Collecting 'Things' And Sorting Them Out

While waiting for the commencement exercises to — well — commence on Saturday, we had an opportunity to speak with the chair of the Newfound Area School Board, who told of preparing his remarks for the upcoming ceremony. He said he was thinking about the fact that, when the Class of 2015 began school 12 years ago, smartphones did not exist outside the laboratory, digital cellular telephones had just been invented and were not seen outside of cities, and even personal computers were rare. All that technology became ubiquitous between the time this graduating class entered school and the present day when they were about to end their time at Newfound.

That conversation came back to us as we listened to the various graduation addresses. We have covered a lot of high school graduations for local newspapers over the years, and have come to expect the speech in which, at a loss for a topic, the speaker turns to Webster’s dictionary: “According to Webster’s, education is the action or process of teaching someone, especially in a school, college, or university.” It provided an easy way to open a speech.

We had not covered a graduation for a few years now, so the contrast was immediately apparent. No one quoted Webster’s at this ceremony. However, two speakers — Principal Michael O’Malley and Carrie Ware, chair of the social studies department — quoted Abraham Lincoln (or someone like him).

We say “someone like him” because, now that people rely on the Internet rather than books, it is easy to come across “quotes” that famous people have said, except that they never did. While Thomas Jefferson supposedly observed, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.” In fact, the quote first appeared in print in 1952, and it was usually unattributed.

O’Malley in his speech referred to Lincoln’s views on the importance of education — a genuine quote, for Lincoln actually said, “Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in.”

The veracity of the quote was not as apparent in Ware’s choice of “Lincoln” sayings: “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” While many sources attribute it to Lincoln, some say it actually came from management consultant Peter Drucker, while others attribute it to computer scientist Alan Kay. We have been unable to find an original source for the quote.

While Webster's dictionary provided an authoritative source of information, the Internet provides an easy way to find something quotable, but that something needs to traced back to determine whether it is, in fact, true. With social media such as Facebook, it is never apparent whether the information appearing there is made up, and it often is.

We have come to be very skeptical of what we find on the Internet, convenient though it is. Before repeating anything, we have to spend time sorting out what is true and what is false. Sometimes that is easy; other times, such as with the second Lincoln quote, it is not as clear.

Still, it is a lot of fun — and it can be instructive — to explore what is out there in cyberspace. As long as one maintains a bit of skepticism, one can navigate through the untruths and half-truths to discover the genuine facts, and in less time than one used to have to spend sorting through books and records in the library stacks.

Collecting things is what we writers do. Every interview, every event covered, everything we read goes into the big basket from which we draw out the items we need to tell the story.

For us, the collecting began when we were young, long before we graduated from Newfound, and the collection was physical. We purposely sought things that people discarded: junk that was broken or no longer held meaning for them. It began with a cleanup of the playground in Kelley Park, where we found pen refills, beads that had fallen off jewelry, and pieces of metal belonging to we knew not what.

A collection that began as something to do to help out became a mission, as we tried to figure out what the discoveries had been used for, how they ended up there, and who might have cast them aside. We saved the junk in a large coffee can, and would sort through it at night, making up stories in our mind about each item's history.

Our strange hobby soon had teachers saving things for our junk collection. Lord knows what they really thought of our collection, but it had caught their attention, and they helped the collection grow.

At some point, we gave up collecting junk, and must have left the coffee can behind during one of our moves, because, except for a few unusual items that intrigued us enough to put into a drawer, we no longer have those pieces of metal, plastic, and glass.

We had not given much thought to the junk collection until we were cleaning the yard and found an unusual number of pine cones on the ground. Because spring brings thoughts of summer camping as well as yard cleanup, we recalled that pine cones make the best fire-starter, so we began collecting the cones in large bags that we could tuck into the storage area at the back of our motor home. It took a second bag, then a third, until we had soon filled six bags — enough to start campfires for the rest of the summer, if not longer.

As we collected the pine cones, we heard chatter above us, and saw several crows flitting from tree to tree, keeping an eye on us. We realized that the intelligent crow was a collector, too, and those watching us may have been wondering what we had found that they had not noticed before. We imagined their chatter to be a conversation about the strange items we were collecting, and their laughter at realizing we were collecting junk — pine cones.

And we thought of that coffee can full of junk that we had collected while in school. What had the teachers thought about our strange collection?

Surely most of what we had picked up was worthless, just as most of what one finds on Facebook or other social media platforms is junk. But some holds the potential of being reused, of inspiring thought, and, perhaps, offering a new purpose.

Much of what one hears at graduation is lost, too, but some of what is said plants a seed that can grow into something completely different. Sage advice or humorous anecdote can help lead the way, and it is up to each person to make of it what he or she can.

 

June 15, 2015