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Being a collector may be in all your genes
Anyone who remembers their school days will recall the old heredity versus environment debate.
You know, that's the one where one side says people get smarter if they are exposed to an environment that stimulates their thought processes; and the other says you are born with a certain mental capacity, and environment only determines if you have an opportunity to exploit your abilities.
Naturally, that argument has never been conclusively proven, but the debate can be extended to include other aspects, such as social behaviour.
The jury may still be out, but heredity seems to be the odds-on favourite.
Undeterred, I intend to further muddy the waters by applying this to collecting, and stating that it is heredity, not environment that makes collectors.
In other words, I believe that collectors are born, not made. I've always said that there is some sort of collector gene, that given the opportunity, will exert itself. That's why some people collect and others, no matter how hard you explain the appeal, just don't think it makes any sense.
Sure, there are some environmental aspects that make it easier or more difficult for collecting to take place, but it boils down to something deep inside that either makes you a collector, or it doesn't. To explain my argument, you need to understand that while I collect a bit, no one else in my immediate family is a collector. My parents kept family photographs, but nothing else was kept after it stopped being useful.
Granted, I did have a grandfather who collected stamps, but he had passed before I was born and I never even saw his collection. All he gave me was the collecting gene.
So the fact that I collected at all (even if my early ventures were little more than a date collection of cents culled from pocket change) is not because I was exposed to collecting, but because of something else.
A more recent example happened on at a family outing. We stayed at one of those hotels which is also a resort/amusement park. Of course, it had an arcade, you know, a room of machines which, when fed tokens spit out paper tickets, which are then redeemed for prizes. I'll be honest, I spent a few tokens zapping weird creatures on a couple of shoot-'em-up games, but I found myself fascinated with the tokens themselves.
These brass-coloured tokens, which cost 25-cents each, are pretty common in arcades and car washes across Canada. Over the years they develop a patina, so you can spot both new and old ones at a glance. There's also several different designs in play, so you could start a collection that would probably take some time to complete.
My children made sure I didn't have an opportunity to hang on to any tokens long enough to develop an attachment to them.
One game in particular involved moving trays that filled up with tokens, which eventually fell into a trough. There were dozens of tokens in play under a glass window, so any oddities were easy to spot. What caught my eye was a number of 25-cent coins being put into play. I noticed a couple of regular coins, and a few Olympic commemoratives, and even the odd foreign coin.
Everyone else saw an opportunity to collect tickets, I was taking inventory of what was in play.
In another area of the property, I was walking along when my son pointed out that the floor seemed made of tokens.
What he saw, was a concrete strip connecting two parts of the building, which contained a few hundred tokens. An appropriate way to dress up what would otherwise be a visual distraction.
Of course, I decided to take a close look, and noticed that they were not all the same time, or even the same colour. I even bent down so I could get a closer look.
The collector in me started to examine these tokens to see if the mix had an interesting story to tell, and I even spotted the odd foreign coin in the mix. I'm sure the other patrons either thought I was strange, or assumed I was trying to pry up some tokens for personal use.
"I'll bet they made that using one of every kind of token ever used in this place," my son said, speaking the words that were in my head. Everyone else saw a piece of floor, he saw a collection.
I guess he's got the gene as well.
Bret Evans
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