I met an elderly lady the other day who was having one of the rooms in her home remodeled to suit her hobbies, which included sewing, quilting and stamp collecting. As she described the features she was asking for in the room remodel, it occurred to me...there aren't many people around who still enjoy or pursue those pastimes. Times change, but mostly technology changes. And it does so at a rate of acceleration that we have become almost blind to.
I used to collect stamps when I was around 12 years old. Stamps from all over the world. But that was in an era when people used to actually mail things. When's the last time you received a real letter in the mail from someone you know? Or even a postcard?
At about the same age I began collecting coins...again, from all over the world, but mostly American coins. I got the foreign coins from the same contacts that I got most of the stamps from, but in the late Sixties you could still find old US coins in circulation. I can remember finding mercury head dimes, old liberty quarters, wheat head pennies, and even, though rarely, an occasional buffalo head nickel in circulation. There was a local coin shop I would frequent, as a teen, to purchase more hard to find coins at a fair price.
I also collected rocks. Yeah...that's correct...rocks. I studied geology in elementary school, and used to know all of the various types of stones. Sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphous. I had a collection of quartzes, granites, feldspars, jades, sandstones, obsidian, and other rocks whose names I have forgotten. At the time I collected them, they were all treasures, and I knew them all.
And then there were the butterflies. I used to catch them in nets, asphyxiate them in a jar with alcohol saturated cotton, and carefully mount them in a case on cotton batting under glass. I can remember having a couple dozen or more in my bedroom.
That makes me feel old. Even though I'm not yet 60. Nobody does this anymore.
Sure...I collected Batman cards, and other trading cards...and to some extent I suppose kids still do this. At least baseball cards. I doubt they still "trade" with one another in the way that we did, via competition. We used to toss them up against the wall during recess against one another, and whose ever card was closest to the wall took both cards.
If your card came to a still leaning up against the wall at an angle you were the hands down winner.
But what took me down this path of memory lane isn't just the stuff I used to collect and treasure...it is how technology has obliterated that past.
Stamps? Sure...they still make them...but few of us use them.
Coins? They are around, but does anyone care? Or collect them? The 50 state quarters was a one off boon if you cared about it, but I haven't seen a mercury head dime in circulation since I had nocturnal emissions, let alone a silver dollar or a silver note bill. Coinage has become boring.
The fun thing about collecting stamps, especially foreign ones, was just how grandiose small countries got about printing their stamps. Some of the most beautiful stamps I have ever seen came from countries that didn't, in the international economy of things, have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. Large, intricately designed and colorful stamps. Things of beauty.
Plastic models? Jet planes. Fighter planes. Airships. Submarines. Monsters of movie fame. Sail boats. I spent many an hour hovering over tiny plastic molded pieces and modeling glue, and had a whole shelf full of assembled models. Countless others were doomed to the equally strong desire to destroy, as opposed to create, and fell victim to the BB gun. But the pastime of assembling them was there.
The butterflies? I still look for them, but they are mostly gone. I wouldn't capture them at this age and kill them, to put under glass. But they simply aren't there, even if I were of a mind to do so.
Ditto the caterpillars. I never see them...and I look. When I was a kid you didn't have to look...you just stumbled upon them, broke off a branch of whatever plant they were chomping on, put them in a jar, poked some holes in the lid, and watched them make a coccoon and hatch into whatever they hatched into.
Video games have supplanted that, mostly, and subsumed that delight in nature.
I still see the occassional lemonade stand, but never have I seen the stand I was most successful with as a kid. I ranged far and wide to a place with lots of frog eggs. I coolected a whole slew of them and waited until they hatched into tadpoles. I set up a stand in front of my house and sold tadpoles for a nickel apiece, and made out like a bandit.
Every kid in the neighborhood wanted at least five. And we all watched them lose their tales at home, and grow tiny legs, and become frogs.
At which point the experiment was over, and you set them free.
But they don't do that anymore. They...well...they do something else. Something that doesn't expose them to ultraviolet light, I suppose.
Technology changes things.