Sunday 16 February 2014

To Wish Impossible Things


“It was the hope of all we might have been; that fills me with the hope to wish impossible things...”

I’m a collector.  One of the most defining aspects of my character is my compulsion to collect and organize things that interest me.  As a small child, I used to marvel at my parents’ record collection.  They must have had over a hundred records, spanning decades of rock and pop, country and folk.  I always went back to Burton Cummings and Kenny Rogers in the early days--we’re talking age three and four here.  Even if I didn’t actually play them all, I used to take them out, hold them, manipulate them, organize them, and admire them for all their decadence and flair.  I remember being utterly horrified when the family cat, which was half-siamese and all evil, sharpened her claws on the cardboard spines, shredding the names and labels on so grand a collection of culture, entertainment, and artistry.  I also remember thinking to myself that I could never be so lucky as to have a collection so grand as theirs.  Today, my music collection dwarves theirs, and spans thousands of titles in four formats.  Not including MP3s.  

I have spent my adult life learning how to temper my unnatural craving for collecting.  There’s the music, of course, which will always be my favourite pass-time, but there are others.  Those who know me well know I am an avid Star Wars fan, and since those same days when I was grooving to ‘My Own Way To Rock’, I was also flipping through colouring books which told me the tale of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.  In the years before the VCR, if you couldn't get to the movie theater, you had to hear about the stories via alternate means.  In a rare juncture of both worlds, I also had the 45 rpm record storybooks.  At the time, I thought the voices on the record were the real actors.  Many years later, after I actually saw the films, I realized how poorly substituted the voice actors actually were.  How hard would it have been to get James Earl Jones to speak into a microphone for a few minutes, really?

I’ll spare the details, but I also collect books, beer bottles, bottle caps, coins, rocks, flags, among other things.  Most of these are minimal cost to me, but for lack of storage or display space, I limit my intake of all of them to varying degrees.  Imagine a greedy dragon sitting on top of his pile of gold and treasure, or Scrooge McDuck swimming in his vault full of money.  You would have a pretty accurate visual of my man-cave.

With only so much money to go around, especially when you consider I have a mortgage, two cars, and two growing boys, I need to keep my impulse to consume tighter every year.  I’m very okay with this.  My kids are either in, or soon approaching middle school, and if you have ever been or have raised an adolescent boy, you know how expensive food is.  With everything these days costing more and more, the need to plan ahead and save has never been more urgent.

While I still indulge in my two main distractions, I’ve come to realize there are some things I will never be able to have, for some reason or another.  I’ve learned that while you can have your cake and eat it too, and maybe even seconds, you can’t keep going back to the sample lady over and over again.  They’ll kick you out of the store.  Or repossess your house.

I’m fine with dreaming of the wonderfully ridiculous things I would love to have, some expensive, others not, but due to the choices I’ve made, and the bed that I’ve made, I’ve acquiesced that it’s just not going to happen.  Here are a number of indulgences that would tickle me several shades of pink to have in my possession, but will likely never own:

> If I could buy one thing, it would be a lighthouse.  Not just one of those small beacons, I’m talking a real live-in lighthouse that has all the necessities for year-round living and a beacon up top.  Given that lighthouses are always on the water, we’re talking really expensive real estate, not to mention the fact that they are brutally hard to keep heated.  And they’re usually far away from any real gainful employment, because in 2014, lighthouse keeping isn’t exactly a viable vocation anymore.  Why lighthouses?  I don’t really know.  They are symbolic of all sorts of things, but mostly I like the romanticism of life by the sea.  I grew up near the shore, while not directly along the coastline exactly, but the salty air invokes a wonderful sensation that you have to just understand to ‘get it’.  

> While I can play piano a little bit, I don’t play any other instruments at all.  Therefore, it would be odd to want to own multiple musical instruments, but I would love to have an assortment of them just laying around.  Maybe I think that by having them there I’ll just magically one day pick one up and play naturally.  I recently inherited from my grandfather’s old house an old dulcimer he bought with the intention of learning how to play bluegrass music.  He never did.  I expect I won’t either, but I’ve dabbled around with it a few times and even played a few YouTube tutorials.  It doesn’t seem too hard to pick up, and no one around here offers dulcimer lessons, so if I want to learn, I’m on my own.  Still, it’s a thing of beauty, and if nothing else, a great conversation piece.  I’d love to have those weird, obscure instruments, like ophicleides or flugelhorns, just for the novelty of it.  My great-uncle used to be a great musician, playing all over the maritimes with Don Messer’s contemporaries, and it kills me to know that he gave away or destroyed most of his instruments years before I was born.  What an amazing assortment of musical instruments he must have had.  

>  I would like to travel one day when I’m more financially secure.  To actually be more financially secure may well be impossible itself, and deserving of its own bullet in this list, but assuming that I can one day pay my debt, achieve a regular salary, and even pay my mortgage off, I’d like to travel.  Not only do I want to travel, I want to see every country of the world at least once.  All of them.  From North Korea to Somalia, rich, poor, or otherwise dangerous for western travelers, I want to see the world.  And from each one, I want their national flag.  I have always found flags to be fascinating, how a small piece of fabric can come to represent a national identity.  I once drew a whole book full of national flags.  I was in Grade 2.  I was proud as pie of all the work I did at the time, but when I look back on it now, they were all uneven, and I never used a ruler.  Still, what I learned from doing it has stayed with me to this day.  I still remember most of them, except for national flags that came to be since the early eighties, including the post-Soviet Union, post-Yugoslavia, and half the micro states of the Pacific.  Gadhaffi made life easier when he made the Libyan flag just a green rectangle, but since he’s been dumped (and killed), they’ve gone back to their classic design again.  Eritrea, East Timor, Macedonia, and South Sudan have all since joined the ranks of new national flags, and by declaring their independence, have added four more countries I’d have to visit to achieve my goal.  I’ve seen precisely three different countries in my lifetime, including Canada.  The others are the United States and the Bahamas.  I lived in the US for a year, yet never bought the stars and stripes.  Instead of buying a Bahamian flag, I bought a large conch shell from a street vendor in Nassau.  So I’m only 1 for 3, and I’m pretty sure my Canada flag was a gift from someone.  My brother-in-law graciously picked me up a Spanish flag when he went on vacation there last year.  I once found a website that has all 193 national flags on sale for about $1000.  Maybe I should just buy these, then fly every flag on its respective country’s national day.  Or, maybe I should just redraw my book from Grade 2, this time with a ruler.

> This one might be plausible.  I would love to own a yacht.  Now, I realize that fancy yachts costs anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and even more if you’re super-rich.  I’ve accepted that super-wealth isn’t in the cards for me, but I think that if I really wanted it, and planned carefully, I could one day acquire at least a small sail boat or similar pleasure water craft.  This romantic notion falls close to the lighthouse dream, for several reasons.  That zeal for the open sea gives cause for wanting to sail upon it.  I once spent the night on a lobster boat.  I woke up feeling dreadfully sick to my stomach.  I would need to be able to combat that nausea that comes with seasickness if I was to go on over night voyages.  But before all that, I’d need to know a thing or two about sailing.  I’ve done research on sailboats recently for my novel, and it has only increased my curiosity.  Since living by the sea seems unlikely, having a boat to be able to take to the open sea is the second most romantic dream I can imagine.  If I decide to take a dent out of the world flag collection mentioned earlier, owning a boat seems out of the question.  

>  If I did manage to save up enough to buy a boat, it would almost certainly mean my lifelong dream of owning a tractor wouldn’t be coming true anytime soon.  Tractors don’t have to be expensive, but the kind I’m talking about would be.  That’s because I’d have every attachment known to mankind ready to snap on for just the right occasion.  Need your garden tilled?  How about your snow blown?  Want to dig that basement or trench you need?  Widen your wood path?  Move large boulders?  I’d be your man.  I’d drive to Tim Hortons in my tractor, just because I could.  I’d be the guy you’re cursing taking up half the lane along the highway that you can’t pass on the blind hill.  You’re welcome.  Before you ask me what kind of tractor I’d like, don’t bother.  I don’t know much about them, really.  My grandfather had a Kubota, and he seemed to like it a lot.  He did all of the above with it and more.  Sometimes he would putter around and just dig up things just because he could.  It made him happy.  That’s good enough for me.

I’m not sure why I always dream of tangible things.  It would be noble of me to dream of the end of poverty, world peace, the cure for cancer, or a Rolling Stones tour this year.  And don’t get me wrong, I would love to see all those things, and more.  I dream of the day they send a manned space craft to Mars.  The day we find a clean source of renewable energy.  When peace in the Middle East is secured.  When we discover life in the cosmos.  The day Canada wins gold in men’s figure skating.  Unfortunately, my lofty ideals seem more likely to come true.  Maybe that’s why I keep dreaming.  If you need me for anything, I’ll be in my lighthouse.