IMO

It all started when I was 7 years old and I found a piece of solid metal in the shape of a house that became my favorite toy for the summer. Even though I soon lost it, none of my other toys were as good and that only made me miss my lost object all the more. I could never forget how good it felt in my hand and in my pocket and that was the beginning of my lifelong search for a collection of Interesting Metal Objects, aka: IMO.

That original IMO was not meant to be a house, it reminded me of a house, but it was probably just a piece of junk furniture or maybe a piece of machinery but it was the memory more than the actual item that stuck with me then and still today. I would try to get a copyright on the phrase ‘Interesting Metal Objects’ or the Anagram IMO, but they already got corrupted by the stupid internet when they came up with IMHO which now makes me look like someone who has no humble when it comes to “In My Humble Opinion”.

Working on the Railroad led me to a treasure trove of IMO and that was when I really came into the habit. Working along the tracks there were all the bits and pieces of broken bolts, bent spikes and chipped rails not to mention the multitude of stuff that falls off trains. The motherload of IMO came from the open top gondola cars that were overfull of scrap metal from all around the country. Sometimes I was lucky enough to climb aboard one of those gondolas when the trains were stopped and I was like a kid in a candy shop.

The Hi-Tech industry is also a bountiful source of interesting objects many of which are also metal. Building chip cubes is the latest craze, you need 6 of the same size and then figure how to glue them together without gluing your fingers all together but in the end it gets lots of positive comments from the passersby who can’t resist grabbing them from the shelf in my cube.

One of the primary collection methods for IMO’s is using the Take-Apart skill set. I was always good at taking things apart. But not so much when it comes to putting things back together again. To this day I will scour the flea markets and junk yards in search of potential sources. While other old men are famous for sitting around and whittling their time away I am always happy to spend a few hours taking apart old hard drives and such for a few magnets and other Interesting Metal Objects. Magnets are the ultimate interesting metal objects.

I have since expanded my collective interests to include interesting objects that are not metal, glass being my next favorite followed by wood and paper. There is no better glass collectible than marbles and I had accumulated an amazing collection at one time but then I lost all my good marbles somewhere along the way in life. I still have enough marbles to get by and am always on the lookout for more. In fact that is a whole other chapter in my Book of Me Series: Looking for My Lost Marbles.