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- Jay
Telfer may have handed over the reigns of the Wayback Times to
Sandy and Peter Neilly, but he is still going to be visible in
the newspaper.
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- The
longtime resident of Prince Edward County will be writing Jay's
Blog, a column on his ongoing love of antiques and life in the
Quinte Bay area.
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- Jay's
Wayback Times, founded in 1995, published 1.7 million papers
in 11 years and more than 258,000 kms
- were
traveled for visits
- and
deliveries to antique
shows, stores and markets.
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- Jay
Telfer's final issue
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- Jay's Wayback Blog
- About lives, then
and now
-
 By Jay Telfer
I have been a collector 99% of my life. Not a true collector,
but a collector of some of the worst garbage no one would use.
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- I will inform you that I have moved 29 times since I left
my family home in Downsview. Now, I am moving back to Toronto.
I bought my first house with no basement in 1980. I did not want
to make that mistake again, so I bought a house sitting on a
solid basement. I filled that up very quickly in the first month
and then moved and moved and moved again, always leaving behind
boxes and more boxes and spare stuff I would never think about
again.
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- I have saved broken taps - just in case the new ones break,
and have been carrying them in my tool case since I did a repair
in Yorkville in the late 60s.
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- I saved some drinking straws with EXPO '67 on the wrapper,
now yellowed and falling apart, but I have them. I have saved
nonworking
hinges from a screen door I repaired in 1979. I have collected
and saved broken down nifty damaged old picture frames that no
decent pictures
would ever get close to.
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- I built a pair of large speakers (2' x 3.5') with the assistance
of the head sound engineer at Studio 3 in Vancouver in 1971 -
and they have come with me from three locations in Vancouver
to Toronto to Los Angeles to Toronto to Wellington and to Belleville
and the multiple moves in between and I just bought some newer
satellite speakers for my new DVD.
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- I have the many written attempts of pieces I have sold (this
was before computerdom), but there is no way to check them out
because it would mean I would have to read them all and decide
which were the best of the bunch.
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- I have heavy duty cables from printers, scanners and storage
devices from Macintosh that will never be used again. There is
a mass of tapes that held 250 million bites of material . . .
wowee, that I will never look at again.
- I have armloads of TV cable - with only one connected end.
I have extension cords with one usable hole. I have book after
book after book that I have already read, but just in case I
retire and want to read them again. Not a chance.
I have screwdrivers with bent heads and with no proper heads
on them, but I carry them in my toolkit in case there is ever
a problem that I might be able to fix. I now have three jam-packed
toolkits. I have 1,500+ toy VWs and no place to store or display
them. I will keep some of them, but anyone interested? I have
some wonderful British antique chairs with wormwood having chewed
through them. (I think the chairs are in the basement and I wonder
if they will float with the dampness and humidity.)
I have my grandmother's music cabinet - a great cabinet, but
who needs a cabinet with a line of horizontal shelves two inches
apart?
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- I believe I inherited this tendency to “collect”
from my mother. She had a bunch of spices and boxes of food she
stored in our basement larder. There was a box of potato pancakes
she brought from Moose Jaw to Toronto, to Mississauga to Oakville
and I still have it. Who knows when a potato famine might happen?
My mother carried around napkins from Victoria, B.C., with a
four-digit "5633" telephone number. And, there are
other napkins; some with a full red-skirted mother pictured as
a cocktail waitress, some that are badly coloured in puke green
and beige in a psychedelic pattern, and also some Christmas napkins
with a fat Santa and, the latest, a much slimmer Santa of the
'80s.
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- As a family, we used to have plain white napkins, but just
in case someone important arrived, mum had a raft of the full
napkin selection.
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- And why would I toss out old bent nails? They can be straightened
and used for whatever. I have used a jar full of screws for multiple
years - masses of screws with no purpose, no nuts, no reason,
but just in case.
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- I can't count the number of times I have had to find two
or three screws in that jar by spilling them all out on the counter
and losing at least three screws under the dishwasher.
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- I wonder why we continually save stuff and save it, and save
it and save it. I know that during the depression years you saved
everything - wax paper, aluminum foil, rubber bands, pop bottles,
string. And when there was one swipe of shoe polish left in the
can, you used it all.
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- Nowadays, the dollar stores are full of nicely packaged selections
of the same garbage you have saved and stored and carried around
with you
forever.
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- All I need is a jar with $10 in it and I will keep that full
and when I need something, I will go to the Dollar store. Then
I can toss out all of the rest of the messy useless concoction
and begin anew. (But I won't save the twisty ties that hold the
wires together ... or the boxes that the stuff came in, or the
spare screws that are left over.)
Other articles by Jay Telfer
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