Collections and Collectors

Jack Black, John James Audubon, and Vintage Tractor Wrenches

I have a document that remained stuck in my truck visor or beside my reading chair at home for almost two years. It is a checklist for bird species that can be found in Louisiana. Though I have lived for 7 years in the same parish in which John James Audubon lived and worked for a period of his life, if I am honest my season of “birding” was much more influenced by an under-appreciated movie starring Jack Black, Steve Martin, and Owen Wilson called The Big Year. My “big year” was 2024 which If I am honest was more like the last 2 months of 2023 and the first 7 months of 2024. I only counted my 2024 birds and I (along with my kids) just barely reached triple digits (there are around 470 possible). I have the app on my phone that helps ID birds by sound and by visual identifiers. I kept the hard-copy checklist instead of a digital list. I even made little notes of where I saw them.

I really get the appeal of birding. It actually changes the how you look at the world. If you are outdoors, there is always the potential opportunity for discovery. It makes you notice new sounds and pick your head and eyes up, even though it also caused me to scramble to get my phone out and get my Cornell Labs Merlin Bird ID App App-ing.

Why am I thinking about my bird list that has gone unchecked for many months? As I am sitting down to write my first post after 2 weeks of neglect, I am reminded of just how hard and fast and definitively my consistent patterns can go completely off the cliff never to be recovered. There is something about my wiring (which I have come to realize that I share with plenty of people) that allows me to dive into a pool with great interest and fervor every day for a long time. BUT when the day comes that I forget my trunks or my towel and I don’t make the plunge, it tends to be over.

I have actually learned to like this about myself. Why? Because it has allowed me to have entry level nerd experience is so many different places and spaces. I have met so many people that are neck-deep into things that I have dabbled in before that leads to so many fun conversations. And if “your thing” is not something that I have explored, consider me a potential convert (even if for a brief season). There is a nerd for everything, and I like to hear about those things.

If you love brand specific wrenches that fit the purposes of particular tractor models manufactured 100 years ago, I know a guy like you (you probably know him too, that’s a small set)

If you love old electric fans, I know that there are 2 subsets of you. Those who like working fans and those who like non-working fans that you can fix. If you love to ride bicycles but only those made with steel frames AND steel forks, be prepared to explain all the reasons why if we ever end up in the same place for more than 15 minutes.

If you like wooden tennis racquets, rusty old farm implements, Nikon cameras made only in Occupied Japan I have talked to someone like you, maybe even traded stories or inventory.

I once had a student in our ministry at Southern Miss who did not have a car, but he had the phone numbers for most of the landowners in 4 counties that he could see from the road. When they tilled up their land or there was a recent rain, or especially both, he would call me and ask me to drive us to hunt for arrowheads. He always promised me at least one artifact that would not disappoint me. He always delivered even though the treasure for me was watching and listening to him wax on about the process and the beauty and the history and the hunts that he had been on with his late father in the desert as a kid.

I like to talk about sneakers with sneakerheads and hear why certain fly-rods are superior to others. I own one pair of what you could call “sneakers” in the pop-culture sense and I own zero fly-rods (though I do have a first edition of A River Runs Through It given to me by my older brother who sends me photos of bass and bream that he fly-rods out of ponds near cemeteries in unspecified locations that he notices as he drives home from work).

I love hearing about what people find fascinating and why. Sometimes I will take it up for a season, but when I drop it as an active participant, I tend to drop it fully. Maybe I will come back to some of these things, but I will never grow tired of overhearing someone in public talking about how they don’t make _________s like they used to, or how they are planning a trip to see a certain band for a monumental 50^th time.

“There is a nerd for everything” was going to be the name of the podcast that I daydreamed of hosting. Someone beat me to it recently. Props to Niche to Meet You. Does it surprise you that I listened to several episodes over the course of a week and have never gone back? Of course it doesn’t.

So why am I talking about all these things? Because after taking two weeks off from posting entries here, I have felt the creeping sense and fear that I might drop this habit. I am trying hard to stay on the horse. 52 entries during my 46^th year. I am at 39 over 37 weeks, that is two ahead of pace, but I have gone at least 2 weeks without posting. There may be a better way to discipline myself as “a writer” that I can discover next year, but for now I am trying hard to keep it going. Maybe it is obvious from this very entry how hard it is to keep thinking through things that are worth offering for other people to read. I am trying to keep doing it for its own sake, for the sake of sticking with it. So, there it is, I am back on the wagon.

a scene from Shaw family desiganted classic THE BIG YEAR

JJ Audubon a fellow one time resident of West Feliciana Parish.