items salvaged from the sidewalk on trash night.

An inconspicuous banker box at the local flea market changed the way I felt about acquiring objects. It was sitting on a ratty blanket surrounded by rusty garden tools and work boots. But I can still hear the chorus of angels singing as I opened the box to find it filled with vintage and antique clocks—all their expectant faces looking up at me. Despite being in various states of disrepair, each one had its own distinct personality. I was enthralled.

I stood there grappling with reason and then gave myself permission to step over the edge. I bought the entire lot. I felt like an acolyte who had discovered a new religion. Some of those clocks are still on display in my home, their filigreed hands perpetually pointing out the exact moment of their unwinding. They serve as beacons, snippets of stopped time, a reminder of the illusory nature of our lives.

They are mingled in with the other items I’ve collected, a veritable showcase of my fickle disposition and shifting interests. A bowl filled with crystal doorknobs. An array of miniature teapots. A garland of keys. And books. Books and books and books. Because inside the books are not only the stories written by their authors (a delight in and of itself), but also a glimpse into the folks who held those books. The people who read them and left pieces of themselves behind by way of the marginalia, or the inscriptions and sometimes a note or a card used as a bookmark and long forgotten.

I’m fascinated with other people’s forgotten jottings. I’ll spend days wondering about the aunt who hoped Aggie might find happiness in a ragged copy of “Home Lessons in Tap Dancing.” Was the gift a preventative measure from a woman steeped in sadness, or did she really believe a girl could shuffle ball change her way to a happier life?

I will tease free the scrap of paper woven into the bars of a rusty shopping cart. Because I want to know what’s on it. Because it might hold clues to the human who wrote it. A letter in a bottle set adrift in a lonely world.

Of course, it might be nothing more than a list: chicken broth, fresh parsley, soda crackers. But it also might be the missing piece to the mystery, a clue to the unsolved puzzle of our lives. This possibility is what drives me to keep looking for answers in things outside of myself even if I’ll never be able to decode the mysterious calligraphy or know the story behind the photo of an inconsolable child. It’s why I love poems, each one a break in the silence within the bigger silence of its own self-contained universe.

It’s also why I read the notes left on random bulletin boards and on the walls of bathroom stalls. I’m the person who searches through shoeboxes in secondhand stores for photos of strangers gazing out at me from the past. I scan the backs of each picture for bits of identifying scribble: names, dedications, locations, dates. Anything that might provide a clue to the big unanswerable questions.

How did these people get here? Who gave them away? Are we all that dispensable—just one or two generations away from being discarded or relegated to oblivion in a box of forgotten curiosities?

And so, my home has become a kind of museum. A carefully curated shrine to the objects that kindle my need to understand who we are and what we are here for.

Some of these items are still useful and that helps to justify their acquisition. I have shelves of fiestaware foraged from junk stores that I break out for social gatherings and silver candelabras that cost only a few dollars at Goodwill that add instant old-timey elegance to every occasion. I have a stash of crystal vases from the Salvation Army store that I fill with flowers from my garden and give to friends (and sometimes strangers).

All of these things live alongside the inherited treasures from my mother and grandmother and great aunts and great, great aunts (all of them collectors). But even dearer to me are the less useful things. The ones I’ve acquired for reasons I don’t understand. The ones that argued for their place amongst my collections by offering to deepen the questions I carry around in my poet-heart. There are the aforementioned typewriters and blue bottles.

The tinted photos, the clocks, the cameras, the keys. But also, the boxes of ladies’ face powders (which I know contain arsenic), the birds’ nests, the movie marquis letters, and even other people’s cast-off collections, jars of buttons and marbles and matches from their world travels.

With unchecked collecting, it didn’t take long before my shelves and walls filled to capacity and stuff began to overflow into the garage. When there was no longer room for the Supernova to co-exist with the collections, I knew I had to make a choice.

In one revelatory weekend, I gave away the stained-glass windows and the old radios. Parted with chairs in need of re-caning. I even gave away my entire collection of gold-gilded picture frames and old mirrors. But not the periwinkle insulators or the Fostoria. Not the skeleton keys or the books.

I’m still collecting. Sorting through shelves and boxes in search of a shiny treasure is one of my happy places. Only now I would not buy the entire box of clocks. Just the one I couldn’t live without—the one from the forties that says, Wake up Dorothy.

But also—in an unexpectedly wonderful turn, my friends have begun to share their wish lists. It’s more satisfying to find a Blue Danube patterned plate coveted by Amanda than to unearth something for myself I don’t have space for.  Now I indulge my collecting obsession while surprising my friends with gifts. It’s the very best kind of win-win.

Even so, my serial mind has already begun to rummage around for my next obsession: apothecary jars. I love their elegant shapes. I love knowing that they once held a cure-all for what ails us. I want to find large ones, big enough to hold an entire universe.

I may not be any closer to solving the mystery, but I can envision the terrariums in my window box. Each one filled with stones, pebbles, sea glass, ferns and forest moss, all gathered and arranged carefully into a story, a secret curated world of my very own making: the forthcoming exhibition (opening soon) in the strange and wonderful museum of my life.

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Inconsolable Objects by Nancy Miller Gomez is available via YesYes Books.