Collecting

 Mostly, I collect dust. 

Afforded, as I am, with ample living space and even more room for storage, I maintain a somewhat ridiculous number of "collections" at my family home. The moment that this came into focus for me was when my wife asked me what we might do with more than a dozen volumes of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. These books have occupied a place on the shelf in our back bathroom for (checks watch) a long time. And while I have spent moments over those years enjoying various bits and bites of kind of interesting anecdotal information, when my wife asked me "What shall we do with all those Bathroom Readers?" I did not flinch.

"We could keep a few, but I don't think we have to hold on to all of them."

It should be noted here that she did not ask me about the tub full of T-shirts in the basement. This is a collection of souvenirs from my youth, most of which no longer fit me, and some that have simply fallen out of the regular rotation. But that does not mean they aren't treasures. These are reminders of times when I went somewhere and just had to buy a T-shirt. Which was most places and most times when I was in my twenties. Concerts, sporting events, tourist traps. These were my diary. 

Now they're a tub I have to move when I want to get to the Christmas tree decorations. 

On either side of our VLTV (very large television) there are two wooden towers of drawers. Each drawer contains a letter or two, of my compact disc collection. The real estate they take up has diminished slightly over the time we have lived in our house, having been decanted from their amusingly named "jewel cases" and slipped into plastic sleeves with their cover art and lyric sheets. And their they sit, monuments to my musical tastes, rarely seen but regularly referenced in my Spotify playlists. Much in the same way the bookshelf filled with DVDs behind the door in our living room reminds me of all the films I loved so much that I needed to own a copy to watch again and again. 

Until I stopped. 

The stacks of movie posters I have acquired over the years sit in a corner of another room, waiting anxiously for their chance to appear on the walls that allow only a limited number of them to be featured. I trot them out from time to time, to show guests what lies in obscurity. In storage. 

But there they all are, captives of my unwillingness to let them go. These are the treasures I drag along with me. They sit next to the ones my wife has, and the ones my son holds onto. I know that someday, unless I do something responsible about it, they will all become my son's concern. And then he can figure out where to put all that stuff. 

Collecting dust.