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Collecting Dust?

Some people are just born accumulators, aren’t they? It’s as if they still possessed an atavistic DNA fragment from when they were squirrels facing the possibility of a hard winter. I am a collector of sorts too -but not of the usual kinds of nuts, you understand, more of esoterica.

I do not collect stamps, despite their popularity from the time when people actually mailed physical things by stuffing them in metal post-boxes, rather than mousing them on a screen. I also felt unwilling to accept that I might be known behind my back as a Philatelist -as if I harboured a poorly disguised bowel ailment, or was prone to random acts of dietary indiscretion.

I tried other collections, of course -post cards, for example- but only on those rare occasions when someone I knew was travelling to esoteric parts and would agree undertake the time and expense of sending one to me. Of course, neither of the two friends I had managed to collect and maintain over the years ever seemed to travel much beyond the local malls, so the only card I received was hand-delivered, and I think I put it in a drawer somewhere. 

But, lest you think I relinquished my dreams of acquisition too easily, I hasten to add that there were other things I tried, too. For example, I attempted women, a few times –not collecting them or anything, and certainly not as trophies either. I’ve always found women more difficult to meet, let alone accumulate, and unlike postcards, or the unexpected allotment of booby prize ribbons, even the most adventurous seemed suspicious of my clumsy attempts at badinage. Anyway, I decided they were probably far more expensive than stamps or the other stuff you can paste in books.

For a while I pretended to be like Michel de Montaigne: an essayist, un collecteur d’idées if anybody inquired. He sounded foreign and nobody seemed to want to admit that they didn’t know who he was or what he did. It became just too painful to set them straight, but mostly it was just embarrassing. Everybody else seemed to be working on a collection of something or other, so I always felt fringed -excluded from any more meaningful conversations at MacDonald’s than commenting on the simplistic design of my McChicken wrapper.

So for solace, I have been going on car trips lately and on many of them, stop for coffee at various restaurants when I feel sleepy at the wheel. Milk or cream is usually available, but to sweeten it to taste, most places only offer sugar.

For some strange reason I do not enjoy sugar anymore -it’s not sweet enough. When I was a child I took a naughty pleasure in sweetening my gooey non-nutritious plain white bread and butter with a heavy dusting of sugar; and the only way I could eat my mother’s cranberry pies was by slipping a spoonful of sugar under the pastry while she was arguing with my older brother. So I don’t know what led to the renunciation of sugar in favour of artificial sweeteners in my dotage. But in one restaurant on an otherwise monotonous prairie road, an exasperated waitress whom I had dared to rise to the challenge of satisfying my sweet tooth, took my request the wrong way. Even when I attempted to assuage her anger by actually naming what I wanted, it did little to appease her outrage. 

“We don’t believe in that city stuff here,” she said with traces of spittle still dangling from her lips as I turned to leave, still  unsatisfied.

So I resolved to pocket a few packets of artificial sweetener the next time I found a Tim Horton’s. I am partial to maltodextrin and sucralose I think, although the letters on each packet are far too small to make identification easily readable. Fortunately, they come in little yellow paper packs with big blue letters identifying the trade name. They’re impossible to mistake for the comparatively unsophisticated plain sugar packages lying in embarrassed disarray beside the stir sticks and those little white spoons that always break. If I’m quick, nobody notices if I take a couple more yellow sacks than I need.

But, as with all things addictive, even a little bit at first often leads to an increasing need. Soon I was pocketing six or eight at a time and putting them in a little cellophane bag when I got back to the car. And I took to keeping a few in my pocket so that whenever I stopped for coffee I would not have to stare down the clerk, or seem unduly agitated if they couldn’t meet my needs. Sometimes you have to disguise your cravings, eh?

I hesitate to classify this as an addiction, though. I mean I would not kill a barista if she couldn’t find my stuff. I would not don a mask (now that we don’t have to), point my finger through my pocket, and demand she fill a bag with all she could find out back. And I do not ask misleading questions while I am attempting distract the clerk behind the counter; they won’t notice a few packets are missing until they count them after closing hours. And even if they phone the police about the robbery, they would still have difficulty tracking me down, or putting me on a no-visit list. I am not into deception; I am a collector.

In fact, I like to think I am only doing what both of my plebby friends do in their leisure time, but with far less orthodoxy, and with considerably more of an adventurous frisson. So after each trip I can hardly wait till I get home and suggest we meet at the local MacD’s for a coffee. I actually have something interesting to talk about.

Mind you, MacDonald’s usually has a pile of readily grabbable yellow packets, so I have to be careful to restrain myself… Or I’ll have to get a new bag -the one I use on my trips is hidden in the glove compartment of my car and it’s already full.

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