The Owls, episode 1. In which parliament is in session.

I have mentioned it a few times now and among my beloved collection of owls lies a three-dollar childhood memento that is one of my most special possessions.

It need not be an object comprised of precious material that becomes the most precious to a collector.  The object need not have cost a precious amount of money.  It need not be precious to any other collector (or Tolkienian creature).  Sentiment will always allow a three-dollar porcelain import to emerge victorious.

Meet my oldest collectible:  a lowly weather owl, deemed so because when first introduced to me, its surface would change hue depending on the perceived humidity.  Today, there is a very slight variation if I take him out of doors and introduce him to the 100 degree daily sauna that currently engulfs deep South Texas, but his superficially magical effect has worn away with time. What has not worn away, however, is the smile that floods me when faced with his countenance as I sit down to my seven-year-old iMac, above which it hovers with its kinsmen on a floating shelf.

Although not the tallest, nor boldest, nor most colorful of my ever-expanding parliament of owls, WeatherOwl always greets me first when I sit to write, pay bills, or play online poker with fellow internet-addicted procrastinators.  Below is a panoramic glance at the full collection of his brethren.

A few of the others are now clamoring
for their own blog moment.

I'm not sure how or why it started, but I've always liked owls.  WeatherOwl found me in the mid 1970s when I was in elementary school at St. Teresa's in Sleepy Hollow (the town formerly known as North Tarrytown), New York.  He was part of an annual fundraising collection of sundries with which we student-salesmen were entrusted in a cardboard sample case, samples of orderables which we shared with family and neighbors who would (hopefully) order multiples to help us students meet our sales quota.  The Franciscan nuns of my childhood were nothing if not savvy marketers of Catholic faith and future relics.  I estimate it has been nearly 40 years since I paid three dollars for my painted porcelain prognosticator of old, a solid, if not sentimental childhood investment.

My memory for collectible sentiment is quite good (Mari would argue quite insanely good), but I do not remember how many of these little weather owls I ended up delivering door-to-door when the nun's orders were later fulfilled.  Among my boxes of wrapping paper, Christmas cards, costume jewelry, and other fund-raised tchotchke to be delivered that year were several (my nearly half-century-old memory cannot distinguish better than several) small identical white paperboard boxes, each containing an identical mystical meteorologist flown directly into my hands from the magical land of Taiwan.

My weekend of deliveries complete, my cardboard "Christmas Kit" emptied, and my collected cache of payments neatly stacked and sorted, I found myself staring into the bright and cheery eyes of WeatherOwl, perched ironically redundant atop his porcelain book pile while perched atop a short stack of my own books.

I also found myself staring into one of my earliest childhood ethical dilemmas as I gazed (the collector's gaze came to me early) into the eyes of a second owl, a surplus future dust-collector which had found its way (via clerical accounting error?) into my previously uncomplicated life.  There are times as an adult when I sometimes feel an echoing pang of guilt (thank you Catholic school!) as I look into the effusively open eyes of my redundant owl (I never decided which would bear that designation as they both seem to share the moral authority).  I was young and I felt guilty, but mostly I was too embarrassed to return the extra owl that had been packed into my fundraising kit.

Four decades later, one owl greets me daily as I sit down to my library office iMac, its twin welcoming me home evenings when I sit at the desk in my home library.  The weather owl memento brothers thus bookend my days and my thoughts, comforting me and decorating my memories as treasured collectibles should.

Dust and guilt be damned.

More flutterings from the past (and the shelf above the iMac) next time.