My husband and I were on a 30^th wedding anniversary trip to New Mexico last fall and I wanted a special keepsake from a Native American Indian Pueblo we were visiting.  The place was magical and mysterious. I had never experienced anything like it before.  I took photographs that are now framed and hang in our bedroom. We bought a piece of art made by one of the residents of the pueblo whose one-room home converted to a small store during the day when tourists visited. But I felt I needed something more, a physical expression of what the special trip meant to me. So when no one was looking I picked up a small black rock, a pebble really, and put it in my purse.

My father was a master at clandestine collecting. His job was to record history through the lens of a camera as a photojournalist in Washington, DC. But his avocation was to collect history. And he did so with the aid of a camera bag, tucking his finds between camera bodies and lenses, flashes and bulbs, and rolls and rolls of 35 mm film. The world was his personal archeological site and he dove into it daily as a photographer for The New York Times covering the White House and Congress.

            Among his collection were wooden name plates for Senators from Humphrey to Kennedy, a silver sugar and creamer from the U.S. Senate dining room (stamped on the bottom), pens used by a president to sign a bill, a football from a friendly game of touch he played with the Kennedy’s at Bobby Kennedy’s Hickory Hill home, a plastic peanut from a cake for Jimmy Carter, a gavel from the Speaker of the House, a shell from Key Biscayne, a rock from Camp David, a brick from the Capitol, a piece of black ribbon from President Kennedy’s funeral.

            Like the antiques that filled our house –  also one of his passions -- my father’s treasurers became a part of him and he told the story of each artifact when visitors or admirers inquired, cradling the object in his hands as if conjuring the object’s spirit or secret tale. He often mimicked the voices, peculiar posture and gestures, or cadence of speech that went with a particular find. His impersonations were acute, coming as they did from the kind of intimate observation only available to someone looking at his subjects through the invisibility of his viewfinder. His stories became as much a part of the object as the object itself and he could hold visitors in the grip of his storytelling for hours.

            I can’t say I was as taken as others by my father’s collection. It looked like a bunch of insignificant junk to me. Plus, hadn’t he stolen most of it? Picked it up and pocketed it? The five finger discount?

 I saw my father in action once when he brought me along to an event at Hickory Hill. We had seen a couple of Bobby Kennedy’s older boys and their friends riding horses. When one of the boys rode past, he dropped his riding crop. My father saw it immediately.  For you, he said, as he grabbed the crop and maneuvered it into his camera bag, the brown tip poking out between the zipper’s teeth. I’m not sure if he could sense I had a crush on one of the boys and knew this would be the closest I’d ever come to him or if my father thought I was like him, a collector of all things Kennedy. Either way, a riding crop last held by one of Bobby Kennedy’s sons hung from the post of my French provincial canopy bed for years.

Whether driven by example or DNA, everyone in my family is a collector. I’m a compulsive penny picker-upper. I’ve even risked my life stopping to pick up a penny on a busy road. What’s worse, I can’t bring myself to spend any of the money I find. It all goes into a box in my closet. I tell myself that every found coin is a piece of good luck. My younger brother buys and sells Civil War era relics and combs the beaches of North Carolina for treasurers with a metal detector always hopeful for that one big find. My father’s younger brother, Steve, collected vacuum cleaners and bicycle parts that he kept in our garage. Thinking about him now, I suspect he was more hoarder than collector. The distinction is often blurry.

In his later years, my father became obsessed with bricks. Anywhere he saw an old building being torn down, he’d stop (when no one was around) and fill the trunk of the car with bricks that he then stacked in the back yard against a cement wall. He could never remember my birthday but he knew where each of those bricks came from.

            To be fair, some of the things my father displayed on the shelves of the den were given to him by those he admired most.  They knew his penchant for collecting. Some even knew the secret of his camera bag. And he didn’t see anything wrong with what he did. To him, I thought, it was preserving history, that of the object as well as his own.

Still, however, while others admired his collection I always felt a gnawing uneasiness about his methods. I’m a stay-on-the-path kind of gal. I go the speed limit. Stop at yellow lights. I obey the rules. I didn’t even want the riding crop my father pocketed but I was more afraid of disappointing him than of accepting what to him was a gift.

            So it is with some trepidation I admit my five finger discount. Insignificant in the larger scheme of things, I know that one small  rock nevertheless leads to another and another until if everyone who ever visited say, the Grand Canyon, took a rock, it would soon be renamed the Petite Canyon. Yet that small rock from New Mexico is precious to me and every time I put it in my palm and caress its smooth surface, I’m immediately taken back to a particular place and time. What’s more, as soon as I slipped into my bag I understood how my father felt.

                My father’s collection – we called it memorabilia – was divided up among the five children when he died. I keep mine in a box in the attic. It doesn’t hold the same meaning for me as it did for my father yet there is meaning in these things. They were my father’s and even if I don’t agree with how he came by them, each piece becomes a relic of him, something tangible I can hold, for each year that passes it becomes harder to remember what it was like to be near him.

I don’t know if my rock will have any significance for my children who will have the task of dealing with the physical part of my life when I am gone. And so as a means of amends I’ve told them to use my lucky coins to return my special rock to its home.

            Or maybe they’ll keep my rock along with the box of found coins to remember their mother, the picker-upper of forgotten change and daughter of the master of the five-finger collector. 

             (This essay is excerpted from a memoir about my father)