Dad's Thimble

I am so not a collector. Whenever something comes my way that might be collectible, I either use it like regular old stuff (as in my mother’s Waterford crystal she bought one goblet at a time) or give it away (the Belleek china my grandmother brought from Ireland on the boat).

I have always had an ambivalent attitude toward collecting: desperately wanting to be that focused—researching, scouting out, arranging all these things that would be physical evidence of my efforts: maybe china or thimbles, Grecian art, medieval samovars, post-Civil War poetry manuscripts—and, on the other hand, not being able to see the value in putting so much time and energy into gathering and holding on to any “thing.”

Once, I thought I would collect stamps. I love stamps. You’d think I was going to live with them when I stand at the post office counter perusing the sheets, cheering when I see one that feels right: Louise Nevelson’s sculptures, Latin jazz, Maine artist Daniel Minter’s Kwanzaa stamp, which I use year-round.
I always think I will hold on to one stamp from each series, but then the day comes when I need a stamp and, voila, it’s gone.

Definitely not a collector.

I let the boys abandon every one of their Star Wars toys in the woods and fields, often buried in little cities, camps, whole worlds. I am sure that a future family will one day be walking in the deep woods behind our old home on the Owlsboro Road in the shadow of Mt. Chase, picking their way through the broken branches and mossy trunks of downed trees, and find Luke Skywalker lounging against a trunk of a peeling birch, half-buried in skeletonized leaves.

Collecting implies a certain degree of care: putting things in plastic, under glass, in books, storing them properly, not handling them too much, assuring they can be passed on in their original condition. That’s a good thing—just not my thing. I know people who really do collect thimbles from all over the world—and even dust them; people who have hundreds of comic books—all in plastic sleeves.

Now that I think about it the things I tend to hold onto are singular: one beautiful fossil rock, a three-inch-long clay sculpture of a sleeping woman, my dad’s only thimble, a black sequined scarf that weighs a ton, the outdated globe I have had since 1968. The world changes and I change with it—there’s no doubt about it—but all these things are things that speak to me and, if I am honest, speak of me. I think that if you gathered them all up—even the silver hoop earring whose mate I lost over 35 years ago that started me wearing unmatched earrings—you could see at least a piece of me.

Whether we know it or not, maybe that’s what we’re all doing—the collectors and the so-not-collectors—assembling a vision of who we are, who we were, for the future.

One day, all those thimbles, comic books, even the Beanie Babies a friend has piles of on a bed in her guest room still wrapped in plastic with their tags on, will belong to someone else. My things will too. I guess I just tend to pass things on one doll, one book, one rock, one well-worn thimble at a time.

Annaliese Jakimides (pronounced Jah-KIH-mih-deez) is an artist and writer who lived on 40 acres on a dirt road in Mt. Chase, population 240, for almost 30 years. She now lives in downtown Bangor, population 32,000.