Dear Reader,
This is a rough rough rough draft of what I am trying to achieve. Please take into
account that my Microsoft Word is not working so the formatting is a little off. Also, I had a
revelation add my mother into the picture .I don't know if it is working. Both my parents live
together and they are polar opposites in terms of organization, so I thought, why not give it a
shot. I did the mother thing but I do not know how to mix the two of them together. I want it to
somehow reflect on their relationship as well, but that's a toughy. I was thinking of integrating
the two lists of items and changing the fonts or something, but I really have no clue. I had this
idea of doing it just like one of those mystery Goosebumps novels where it states, "If you would
go up the stairs go to page ___," but I don't think that is suitable for this project.
F.Y.I. I want what my father collects to be a fucking pretty list, not a poem (this is an
essay after all). We all write lists, therefore the reader should be able to relate to it. I mean
come on, everything he collects is so random, discombobulated and garbled up that it is almost
impossible to categorize anyway, and that is kind of the point. On the other had my other is the
opposite, hence the neatly structured way I wrote her stuff down, in a poetic form.
Oh, and these are the 3-5 other things I may/may not do to it by the time it is done:
0)Preemptively Changing the ) to a . for every item
1) Making my Dad's list 100 items
2) Putting check boxes next to them
3) add a flourish in between every section
4) Having people check off the item if they own something similar and then adding them up at
the end (this might be too much...it requires a pen)
5if I do 4: Giving a description from Homeless to Hoarder based on how many of the items you
own
Please answer if 1 through 3 sound good to you.
I have no idea how many words this is and I wouldn't pick a sentence. It's not about that. I
wouldn't even know how to count them anyway. Enjoy!
Best,
Alee
61 Things My Daddy Collects In His Closet with a Cross-Examination of What My Mother Likes to
Collect
My mother is usually really organized, especially on the surface. If one digs a little
deeper one will find the occasional thing out of place, but she is neat overall. She knows where
everything is, unlike my father who doesn't ever know where anything is. I call her Miss Fix It. It
is a term with a similar meaning to MacGyver. She has so many tools and can fix anything one
dreams of, even if he has to look it up in a book, she can do it. It may take some time, but she'll
do it and do it well. For example, we once received a several pound jar of natural honey with
the honeycomb in it. When the jar was almost empty, and the dregs of the honey were left, she
took a pot full of water, put the jar in it with a metal spoon inside to absorb the heat, and
boiled the jar in the water in order to extract all of the honey that was left. These are the things
she enjoys collecting:
Art Deco jewelry
1980's Fiesta Dishware
Singer sewing machines
Non-Digital old cameras
Celluloid vintage handbags
Coca-Cola memorabilia
Coca-Cola puzzles
Coca-Cola clocks
Coca-Cola bottles
Coca-Cola glasses
Coca-Cola advertisements
Coca-Cola Rewards bottle-caps
Art Deco furniture
A pearl tie
Knick-knacks or Chach-kees
(insert pretty flourish)
"Mommy what does Daddy collect?"
I curiously asked.
She replied with a strange tone, "I
don't know. He's got like 800
matchbooks.
My mother hates the way my father "piles up stuff around the house." I don't think he
does that, but he does have his corners, where he likes to keep stuff, around the house. My
father’s closet collection is a mysterious sacred aspect of our household. My Daddy's hallway
closet is one enclosed 3-feet-deep 4-feet-wide 12-feet-high rectangular space, with a
cardboard-like hollow wood door. It has been in existence probably since before I was born,
holding God only knows what. It holds almost everything he has left of his life. He rarely digs
through it to find anything. It is always an ordeal when he has to “take apart his closet to find
something.” It is like a shrine to my father’s life from birth to the present. It is so overstuffed
and unorganized that the door is busting off the metal hinges and coming out of the frame.
When he closes his closet, he has to leverage himself against the opposite wall of the fairly
narrow main hallway, put his foot against the mid-section of the door, in order to apply enough
pressure, and shove as hard as he can in one thrust to hear the click of lock which is really a
groan of relief because he knows it is shut, at least for now. He closes and deadbolts it after
every single time he opens his closet. To this day I ponder the obscurities behind that door.
These are some of the things in that controlled mess, his cryptic cave of comfort, he reluctantly
disclosed to me.
(Insert pretty flourish)
“See how nice and neat this shit is
packed…and when I put my clothes
back Mom is going to be happy too”My Daddy
(Insert pretty flourish)
Instructions: Grab some sort of writing utensil. Check off each item that you own. If you own
something similar, check it anyway.
□ Memories
□ Two Suits (one of which to be buried in, consequently it is his favorite dark pinstriped
Burberry)
□ Assorted tapes both personal creations and something else
□ Videos he taped of mainly family
□ Some school notes from back then
□ Tiny little coin about four hundred years old
□ Shirts
□ Books
□ Rocks
□ Books
□ Newspapers
□ Records (like 45’s, not criminal)
□ Postcards (so stereotypical, right?)
□ Family memorabilia
□ All sorts of cables for everything one can imagine
□ His scenery photographs from all over the world
□ Diplomas (yeah probably, from his mother and his father (some of which are on display))
□ Some ancient movies (“wait…I think I gave them to my brother”)
□ An errant box of Christmas decorations
□ Some icons that he painted (if not there in storage)
□ Broken jewelry which turns out to be silver or gold (but that hasn’t happened in a while)
□ Copious amounts of random tools (some that still need to be fixed)
□ Discarded Lottery Tickets (although they are still there technically, aren’t they?)
□ An old pair of uncomfortably loose sneakers
□ An individual eye dropper thing
□ An almost new Chapstick
□ Pine cones
□ Rocks
□ Smashed pine cones
□ A few TV sets
□ An empty plastic shot bottle of scotch whiskey
□ Hardly any golf balls
□ One expired dollar-off coupon for Snus
□ Rocks
□ Some colognes
□ Receipts from the supermarket from God knows when
□ His old Driver’s License (I am surprised he didn’t lose it)
□ Some bottles of perfume (only one of which he will wear…ever)
□ Broken compasses that make circles around you
□ Copious amounts of MetroCards which sometimes have money sometimes not
□ Three keyboards which have a short (one of which is in THE closet)
□ A red guitar that needs a little soldering work
□ 60 tapes (50% rock and roll/50% metal)
□ Three pairs of headphones (in the last 6 months alone)
□ A wide variety of greeting cards (rarely unused)
□ Motel room card keys from all around America
□ And...still...even more Rocks
□ A pad of white college-ruled lined paper with a piece of brown cardboard on the back
□ A black fabric Borders sunglasses case
□ A roll of color 35mm film developed on 11/14/12 labeled by my father ‘SF Trip Family
Flowers S.C.’
□ A bunch of New York Lotto tickets bundled up with a list of expenses on the outside of it
□ A rubber band that has a note in two different colors with several dates and a bunch of
things written in Russian
□ A Bali Shag pouch with about a fifth of the tobacco left in it (for emergencies)
□ A “same shit different day” set of photographs
□ An obviously originally blank CD in a small plastic baggie called the ZNO RECORDING from
January 29th, 2012 (it has my father’s piano “jamming” on it)
□ An unopened Membership Services letter from Tampa Florida
□ Another unopened letter from Accorda Therapeutics
□ A hard copy of “The Holy Archangel Michael and the Bodiless Power of Heaven” by Bishop
Nikolai Verlimirovich
□ A ton of National Multiple Sclerosis Society flyers
□ Another three letters (they have same stamp as 56)
□ A brochure from Storm King School for the Annual Fund for Giving
□ A calendar (solely for recipes)
Total Items Collected: ________/61
"Look up garbage in the dictionary
you'll find a lot of words there." –
My Daddy