The Really Good Stuff

Comes now a reality program called Hoarders, designed, apparently, to let the untidy desktop crowd feel superior about the untouchables with living room collections of 30,000 beer cans. MC's favorite bit of television analysis is the revelation that attention deficit disorder prevented one featured subject from tidying up her overstuffed residence.

ADD explains so much about the garage at CG Farm. But more about that later. First, MC would like to take issue with Hoarders' these-people-are-deeply-troubled premise to speak in defense of Those Who Gather. What the untrained eye might see as a weirdo's collection of empty prescription bottles, she would argue, is another person's embarrassment of wealth.



What if the Hoarders gurus brought their de-cluttering techniques this scenario? Well,
they'd lose their chance at ever restoring their Robbins & Meyers H-model ceiling fan. The Fan Man, located in Dallas, apparently
gets inspiration by keeping his inventory within arms' reach. We're saving up for a restoration of a glorious H-model, rescued from the Cranky Hometown Bijou Theatre by UM. Fan Man can be as eccentric as he wants to be as long as he can rewind the coil and find us some replacement blade hardware. When you're looking for 90-year-old hardware, Those Who Gather are savants, not bipolar clutterers who need their Xanax refilled.
(Fan Man shop from UM; Robbs & Myers image from vintagefans.com)

Did MC get the fender part for her '67 Plymouth Belvedere from Ebay? Please. That vital piece of Mopar engineering was collected from a pasture, where it was lovingly conserved with very many of its high-performance friends and watched over by attentive goats that kept weeds at bay. We understand that Cousin Tom's wife had a yard sale a while back, so some of those car bodies may now be lost to history. See what we mean about the dangers of de-cluttering?

MC once scored some terrific glass drawer pulls from the house next door to El Azteca. There were bathtubs out in the yard; it looked like an antique shop. OK, a really low-budget antique shop. So when she asked for cabinet knobs, she had no idea she would be led into the house, through a labyrinth of boxes, to inspect the merchandise. There, hanging on a nail beside a bed, were the perfect drawer pulls. Yea! When a person rolled over, MC realized that she was standing in someone's bedroom. Which just happened to be a hardware showroom. But still. Bathtub/drawer-pull guy was a serious member of the Those Who Gather society.

Back in the day, MC's father expressed his gathering tendencies in his office/garage. When it fell to MC to conserve these treasures, she mentally grouped them into categories: Stuff that Won't Burn and Stuff that Will Burn. The "Won't Burn" category was by far the largest. What do you do with half a dozen broken oil-well drill bits? MC's father picked them up because they were trash in his field, yet now they're 40-pound garage objet d'arts. Each time she found an object that seemed perfect for the scrap pile, members of her tribe would tell her something like: "That's the PTO shaft for the Allis tractor," or "That's the jet rod for the xyz windmill." Useful stuff, lovingly gathered and faithfully conserved, in the middle of the garage bay.

MC has since added a fabulous broken floor lamp to the garage mix. She's sure she can find a craftsman who can display its '30s wonderfulness in an appropriate fashion. It's not like she's on a deadline or anything. It's been gathered, and that's the fun part.
--MC