Six year-old Lola hoards things and starts up collections and saves the most ridiculous things (most egregiously a Slushee cup from "Wall-E", which is named "Cupy" and lives in our dining room). Today when I picked her up at kindergarten, I pointed out that I'd gotten the car washed. "Doesn't it look nice?"
"Yes," Lola said condescendingly as I unlocked the car. Then Lola climbed into the backseat. "WHERE'S MY GARBAGE COLLECTION? I WAS KEEPING MY GARBAGE COLLECTION BACK HERE!"
3 comments:
"Oh, I love trash! Anything dirty or dingy or dusty... anything ragged or rotten or rusty! Yes I love trash!"
- Oscar the Grouch
I recently read an lj post from a friend who does visiting care for hiv+ and other chronically ill folks. she mentioned one of her clients telling her "I'm collecting history here - there are memories in this silver spoon" (picks up spoon and tells fascinating story about his grandfather).
he then goes on about something else, and later notices the spoon again, saying "what is this doing here?" and then goes on to tell a different fascinating anecdote about the grandfather.
what I got from this is that, as someone who likes to save things myself, part of the attraction there is in that memories are anchored to these objects, and we don't want to let go of the objects for fear of losing the related memories.
I don't know if this is at all helpful, but I thought it was an interesting way to see this behaviour that Lola and I seem to share. :-)
As someone recently said to me, if we still did the things we did when we were [fill in the age], everyone would think we're crazy.
My 7-year-old is also a collector of garbage, although he doesn't call it that. Usually he says he needs whatever it is for his inventions (he's been working on a robot and a time machine).
my kid is always wrapping plant leavings in foil and submerging them in glasses of salt water for days on end to see what happens.
nothing happens except I yell a lot, "who left this glass of aluminum foil balls here?!"
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