Juan Calvo

I am a collector of things. My collection has grown through the years. The magazines I own are quite rare. I own things that people want and need. When it breaks, I have the part to fix it. When it’s missing, I have the piece to make it whole again. For every collection, there is the one item that always eludes the collector—I have it.###

My mother had a basket that she got from her mother. It was full of needles and yarn. In my collection I have a blue acrylic sweater and matching booties which she knitted. Both of my sons wore the sweater and booties when they were young. The blue has faded a little but they hold such sentimental value, I could not part with them. I did not knit like my mother. It was tedious and my fingers did not move the way hers did. The thread of the yarn flowed around the needles, passing in and over and out with her fingers brilliantly orchestrating the motion.###

She willed the basket to me after she died. Frankly no one else really wanted it. They seemed content to paw over the rest of her possessions. It was sent to me in a box, wrapped in tissue. My father had put it in the basement when she was in the hospital and left it there. Mice had gnawed through the bottom and shredded the lining and the yarn. When it arrived, I didn’t know what to do with it, and in my grief, put it in the trash can.###

I think I would have gone on for years not regretting my action, if it hadn’t been for this wooden thing that I stumbled upon in a thrift store. It reminded me of what I had done and appeared to be the exact piece that would have fit into the gnawed through corner of the basket. When I held it, I realized that it was too big and thick to ever be part of a basket. But I bought it anyway. I know that someday, I will know what it is for; what its intended purpose is or was. Someone will see it and recognize it immediately. I suspect that that is true of many things in my collection. The value of what I own is unfathomable.