you can't do that with doorknobs.

My mother collects magnets. It's a simple, cheap hobby, and it makes getting her souvenirs from places simple and cheap too. I have a friend whose mother collects doorknobs. This is not a simple and cheap hobby, and so I am glad that my mother is generally satisfied with just the doorknobs on the doors in the house.

I don't know why she started this collection. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that she has six children. Since the refrigerator is traditionally the gallery of the artwork and good grades and Optimist League basketball schedules of children, my mother just wanted to make sure she had what she needed to hang everything we wanted displayed.

Now I don't have any children. But I do have magnets. They help me display recipes, shopping lists, coupons, and winery pamphlets. But I don't buy a lot of magnets for myself. I'm too busy not buying a lot of coffee mugs for myself. Mama doesn't have much to hang for us anymore, so she uses the magnets to hang stuff from her grandchildren, letters for her children that still come to her address, and articles she clips from the newspaper about the health benefits of chocolate, coffee, and wine.

When I go somewhere, I try to buy Mama a magnet. Like I said, it's easy. Most souvenir shops have magnets, specifically for the people like my mother. She always jokes that I'm going to buy her one of those t-shirts that says her daughter went to such-and-such and all she got was this stupid shirt. Finally I bought her a magnet in Pigeon Forge that was in the shape of a t-shirt that read "My friend went to the Great Smoky Mountains and all I got was this stupid t-shirt." Sometimes the perfect magnet just calls out to you.

And because it's so easy to get a magnet someplace, I feel bad when I don't get one for her. I try to be picky. A lot of souvenir magnets are pretty stupid-looking or at least just not very interesting. Often that means I have to get her the mose expensive magnet, because it's the best, but since magnet prices generally top out at $5 or so, I don't complain too much.

I did buy her a very expensive one once. For the longest time, we had been looking for Snoopy magnets. This was before Charles Schultz had died, when Snoopy items were still a little hard to find. My sister had just moved into her first apartment, and we were trying to find one for her, since she was the original Snoopy fan, and Mama and I just kinda jumped onto the Snoopy bandwagon she started. I went on a youth group trip down to the beach, where we stopped at an outlet center. There was a tiny shop there with gray metal walls where all they sold was magnets. And there I found a Snoopy magnet, a very, very nice magnet as far as magnets go. It was about an inch thick and maybe five inches tall. It was $8, which is absolutely ridiculous, but it was exactly what we wanted, so I got it.

When I got home from the trip, I brought out that beautiful Snoopy magnet that I had bought for my sister's first refrigerator in her first place of her own to show to Mama. She was very excited, as she should have been, because this truly was a fine specimen of a magnet. And then she put it right front and center on her fridge, hugging me and thanking me all the way for her new magnet. I said she was welcome. (We did eventually buy my sister a Snoopy magnet, but it was not as nice as Mama's. She never knew the difference. Well, not until now, anyway.)

By now, my mother's fridge reads like a travel log of all the places she and her children have been. There are more magnets than things hanging from them. Whenever she gets back from a big trip, she brings out all her newly-acquired magnets, shows them off, and tells us about the place where she got them. You can't do that with doorknobs.