For starters, let me admit, we live next door to a hoarder or two. Deborah and her husband Steve are the two elderly smokers who inhabit what space is left in the townhouse next to ours. Steve used to work for the railroad. Now, what with the COPD and all, he can barely make it from the front door to his detached garage. That’s where he likes to tinker with his Harleys and a vintage truck or two. Because they’ve been mostly swallowed up with boxes of parts and tools and whatnot, I can’t quite tell the makes, models, or years. As for Deborah, let’s just say she takes the whole “hoarder” bit to a whole ‘nuther level.
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When we first moved in, Deborah came over straightaway to welcome us with tales of Penny, the woman (also a smoker, now deceased) who lived in our place before we did. Penny and Deborah used to get together in the late afternoons for drinks. These boozy get-togethers were always at Penny’s place, never at Deborah’s. How do we know this? Because at Deborah’s place there was never enough space to set foot or sit down, save for a meandering narrow-walled maze between chest-high stacked bundles of newspapers. I can’t tell you what other unearthly delights may have inhabited the rest of the space beyond the first few feet visible from the front door. Use your imagination. I know I did. And the ones who might best describe it are named Alfred Hitchcock and Stephen King. But I digress.
Anyway, admiring our gleaming hardwood floors at that first meeting, Deborah said, “Just a minute, let me go get you a housewarming gift. I have a couple of them.” “WTH?” I wondered with a shudder. “Please, just don’t let it be a mummy. You know, like Anthony Perkins’ mother in Psycho?” Turns out, it was a super deluxe upright hardwood floor polisher, still in the sealed box, never used. I’m not sure whether I was more weirded out by the fact that she had “a couple of them” or by the prospect of her having, say, a spare mummy or two in the back bedroom. But truth to tell, I still haven’t used it. Then again, our floors remain shiny without buffing. What’s more, you can see them without a shovel. “Thanks very much,” I said to Deborah that day. “I really appreciate it.” And it’s true, I really did.
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I say all this by way of preamble to today’s top story from the obits, a running segment they call “Those We’ve Lost.” It’s about those who’ve succumbed to Coronavirus. Today’s feature, full story here, is on “Madeline Kripke – Doyenne of Dictionaries – Dead at 76.” What makes it all relevant, see, is that Madeline was a collector, not a hoarder. The difference? Her trove of 20,000 lexicography books – all crammed into her Greenwich Village apartment – was focused rather than randomly scattered.
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Beginning with the Webster’s Collegiate that her parents gave her in the fifth grade, she accumulated an estimated 20,000 volumes as diverse as a Latin dictionary printed in 1502, Jonathan Swift’s 1722 booklet titled “The Benefits of Farting Explained,” and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s 1980 guide to pickpocket slang.
Ms. Kripke was not an indiscriminate amasser, said Ammon Shea, the author of “Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages” (2008). “Madeline,” he said, “built a cathedral of the English lexicographic tradition, tens of thousands of carefully chosen items.”
Simon Winchester, the author of “The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary” (2003), said in an email: “I would challenge her to find this volume of Czech loanwords or that collection of Greenland slang or Common Terms in Astrophysics — and she’d always say, ‘Yes, I’m sure I have it somewhere.’ And she would dive in like a truffle hound and come up for air holding the volume in triumph. And I would retire, always defeated.”
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Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure if I asked Steve for a particular socket wrench or a particular part for a ’65 Ford flatbed, he could – after wheezing a bit going up the steps – take me right to it. I’m not sure anyone would ever describe him as a “truffle hound.” Maybe something more like a shaggy gray sheep dog with a lot of carefully selected bones buried in the backyard? Still, the difference between hoarder and collector is a bit fuzzy here. As for Deborah? Well…
When I say my prayers at night, I just ask the good Lord that she not die in bed with a slowly smoldering cigarette between her tar-stained fingers. You know, the ash falling slow-mo to the floor among all those old dried-up newspaper bundles, with a zoom shot ordered by the director catching the first flickering flames. Hey, at least there’s are no mummy in this scene. Am I right?
Sharing a wall as we do, both our places would go up in a conflagration worthy of Hollywood’s best CGI. Depending on how fast the fire trucks got there, the only one left to tell the tale upon the later arrival of some new occupant – well, after the inevitable rebuild, of course – would be the crazy dog groomer over on the other side of us. But that’s another story for another day.
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Not Just Another Hoarder?
You make the call.
