My Father's Garage

Growing up, the garage was my Dad's domain. It still is, though the house has changed and I no longer live with him. In the garage was/is a work bench of some sort, countless small cubbies and jars and drawers filled with the tools of his trade. When I was young my father worked as a cabinet maker before starting his own business running a diner. He's quite handy and would see to the home improvements himself, even larger tasks like cutting a hole in the kitchen floor and building a rounded pine spiral staircase to a now existing basement.
    His drawers full of washers, nuts and bolts, screws and nails, his assortment of tools, his odds and ends inspired me. Where he would put things together, I enjoyed taking things apart. Not with the view of understanding how they worked, usually they were broken things in the first place. I simply enjoyed the piecemeal pastime of slowly taking things apart, my dad's set of mini screwdrivers in hand.
    I would take apart the old clock radio and keep whatever piece I liked. My brother and I were avid scale model makers, so bits of plastic were often the very air we breathed - joined by Testors model cement. Putting models together, taking radios apart, I dealt in fiddly things. Small details, small hands. The parts from long broken models, or the secondary optional pieces were saved for future projects. We already were aware of scratch building and knew that a good model maker had an array of parts to choose from. My relationship with small pieces of junk is informed by this background - my father's garage, model making and taking things apart. Finding things would become the fourth horseman.
    My father's garage, it occurred to me many years later, was what I was ritualizing when I would collect rusted washers and pin them to my jean jacket. Whereas he saw these components as being useful - and knew how to use them, I abstracted them into fetish objects. I took his tools and hardware and turned them into sacred hippie relics, tied up in buckskin pouches, dangling from my closet door handle. He of course made fun of me, seeing me sitting cross legged in my teenaged bedroom, an assortment of seashells, stones, rusted metal, bone and plastic arrayed in front of me as I strung them into necklaces or fashioned velvet pouches to carry them in. I sewed many pouches in my day, and made many pieces of jewellery -part hippie, part urban decay. My father would poke his head in and comment if I was having fun playing with my la-la. Verbatim. My La-La, should be capitalized. Of course I took offense, but knew better to make a big deal of it and just deflected what I could.
    How does a hard working man, whose hands are gnarled tree roots that can easily break me in half, make sense of his long haired son weaving strands of macrame around his wrists, surrounded by pictures of Jesus, Mary and Gandalf ? How can he not make fun of that ? How could anyone not ?
    So today, I am a collector of small objects. I place them in jars, I'm making art from them. I've learned a thing or two about being handy in the real life way and am astounded that some of my forty your old male friends don't know how to put up a shelf. I've learned about home repair, not on a grand scale, but enough to not be too intimidated by renovations. I've taken over my dad's garage, the one he set up in the shop I now run. I've made it mine but have kept tons of his components. I use them. I use the tools. I have a foot in each country, my father's and my own.
   

Collecting

I've made peace with the fact that I am a collector. I am eternally grateful that the things I collect have near zero market value. Also, that for the most part, they are small things. I collect paper. I collect scraps of paper. Small printed details, drawings, kids art, water blurred garage sale posters, odd bits of ephemera, poetry leaflets, doubly exposed found photos, 1970s craft magazines, battered vintage books on prehistoric life and outer space. There are many groups and sub groups, many that have no discernible theme except in my eye. I collect minuscule scraps of paper, some half the size of a postage stamp. I get these plasticized like identity cards. I have a hundred of them. I also collect the occasional label drawn on and stuck by street artists. I harvest the ones half hanging loose. I smooth them down flat on a piece of card and write the street and the month and the year I find them.
    I used to collect the odd designs printed on the bottoms of cardboard boxes. When I worked in warehouses I would find some strange logos and motifs. I got to thinking that many of these signs represented nothing more than the cadres of buddies who worked in box factories. I used to collect comics. I can't bother picking them up anymore. Of course if I happen upon some copies of old Boris Karloff Presents or Ka-Zar Lord Of The Hidden Jungle for a buck or two, I'll pick them up, I'm not crazy.
    My rule, loose and sloppy, about collecting is that I am not a completist and that I don't have to collect it. I'm getting good at letting things go. For a year or two i collected wooden spoons. Then one day thrifting I just didn't bother buying some spoons I found. And then the spark fizzled. I tell the story of scouring all the bookstores in my hometown for examples of concrete poetry. I'm adept at pulling avant-garde periodicals from the messy shelves of good will shops. Invariably that white spine belongs to a book published by a small Canadian press in 1973. I can spot them a mile away. The second hand bookshops in Montréal, though, very rarely have what I'm looking for in the poetry department. On a recent visit to Toronto, I checked out a very well curated bookshop and asked my usual question - 'got anything by way of concrete or visual poetry, photocopy art, mail-art, text manipulations, that sort of thing ?' Instead of getting a blank stare or some tepid attempt to sell me Apollinaire, the clerk brought out a huge stack of exactly the material I look for. At that point it became, how much money would I want to spend. I bought a fine volume for thirty dollars and haven't cared much for the stuff since.
    Scarcity or the hunt is key. Milling about flea markets with unlimited funds is not collecting, it's shopping. Most of what I collect is tied to finding. And what I most like to find are things I didn't know I was looking for. Some Hassidic kids homework sheets, a stained flyer, a printed glitch, the dedication page of a mangled old book. What I want resonates with an unknown history. It has texture and life. It doesn't come by the dozen. It's oblique and hints at mystery.
    The stuff I collect fits in file folders, shoe boxes, stacks. It gets sorted through often and rearranged. It gets confused with art. It get's exhibited, shown, flaunted. It may even get sold. One thing for sure, it's not going to weigh down my kid and it's not going to line my coffin.

Painting Figurines

I would take special trips downtown, getting off at Atwater or Guy stations to visit a hobby shop on Saint Catherines between the two stops. It was there I would select and buy a small lead figurine to paint. The selection was huge. I chose Ral Partha figures because I liked the designs of classic fantasy and they were affordable for a fourteen year old.
    I'd take them home and spend a good couple of hours painting each one. I had a steady hand, fine brushes and Testors enamel paint, that I'd been using for years building plastic scale model kits. The final result was a far cry from what I saw in the hobby magazines and catalogs but it was still pretty good. Hill Giant, Frost Giant, Cyclops, Dark Rider, Skeleton Archer, Jabberwocky, Complete Adventurer. Some I would cement to wooden stands, glueing railroad grass around the base.
    I loved miniatures and would gaze absently at the materials for sale at Hobby World or whatever it was called. I'd fantasize about the many uses of balsa dowelling or copper rods. The plastic sheets mimicking brick or stone walls were especially tantalizing. Would I build a torture chamber ? No, probably not. too many ideas and not too much get-up-and-go. My scratch building was mostly relegated to the realm of the imagination. I'd tinker plenty though, and built a nice collection of miniature weaponry, halberds, scimitars, battle-axes, broadswords. A small plastic tube cemented to a small bit of chain cemented to a bead made a perfect little chain-morningstar. My dad got into the spirit and whittled a sweet sword and scabbard out of popsicle sticks. I still have all this stuff, of course.
    Projects are successful if they are achievable in one sitting. A weapon yes, a dungeon no. Small offerings that add-up, that's my style. Now, none of the figurines or weapons I've mentioned ever made it to the semi-regular Advanced Dungeons & Dragons games I'd play. They were for me and my room. The games were fun and don't need figures to be played. In fact, I like my role playing games with nothing but paper and dice. The head spaces that one enters with a great campaign led by a great Dungeon Master are fleshed out worlds brimming with enthusiasm. I laughed coming home once after a great game and said to my startled mother, 'Ma, I get why kids kill themselves over this game!'
    I'm still hoping to find a fun DM along with a perfect ragtag team of warriors and magicians. D&D is the kind of game you wish your best friends can play with you, but often they can't. It's another bunch of people, I guess that's ok.
    My Testors paints are sitting there dormant, oil up top and pigment down below, a sediment waiting to be stirred to life. My figurines are scattered, some broken or missing, others sold, some in a box somewhere. I should dig them out, the remainders are mostly giants, and dust them off. My altar is a better place for them than the dark of a cardboard box.