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Miami
...I collect my thoughts about collectables
Arizona:
September, 1997
Just west of Globe, Arizona, is Miami. Far more Spanish than Globe, Miami is overshadowed by spoil heaps, and again has seen richer days. Through the town runs a dry stream, neatly crossed by a series of hump back bridges that wouldn't look out of place in some Mediterranean high cultural centre. Miami has a foxed and faded look, like a very old book photograph. And, on both sides of the highway, are "Flea Markets"
Collectables
In Miami, Globe, and other places we pass through, people gather together old stuff, call it "collectables" (or collectibles), and sell it. Anything someone else has owned and discarded is a collectible, especially things we look at and say: "If only I hadn't thrown away that thingummyjig I had -- it'd be worth a fortune today!". And if you can't find an old whatever-it-is, then you create a fake. For example you can purchase "arrow heads", at which a true native hunter would laugh heartily, for $1 each.
And somewhere in Asia, people are still churning out tinplate toys (you know, those cars and trucks and trains that are kept together by little turned-over flat tabs), which have far too many sharp edges to be played with by today's infants (we were obviously made of sterner stuff 40 years or more ago). Now these crude things are purchased by adults, who presumably store them safely away in glass cases.
Remember those strange children we all knew who used to keep their toys neatly packed away in their original boxes? Well, exercising their anuses paid off, because the most valuable collectibles are those very toys, complete with boxes.
There are, of course, those valuable collectables that people dig up in ghost towns, like insulators. Insulators? Objects that add grace and charm to any living room, I'd say.
Have you noticed that collectables, far from being merely inanimate mass-produced old stuff that we once threw away, actually become like children, or at least pets. At sales and swap-meets and antique shows, plump couples sit at folding tables, watching over their charges, their rows of insulators or matchbox toys in their original boxes or 1950s egg-whisks. Love is in the air.
Is it nostalgia? Or just greed? There is certainly plenty of the latter -- I remember in England that bottle hunters would regularly entomb themselves in the excavations they dug too deeply into Victorian rubbish dumps. And any old house that is left neglected for a year or two is likely to be stripped of anything brass or iron that can be sold.
However there is a desperate need these days not to keep up with the Jones', but to be significantly different to the Jones'. So a house filled with rusty biscuit tins or faded children's toys is impossible to reproduce next door, where they might only have ranks of dull spoons or a collection of egg whisks.
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