COLLECTING
One of the things that Kathe and I had great fun doing was going to yard sales. For years before that I was addicted to the Asheville Dreamland Flea Market. Kathe also enjoyed finding beautiful clothing at marked down prices at resale stores like the Enchanted Forest. I loved to bring back beautiful textiles and other beautiful objects from my every other year trips to India.
We enjoyed placing these objects around our house. Collecting beautiful objects made us feel good.
But of course there wasn’t room to display everything. Soon our closets were jammed full, our car port filled up and had to be enclosed, the laundry room shelves were filled with beautiful things. We even had to rent a temporary (17 years) storage unit to keep beautiful things in.
I was responsible for most of this collecting. For years when I found books that looked interesting on sale I would buy them. When I turned 60 I began to take digital photographs. Photographing beautiful things was a substitute for buying beautiful things. Photography6 just happened in the nick of time because every spare place was full. But I couldn’t resist photography books, usually on sale, and now have about 1000 photography books as well as 50 milk cartons of books stored away plus a good number on bookshelves.
Finally, much to late, I came to my senses. Now I only buy ebooks and store photographs I like on a hard drive which creates other problems that I will get to later.
In a strangely ironic way it was American consumerism, American collecting, that drew me in in the first place. As Americans we are such intent consumers, always being lured into buying one thing or another, that all of our houses fill up. When they fill up we take them to the flea market or sell them in a yard sale or take them to a thrift store like Goodwill and then people like me come by and for almost no money collect these things ourselves.
So now I have finally become conscious, much too late, of the effects of collecting. This is one of the huge decisions that I never saw coming at the end of old age, and now that I am here it is suddenly very apparent. I was a junk junkie addicted to junk, who loves his junk and now needs to do something about it.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 