Jim Putnam - Thinking Through My Fingers

Collections

Our home is an extensive set of collections.  Marrianna claims to have read somewhere that if you have more than three of any anything you have a collection.  I assume suits, shirts, trousers, underwear and socks are exempted.  Using that definition, we are both avid collectors, even so far as having collections of collections.

As I wrote last evening, I have a collection of thimbles.  I'm now constructing a photo album of them.  You may have noticed that two of the photo albums I've had around for a while are missing.  I decided to drop them and put the thimbles up.  Today I continued taking photographs and loading some into the blog.  They are not ready for publication, but they will eventually appear on the right with Marriana's art.

I claim that Marrianna has more collections than I, and am probably correct.  But I have a lot too.  Books, with subsets of authors, subjects, and genre are one.  Over time, as an outgrowth of the books, I've collected a set of bookends and book-slides.  Most of these were bought at yard sales and antique shops.  Some were bought for their beauty, some are simply utilitarian.  I've not counted, but there are probably a dozen bookend sets, and two book-slides.  To be honest, I just learned the term book-slides this evening.  A book-slide has the two ends connected, and they slide open or closed to accommodate adding or removing books.

I have a belt buckle collection.  These buckles require belts that allow the buckles to be removed and replaced with other buckles.  I have 24 buckles, which rotate across seven belts.  Since more than three is the criteria, I have a collection of five quilting frames. 

I have numerous neckties, but I place them in the same category as clothes listed above.  When I retired, I said that from that day forward I would only wear a necktie for funerals and weddings.  I've stuck to that.  However, I do wear another of my collections: bolo ties.  I have almost a dozen of them, most with a southwest theme.  I love wearing them.

Beside the books we both collect, I have approximately a hundred cookbooks.  This evening I looked through several of them for a recipe.  That's a disadvantage of having so many, at least for me.  I can never remember in which book has my favorite recipe for a specific dish.  Tonight it was peach cobbler. I looked through five books before I found the right recipe.  By the way, the hot cobbler with heavy cream over it was delicious.

There are probably more of my collections, but those are enough to make the point; I'm a collector.  The question becomes why.  Why, when I cannot possibly wear more than one belt buckle at a time do I, upon entering an antique shop, look for buckles?  Why did I purchase a dozen and a half thimbles on our recent Michigan trip?  Why would I buy another bolo when I have so many?  In other words, what is there about collecting things that appeals to me?

I don't have collections to look at them.  I use almost all of my collections.  There may be cookbooks that only get referenced for a recipe once in two years, but they are more often pulled from the shelf and read for entertainment.  I wear my buckles and bolo ties.  I use thimbles, even though most of my collection are unusable for piecing or quilting.  Someone brought me two from Alaska in the late 80's, and I've been adding to the collection since.

I suppose an element of why I collect is "because I can."  If I were extremely wealthy, I would rival Jay Leno in my automobile collection because I love automobiles and motorcycles.  I can't do that, but usually I can afford a thimble or bolo.  Is there a better place for me to put my disposable income to work?  Probably, but I am not going to feel guilty.

It surprises me how people make art of even the most utilitarian object.  Some of my thimbles are pure art, with no useful value other than being pretty.  That's worth their existence, but I often wonder how, or why, some glass artist decided to use a thimble to show the beauty of a hummingbird.  Why do people decorate objects they use in daily living with engravings, or apply cloisonne, inlay, or paint flowers and landscapes on them?  What is there about the human that so many objects of daily life become art?  Quilts are another example.  Quilts are, or were, primarily meant to provide warmth.  Well, that's not entirely accurate.  Originally, Eastern warriors wore heavily quilted tops and leg protectors to protect from sword wounds.  Quilts continue to serve as warmth, but have along their history become art also.  In some cases, thimbles and quilts for instance, once art they are no longer useful.

Art or utilitarian, I enjoy collecting these objects.  Perhaps the best I can hope for is to not add any more, different collections.  But even there the oerhaps is pertinent.  I'm not sure I can swear to it. 

Today Has Been A Digitabulist Day

For weeks, even months, my thimble collection has been scattered around the quilting room.  There were two cabinets with thimbles, and several boxes of thimbles awaiting arrangement.  I purchase thimbles whenever we travel, and two friends have contributed a couple of boxes that need to be put out for view.

So today I began the process, with some assistance from Marrianna.  We began with her helping find a new cabinet, and then arranging all them all in one of three cabinets.  I began photographing the thimbles, and cataloging them by cabinet position, composition, subject, design, and maker.

I have 188 thimbles, plus five that are duplicates.  Here are a few of my favorites.

 

I don't know anything about this thimble except that I think it is pretty.

 

The glasswork in this is exquisite.  The leaf has a small chip, but it doesn't subtract from its beauty for me.

 

This is a silver thimble with some pretty scrolling.

 

The thimble isn't unusual, but the walnut carrier is, at least to me.  I like it.

 

This is my most unusual thimble, and the most expensive.  It's pretty much unusable as a thimble, naturally, but it's beautiful.  It's a silver Medusa's Head, made, I was told by the antique dealer, in Scotland.  The little thread you see there has the price tag, just to remind me that I don't usually spend so much.

There are, as I said, 188 thimbles.  That number does not include the four or five working, every-day thimbles.  When I say these are my favorites, I'm really referring to them in a particular time.  Tomorrow others may be favorite.

I have many bone china and metal thimbles.  Sometime when I look at the art on bone china I am charmed by their beauty, and would pick them.  Sometimes its the color, and sometimes it reminds me of a place and time.

There is an entire other case to document.  It may not be completed tomorrow, but soon.  It's actually fun photographing them.  But that will have to wait until at least tomorrow.

Various Musings

Early yesterday morning I had hearing aids fitted and then wore them all day.  Today was their second day, and I can report that they have definitely changed my daily experiences.  I've not adjusted completely to having them, but it is easier than I anticipated.

For me, the most difficult part of this is getting used to the fact that I need them.  I consider wearing hearing aids an admission that I am getting old, and that's more difficult than I had thought.  But with two days experience wearing them, it is now much easier to admit that I need them.  Marrianna and I have had to do several tasks these two days that have placed us in various conditions in which I must have been having problems hearing but was unaware that I was.  We went to the movie this evening, and the theater was entirely too loud, so I just turned the volume to the aids down to their lowest level and was quite comfortable.

Speaking of the movie, this evening we saw Mamma, Mia!  This is a truly fun movie.  I think Meryl Streep is a great actress, with an extremely wide range of acting talent, closely rivaling that of Dame Judi Dench, whom I consider the greatest actress of our time.  I highly recommend everyone who is looking for an entertaining evening of good fun and music, this movie is very, very good.  If you're looking for special effects or heavy drame, this is not your movie.  And, Abba music sounds very good in this tale, even for an old fart that didn't like Abba very much.

While we were on vacation, I received a book I had ordered before we departed.  It is a reference book for writers, but I've been reading it like a novel.  Fowler's Modern English Usage; Second Edition [Oxford University press, 1968] is fascinating.  Marrianna and I were discussing a specific word as we rode on the trip: specialty vs speciality.  I said that the second of these is a misuse, indeed may not even be a "real" word, and that specialty was the preferred usage.  While riding, we agreed to disagree.

Once we unpacked the huge amount of mail that accumulates over three weeks, I took up my newly acquired Fowler's.  It said:

Speciality, -alty.  The two words, like many pairs in -IC(AL), while they seem to cry out for differentiation, have made little progress in that direction.  Anyone who thinks he knows which of the chief senses belong to which, and tests his notions by looking through the OED quotations, is likely to have a surprise; he will perhaps conclude that writers use either form for any of the senses according as they prefer its sound in general or find it suits the rhythm of a sentence. Where usage is so undecided, it would be presumptious to offer a profitable differentiation, or to recommend either of two fully established forms for extinction.  The most that can be ventured is that speciality is in most senses the commoner, and that specialty prevails in the sense of a special subject of study or research and in the legal sense of a contract under seal.

One of these days I'm going to have to learn not to argue with Marrianna.  I think that I shall continue to use specialty. To my ear, speciality sounds wrong.  Why add a vowel and syllable that isn't necessary?  Incidentally, Fowler's has several pages on the use of shall and will.  I think I've made the correct useage above.

I have not yet loaded our trip photos to the computer.  I will try to get to that soon.  We seem to be moving in slow-motion since our return.  The necessary tasks get done, but not much else.  I haven't even removed the quilt from its carrying case.  All the thimbles I bought to add to the collection are in a plastic container, waiting to be put in the display.  I just can't seem to get started on quilt work yet.  the time is going to have to come soon though.  I can't remain "on vacation" forever.

Home, Sweet Home

We arrived home yesterday afternoon.  Our entire trip was wonderful, but it is good to be home sleeping in our own bed.  For us, there is always a point in out travel in which we recognize that we are both tired of being on the road.  For us, that point came Wednesday morning.  When we got in the car that morning, we almost simultaneously turned to one another and said that we were glad there were only two days left before being home.  We were tired of traveling.

That day of travel caused us the most anxiety.  Actually, abject fear would be a better description.  We were driving through the mountains of Tennessee.  We've set our GPS unit to avoid freeways, which is almost always our preferred way to travel.  This time, it turned out there was no route over a mountain that was not a freeway.  So we were directed to a small road off the main highway.  It was small, and marked in black on our maps, so we thought it would be a good, though slow, drive.  A mile or so after we turned, it deteriorated to a poorly paved, gravel covered road, and then to a dirt road curving around the mountain.  The scenery was beautiful so we decided to continue rather than turn around.  That was a mistake.

The road wound around for over forty miles, becoming very narrow and with steep drop-offs into valleys far below us.  It was also a road used by huge logging trucks that roared down those hills at unbelievable speeds, raising huge clounds of dust.  We unexpectedly met one on a blind curve with a steep drop-off on the right side.  We missed each other only by a few scant inches.  I stopped the car, both to allow the clouds of dust to settle so that I could see the road, and to let my heart stop pounding.  That was my most scary moment in over fifty years of driving all over the US on small back roads.  Literally four inches to the left, and we would have been hit by the truck, four inches right and we would have slid off the road and likely down the side of the mountain.  If I had swerved rather than slammed on the brakes, one or the other would have been the end of our trip.  I don't take pride in it, but I hope the truck driver was as frightened of those possibilities as I was.

But one moment of fear cannot possibly change our appreciation of the other 22 days of travel.  We saw places and met people that will be in our memories forever.  It was a warm, gloriously wonderful vacation, and we have so many friends to thank for it having been so.

Marrianna and I talked about the trip as we unpacked last night.  We discussed our favorite parts and, not surprising, we found that each of us had the same first four favorites.  The four day birthday party was at the top, with visits to Minneapolis friends and then two sets of Chicago friends the next three.  The next most favorite was Mackinac Island.

The Upper Penisnula of Michigan is a beautiful reminder of the beauty of this nation and strength of its people.  Anytime a man can throw a birthday bash in the far reaches of the UP, (Houghton, Michigan to be exact) that turns into a four day party and have friends from Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Maryland, Idaho, Iowa, California, Arizona, Texas, and Switzerland, yes Switzerland, travel to be there specifically to honor him, the strength of personality and character of the host shines through, a clear example of a life well lived.  I'm proud to have been there.

I think that's it for this evening.  I've been away so long that it is going to take a couple of days to get back into a writing routine.  One thing that I discovered, the few snippets of news on the TV in the breakfast lobby of motels was somehow enough.  I lost interest in going deeper into news stories.  Though I am not sure whether that is good or bad, it is accurate and I'll probably never even try to figure out which.