“My grandma collected turtles, and now I collect turtles.”
Do you collect anything? There’s something that I do collect — there’s actually two things that I collect. But one of them’s turtles, which — actually, I’ll talk about them later, and another of them is rocks. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been obsessed with rocks, and all I remember is like, when I was a kid, my dad would take me around to caves and buy me rocks and geodes. And it was like a big thing that we always did together.
And I ended up asking him about a year ago about it. I was like, “How did you get into rocks? Like, why do you like collecting them?” And he told me, “Oh, I don’t like collecting rocks. You liked collecting rocks.” I was like “What do you mean?” He said, “Ever since you were a little kid, like two, three years old, you always loved looking at rocks.”
And so, he would bring me places to let me look at rocks ’cause that was like — my dad is single, my parents are separated. And so my dad didn’t see me that much, so whenever he saw me, he would make — go out of his way to go find a new place to go where we could go get rocks together. And so now I have a five or six shelf in my, my living room — well, my dad’s living room, where I — we have all of our rocks that we’ve collected, and I also have some at my mom’s house, and I have some in my closet, but we have a shelf of rocks now.
Now, also on vacation, whenever we go somewhere new, you know, it’s fun to get something that’s a little ugly. You get something a little immemorial, the little thing to remind you that you went on vacation before. And so, one of those really cheap things that you can find a lot is turtles. You can find like, not plastic turtles, but there’s different types of turtles, there’s glass ones, like, there’s designer ones. There’s just different kinds of turtle related stuff. So me and my dad started collecting them.
And we only found out later, we were on a — I think it was — we were on a cruise, or something like that. And my, my uncle was getting married. And so, our — or my grandma. So, their mom had just died. Like my uncle’s, and my mom — or my dad’s mom had just died, and they were going to spread her ashes, and they were in like, a cardboard recyclable turtle thing, so that they can release it at sea. And my dad asked, “Why are they in turtles?” And my uncle said, “Well it’s because our mom used to collect turtle stuff.”
So, somehow, me and my dad ended up starting collecting turtles without even realizing that our grandma was the one that started the trend all along. And my, my dad had a very bad relationship with his mom. And I never — I met her once, that was my only interaction with her. So it turns out, I guess collecting stuff is genetic. My grandma collected turtles, and now I collect turtles. So I guess that’s got something to do with her.
