Her response was predictable and didn’t curb my enthusiasm. I know she doesn’t appreciate the value of the treasurers on which she roosts. On the contrary, she’d take a match to all of them if it wouldn’t leave her homeless.
I told her about contacting “American Pickers.” She laughed then said the producers of “Hoarders” would more likely be interested in me.
For those unfamiliar with the two shows, “Pickers” is about a couple of guys who scour the rural landscape looking for anything Americana like old bikes, movie posters, commercial signs, toys, etc. They are the guys trying to get to an estate auction before the owner of the stuff actually croaks.
“Hoarders” is about people with obsessive-compulsive disorders who have trouble letting go of anything be it paperclips or paper bags. They used to be called “pack-rats” now they are considered to have mental defects.
I scoff at the idea that I am less “Picker” material and more a shrink’s coach candidate. I’m just a sentimental guy, I told her, who likes to keep around bits and pieces of my past to remind me of those times.
“The distance between rationalizing and being rational is greater than you think,” she responded, glaring at the wooden nickel. “Besides, you’d be one of those guys who’d invite the pickers in and then keep repeating, ‘No, I believe I’ll hold on to that’ when they’d make an offer on something.”
I’ll admit that stung a bit, but I had to remind my lovely that not all the treasurers in the house brought here by me. Most of them came from a woman with whom I shared a curator’s kinship – her late mother.
“Yes, but each time I try and throw away some of her junk you sneak it back in,” she said.
“I do not,” I said firmly, but with a resolve that faded just as fast. “Well, maybe I do, but ‘sneak’ is such a word of deception. I like to think of it as ‘rescuing.”’
I could see that what started as a walk down memory and scheme to fatten my wallet had turned into an issue that might require marital mediation. The spouse smelled the blood too and jumped on me like a hyena on a water buffalo’s back.
“What are we going to do about it? I’m tired of living with all this junk,” she snarled, her teeth gnashing at the nape of my neck.
Thinking quickly, even though the pain (or was it anxiety?) was piercing, I said, “Let’s flip a coin. Heads everything stays. Tails, we burn it.”
“Fair enough,” she said letting go and figuring that a 50-50 shot at getting the stuff out of the house were better odds then she would have imaged waking up this morning.
“We’ll use this wooden nickel. It’s symbolic anyway. I’ll take heads,” I said.
I flipped the disk into the air. It rotated three, four, maybe five times, each seemingly in slow motion. It landed at our feet. Our heads, together, we stared down at it. Then, a loud cry of joy and another of angst rang through the house.
Who cried what? I’ll give you a clue: What’s that old saying about wooden nickels?
(If you have a collector’s or hoarder’s story, share it below)
