Strange collections

[solarbird]

poodlgrl stopped by an estate sale yesterday, and then here, where she gave me some posters from earlier Streetfairs she'd found there, and said I should go look. So I did.

It was in one of those houses on 8th, the buffer zone between the Freeway and the places where it's possible for yards and gardens to be quiet and friendly, rather than sounding like a windtunnel and smelling like gasolene fumes; part of the neighbourhood that you know was much nicer before the freeway went through, taking out 6th Avenue NE completely and making 5th and 7th into parodies of streets, dirty feeder lanes straddling the 10-12 lanes of freeway just next door. Houses still face those streets, on one side each, but I don't know how; the noise is tremendous, and, to me, just unbearable.

But, well, while it's not exactly an original thought to see freeways as brutal scars in the landscape of a city, it just seems particularly obvious here. It's not as bad, further south; a huge chunk of it becomes a bridge, which hurts the surroundings less, at ground level; then it's in the side of a hill, cut out and supported with retaining walls, with no real neighbours except fabulously expensive condominiums starting 40 feet up and facing the Olympic Mountains, and downtown, which not only sends bridges and the convention centre across it, but an entire green city park, obliterating it entirely for a few small blocks. That helps. Here, though, it's just a kind of raw brutalist statement, even given the landscaping which followed. It takes more than shrubbery to begin to control the unending howl.

I suspected strongly when I walked into the house on 8th that the previous owners had been one of those sets of people who had bought before the highway tore its way through in... 1964, I think; that they'd perhaps been one of those families who, when they found out about the highway, went "Oh! So convenient!." And, well, since they weren't on 7th, they wouldn't be facing it directly, and besides, 'I hear the freeway traffic sounds almost like a waterfall just around the hill; that's not bad at all.' I hope they never changed their minds, either - they never moved, certainly, and they'd not have been so set in their ways back then that they couldn't have. But I couldn't help notice that the windows facing the freeway side had all been buffered, in one way or another, and the back rooms were not so often used.

I don't think that had anything to do with the collections of antique electric irons, though. And the antique handheld mixers - the kinds with the big gears and cranks that you still see in stores, but not that often. We don't even own one; for anything like that, I just use the whisk. This may be foolish of me, from a cooking standpoint; I don't know. Or the high-voltage glass and ceramic electrical insulators, lined up in neat little rows in the basement; I picked a couple of them up, trying to figure out why someone would collect things like these, and then, even given that, why they'd repeat so many kinds. It was clearly labelled as a collection, so I know it wasn't just one of them being an electrician and having these left over in the basement from work; maybe there were just differences between them that I couldn't discern.

The nature of appreciation - and its fairly arbitrary nature - has always partially eluded me. I know that I like a thing, but I don't often know why. It's not that I can't say what I like and dislike; it's that I don't really understand how that works, at the lower levels of my own mind. It's certainly easy enough to look at, oh, Fallingwater and say "I like that." And it's easy enough to start talking about the details of why. But at each level, you can still drill down, and eventually you get to just "because." And certainly, I understand the idea of chemical stimulus in the brain, and the electromechanics of it all, but ... that's not really the answer, either, because the whole transition from that to "consciousness" is still so not understood.

This isn't something I've really thought about in a while; after high school, I just decided that "because" and "it calls to me" were okay answers for now and went with them, but I know that it really used to puzzle me deeply, and occasionally, it still does. Like when someone collects dozens of antique electric irons, or ceramic and glass high-voltage insulators. Or hand-mixers.

Or, even, when someone likes freeways being built across from the house behind their own.

Comments

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

I remember growing up we used to have, oh, maybe half-a-dozen glass insulators. They were nice colors, a good weight in the hand when you picked them up, and they looked pretty lined up along a windowsill. I have no idea where any of them are now, I haven't seen them at Mom's house in years.

Dozens, though? (...says the person with an entire closet full of yarn...)

[solarbird]

A few dozen - maybe four dozen, all in the basement. The irons were also mostly in the basement, but some were upstairs. The kitchen tools (lots, not just collectable) were on the main floor. And there was a lot - I mean, a lot - of acrylic yarn. I didn't buy any because I don't want to knit acrylic, I don't think. (I felt it; I didn't like the feel very much. Someone in front of me had already picked out a lot of kinds of yarn, so I suspect she got the best stuff.)

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

Ha, ha! Another yarn snob is born! My grandmother had a bunch of stashes of acrylic yarn, both unused and partly finished items. When my cousin and I were cleaning out the closets, I salvaged all of the knitting needles (even yanking them out of projects) and put the yarn aside to give someone else. I don't like knitting with plastic, but I do have a small amount of acrylic hanging around for baby items where I know the mom will just toss everything into the washer on hot. I'm always happy to get back to some nice natural fibers afterwards, though. My current favorites are wool-silk blends. Yummy!

And then there's me....

[poodlgrl.livejournal.com]

I'm a magpie. OOOH SHINEY, MUST HAVE. I'm the kind of person who spends $40 at a sale like that and walks off with about 30 yards of fabric, 40 or so vintage crafting magazines from the 50s / 60s. In fact, I looked at that sale and thought, "BEHOLD, here is your future." Those hand mixers were fabulous! I don't have one either though. When I was there yesterday morning, there must have been 2000 yards of fabric. No exaggeration.

When we were house-shopping, we looked at a house that had evidently been moved during the I-5 construction. We surmised they opted for the move, rather than cash-out, and then apparently spent the allowance for the new foundation. Because the house was listing about 1' from one side to the other, and it was sitting on cinderblocks, with a basement full of Pickup Stix.

Re: And then there's me....

[solarbird]

That icon is so you.

But aside from that - really, that's fine. It doesn't look to me like this person was a hoarder. They just collected things. It's not like the person who owned Joby's house (that he no longer owns, BTW; he sold the pumpkin house, so sad!) who kept school notes from 1952 and stacks of burnt-out lightbulbs.

[amethyst-dancer.livejournal.com]

I worked for a collector magazine some years back, and while I was working there, I remember an article about those little insulator thingies. I thought it was pretty weird, although by then I was getting used to some of the things people collect that I don't understand at all.

I believe the article said that some of them were rather pretty, that there was a lot of variation from one to another. I'm trying to remember if it said they were handmade. I do remember it said that some of them could be quite valuable to collectors.

There are some people who collect antique woodworking tools, partly because those were usually made extremely well, to last a very long time. So I'm not surprised that there are those who collect antique kitchen tools and irons.