My father has an extreme interest in politics. He voraciously consumes facts from the news, in his case newspapers and TV, then he seems to spend hours thinking and analyzing what he's heard and learned. The result of all this is a head full of insight and conclusions--which he is then anxious to share, debate, whatever, with others.
And his interests are not limited to current politics, or even local politics. As a self-described "European History Major" who lived in Germany for 35 years, he has a healthy interest in both the Bavarian political scene and historical European political situations from roughly 1900-1935. Then there is the fact that he spent a career teaching US History to high school students, his focus undoubtedly related to the political influences, if at all possible.
As I see it, my father, a professed minimalist in the physical world, is very much a collector in a virtual sense: a collector of facts and theories, with a mind that is crammed full of them. Like many collectors, he derives pleasure from his collection when he browses through it or spends time in organizing the various components and their relationships. Not so very different in my mind from a collector of just about anything else, except of course that his collecting isn't obvious in the physical sense.
Not surprisingly, my father can talk and speculate endlessly about politics. Mostly, it is what he talks about. Also not surprisingly, he can be hands-down fascinating to listen to, as are many people who have a firm grip on the subject of which they speak. One can learn a tremendous amount from just listening to him, and he can move the conversation along without any assistance or questioning, meaning on a good day his monologues can run for hours. Depending on one's mood and the subject, the conversation can also seem endless.
My mother, who had a wide range of passionate interests of her own, was a collector in both the physical and virtual worlds. Inheriting her physical collections and then going through them in the year and a half since her death has given me quite a bit of insight into what she thought and collected in her head, because she wrote some (much?) of it down. And kept some (much?) of these notations, which of course had to be sorted through.
It amounted to mountains and mountains of paper scraps, notebooks, clippings, boxes of folders and files...some of it organized, some not. Much of it was packed in boxes in the garage, untouched for at least the 13 years since their last move, some of it much longer. My mother was a list keeper, things like books she'd read, books she wanted to read, things she wanted to do, places she wanted to go, ideas for things she wanted to make. Then there were the lists and compilations of things like the name for different animal young, varieties of apples, different kinds of breads made from a sponge, and the titles in chronological order of all the Tintin books. (Keep in mind, her habits predate being able to Google everything). She left piles of notebooks full of menu plans--most with comments entered after the meals had been cooked and eaten. She filled stacks of notebooks with ideas for combining different clothing items into outfits, using both separates she already had and ones she planned to make or acquire. And then there were the notebooks full of mathematical formulas and geometric scribblings, which are completely greek to me. But together, they all point to a woman who had a very wide range of interests and things on her mind.
Unfortunately perhaps, politics was not among my mother's very wide range of interests, or at least she seemed no more interested than the average person who follows the news and votes. And so, enter a little conflict into what always seemed a relatively happy and contented relationship between my parents. They worked it out over their 57 years together, but of course there was the eye-rolling and the outbursts of "Enough! I can't take it any more!" on occasion from my mother when she had reached her melting point for politics.
Several years ago we played this video for my mother, and she found it hilarious. She could relate!
It wasn't long before she was joking about finding a blow gun.
And amazingly, just a short time later, what did we come across in our garage saleing? A blow gun at a very reasonable price! We were of course, delighted by the find and wasted no time in presenting it to my mother, who was equally thrilled with the gift. The gun came with a dart, so we loaded it in the gun and had her try it out. She puffed into the mouthpiece and the dart shot across the room and drove itself into the molding around a closet door. Wow! Much hilarity ensued. And, after acquiring the blowgun and darts, which she kept on a table in the living room, discreetly tucked behind a large coleus plant, all she needed to do to register her waning interest in a long political monologue was mention needing to find some curare somewhere...soon...
I don't think my father was aware of any of this, if he was, he showed no indication. Curare, blow darts--he just ignored the whole spectre of the joke. But it sure provided the rest of us with plenty of lightened moments!
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The blow gun is now part of our permanent collection. Joe devised a way to hang it on the wall using the handles from a couple of my mother's cooking pots that went to aluminium recycling. It hangs in the living room.
waiting for curare
