Old Habits Turn Into New Quasi-Related Habits

The Bogucki family has a hoarding problem. OMP saves everything he or a family member has ever owned, from his father's bowling shoes to a cowboy hat he bought in Montana when he was 8 (he will be chiming in with the correct age in 3...2...1....). Caroline hoards anything she can off of planes, such as napkins, salt packets and dinner rolls, only she refuses to hold them herself instead making her poor little sister who just wants the effing plane to land already pack them into her already packed carry on. She also will take any leftovers from weddings home. Even weddings in Mexico. I hoard....well I don't really hoard as much as I collect. Not collect like one would collect valuables or even have a hobby. I just pick stuff up and put it in my pocket more often than not. As a child this led to small collections of shells, rocks, pennies, a failed attempt by my aunt to interest me in stamp collecting (stamps could not be picked up off the street and thus did not interest me) and the subject of todays entry, bottlecaps. 

Mom, not being a Bogucki by blood, does not fall victim to the hoarding curse that has ruined the rest of us. She has in fact been spending the past 30 years trying to rid the family of the curse. She has failed. As the bottle cap collecting gradually turned from a disturbing habit into a possible hobby, she encouraged it, hoping that having a single focus would in turn encourage me to become organized. I made that last sentence up, I have no reason why I was discouraged from having a messy room filled with junk but yet encouraged to pick up trash off of the street and place it in a jar. Whatever the reason, I acquired quite a hefty bottle cap collection over my lifetime. I abruptly stopped collecting bottle caps probably once I started high school. I guess this is when I became popular and realized that my collecting was "freakish". Stop laughing, I had friends and I think they liked me, that means I was popular. I digress. 

I don't know how many bottle caps I have, I've never counted. I don't know what types I have, I've never researched them. The early bottle caps either came from off of the street or from the remnants of family parties. After my family picked up on my new hobby they began to bring them home from other places, which has led to my number of caps from Poland. Every summer my Dad, Poland's third most famous archaeologist (debatable), would leave my mother with two small children for three months while he excavated the Neolitic farming communities of central Poland. Stay with me, I promise this has a point. He would arrive back with various bottle caps of all sorts of colors and names such as "Coca Cola" and "Pepsi". That's right, Poland at that time still sold soda soley in glass bottles. This right here is what kept me going in my collection. I was fascinated that things other than beer came in glass bottles. Needless to say I sent my father back to Poland the next summer to bring me home some more. 

My collection was still fairly small. OMP would only bring home four or five bottle caps at a time (I know you drank more Coke than that!), there was a surprising lack of beer in the house, and, as it was the nineties, all other American beverages were coming with plastic twist off caps. My collection was looking grim. Then a chance visit to a German restaurant in the White Mountains of New Hampshire changed my fortune forever. 

I must have been around eight when we were vacationing up in North Conway, NH. We were dining at a German restaurant, as we are cultured people, when my parents both ordered beers. My mother asked if they could bring the cap out with the bottle, as I was somewhat of a bottle cap connoisseur (my words, not hers). The waitress was impressed that such a young child would have such driver and determination in life and said she would do us one better. No one knew what that meant and frankly when you're in a German restaurant in the middle of the woods "one better" could really mean anything. At the end of the meal the waitress appeared with a giant bag of bottle caps, at the time I assumed it had been all the bottle caps they had used that year, now that I am of age I realize it was probably all of the bottle caps from happy hour. These caps basically doubled my collection overnight and got me going bottle cap crazy. The power of the caps summed the courage in me to start asking for caps at parties, to pick up every and any cap I found on the ground, and to move my cap collection out of the bucket they had been sitting in and into a more fitting barrel that had been used to package wine. While I was already pleased with myself in general at the age of 8, this bottle cap triumph of mine really just further upped my image of myself. 

The caps began to control my life. I was quite the reader as a child and read many stories about the depression and WWII as seen through the eyes of precocious youngsters. All of these stories had a common thread, in each one the lead character would either sell scrap metal for money or collect scrap metal for the war effort. I was terrified. I listened intently to the news every night for two reasons, signs of incoming meteors (this fear was the result of a trip to the planetarium gone wrong) and signs of impending war. I didn't care about horrors of war, I just cared about my bottle cap collection. I knew that the government kept a secret database of all precocious and patriotic children who collected bottle caps and would immediately come to seize my prize collection should we go to war. As a precocious and very patriotic child, I knew it would be my duty to give it up, but much like a child who raises a seeing eye dog, it wouldn't be easy. Luckily, by the time we went to war technology had advanced enough that the government allowed me to keep my collection. 

Now my cap collection sits on my bookshelf in my room. It's neatly arranged by color in plastic baggies that are then stuffed in the wine cooler or whatever it's called. Every now and then I look over at it and think "when I get some free time, I'm going to go through that". As I have taken numerous 3 hour naps in the past two weeks, I realized that "hey! I have a lot of time!" and pulled out the collection. I still haven't counted it. I still haven't gone through all of them. But today begins my new series "Marianna's Bottle Caps" (better title to be determined later). Every so often I will profile one of my favorite bottle caps. I will include where it is from, roughly from when, how I think I got it and why I like it. 

Todays selection is

Squash

Made By: Thor Bryggeriene

Made In: Randers, Denmark

How I Think I Got It?: Most likely brought back from Denmark by OMP

How Old?: 11 years? 10 years? 

Fun Fact: Thor Bryggeriene brewery was a Danish brewery founded in 1856 that closed in 2003 (www.beerme.com)

Why I Like It: As prez of the BMC Squash club, the idea that there was a beer called Squash screamed "FUNDRAISING" to me. I though it was cute that it was one of the first ones I pulled out of my collection, considering all of the time I've put into squash over the past few years. Also, I like the color scheme, it's fun.

Why I Don't Like It: It reminds me that I have to find us a squash coach. Does anyone know any squash coaches in the Philadelphia area?