"All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should
have been more specific." ~Jane Wagner

Sometimes I wonder where my being non specific about what my goals are. Was it when I was about seven years old and started collecting things. They say it's a good age to get children interested in collections... like coins or stamps. But my dad, who collected stamps, missed the age when he finally tried to get me interested in that hobby. No, when I was about seven, my best friend, Julie Foley and I, would traipse through the woods in back of people's houses... down where it was convenient to dump stuff, and found all kinds of treasures. It was then I started collecting keys. The house-key kind was far and few between, so I also started collecting the keys one opened cans of ham and Spam... Really. What the fascination was I do not know. I might just as well have collected dust bunnies from under my bed. I finally quit when while unwrapping a key from that savage tin surrounding it, I cut one finger badly. I realized then that it wasn't worth that to collect that type of thing... but don't remember collecting anything else--or wanting to.

I do keep cards with personal messages or really funny or poignant ones, but haven't really "collected" things, and heard about a child's interest in doing so was when they were about seven. I've been collecting the States Quarters for my grandchildren since their coinage started. This year my granddaughter Amelia, and grandson Willem become seven, so they get the collections saved for them... complete up to DC and Northern Mariana Islands.

How did this come up? I guess while I was kicking twigs off my trails and shoring up the downhill sides of my paths in the woods this morning. They are nice trails, but it seems that it's the one thing I did well in life ... "I was a Trailblazer." It seems like another useless thing to me, but probably as valuable to me now, that collecting the Spam keys was when I was seven.