Get a Free Glass with Every Drink You Have at My House

Photo from Pixabay. This is not my house. I’m too embarassed to show you that.

Do you ever worry that after you’re gone, your children and grandchildren will snoop through your home searching for heirlooms, and they’ll open a cupboard and be knocked to the ground by all the junk you’ve collected over the years? Then they’ll realize that, just as they’d suspected all along, you really were quite unstable and they should probably go ahead and contest your will. You don’t worry about that? I do, and for good reason.

People looking through my home now think I’m unstable. Recently a friend reached into my kitchen cupboard for a glass and burst out laughing. “You’re a collector!”

Naturally I denied it. The way I see it, there are collectors and there are disposers. Collectors spend their lives gathering items for their estate sale. Disposers spend their lives giving stuff away. Usually they marry each other.

But even as I protested my friend’s accusation, I realized that not only are my husband and I both collectors, we’re the worst kind of collectors: the accidental kind. True collectors are driven by their interests. Most of what we’ve collected has come to us the way litter collects in a road ditch and tumbleweeds gather on a chain link fence.

I certainly didn’t set out to collect drinkware. And yet along with our set of ordinary drinking glasses, we have a fancy set we never use and a dozen canning jars we do use, but not for canning. And rounding out our glass collection are the dozen or so beer and wine glasses with logos from the establishments they came from. Apparently paying more for a drink so you can keep the glass it came in is seen as a good deal by people who’ve been drinking.

Unfortunately, glasses aren’t the only things collecting in our home. Some things we keep because I’m afraid my husband will notice if I try to get rid of them. He buys a new baseball cap everywhere we travel, not because he collects them but because he forgot to bring one with him when we left home. We have more caps than the American League.

Some things we keep because they could be worth money someday. We have a veritable alphabet soup of entertainment: cassettes, LPs, CDs, VHS tapes and DVDs. I’m just thankful we don’t have any eight-track tapes—that I know of. They could be around here somewhere.

A few things we keep are worth money now. We have so many coupons that in order to use them all, I’d need to purchase an elaborate filing system and hire an assistant to organize it. And that might defeat the purpose.

A lot of things we keep because we may need them someday. Chargers and power cords have taken over our home like bindweed. But I’m afraid to get rid of any of them because I’m not sure what they’re all for.

I have a bag full of widowed socks, some whose partners were probably lost in our last home. I’m afraid if I toss any of them, their partners will show up shortly thereafter, having taken nineteen years to walk the six blocks from my old neighborhood.

I hate to admit it, but I keep a lot of things because I have a sentimental streak. For example, I have scrapbooks from my college days, and I didn’t just go to college yesterday. Along with the usual ticket stubs and fortunes from fortune cookies, my scrapbooks also contain page after page of small cardboard circles taken off the top of a particular brand of yogurt. If you’re ever snooping through my home, you might question why I saved those. I do too. At least I know that at one point in my life I was getting plenty of calcium.

And finally, we keep some things because we’ve forgotten we even have them. We rarely open the cupboard that contains all our cookbooks and coffee mugs. Anyone snooping through my house would wonder why I have so many cookbooks when I cook the same six meals over and over and why we have so many mugs when we don’t even drink coffee. I suppose they’ll come in handy if we ever run out of glasses.