Marrow Minded : Kevin Tripp of Westminster has dozens of wishbones from turkeys and other fowl. Each one has a story behind it--even if Tripp doesn’t know what it is.

WESTMINSTER — “Sometimes I wonder, ‘How long did this guy last?’ ” pondered Kevin Tripp, holding aloft a turkey wishbone, as if it were Yorick’s skull in a particularly low-budget production of “Hamlet.” “This sucker here, did he put up a fight? Was he still running around after his head was cut off?”

Tripp is able to spread such musings over a collection of about 40 wishbones, from turkeys, ducks, geese and Cornish game hens. He claims, “I’ll take a wishbone from anything that has one. My father’s seeing if he can get me an ostrich one.”

Tripp, now 35, began collecting wishbones when he was 15 with the intent of amassing 1,000 of them and then contacting the Guinness records people. At his present rate, their phone might not ring for another 480 years or so. “Well, you only eat turkey twice a year, and sometimes it’s ham instead,” he explained. “And you can’t save them all. Some have got broken by my little cousins or other people.”

He did get a boost a few years ago when a friend passed on his grandmother’s wishbone collection. “She was 90 when she died, so some of these bones are probably 60 years old. They’re mostly from geese, which we think her husband hunted. She saved them because he’d used them to make doll furniture,” Tripp said.

Some of Tripp’s wishbones, particularly these older ones, have a strange sort of beauty. They turn brownish over the years, veined and translucent like petrified wood. While the turkey and game hen bones have familiar McDonald’s-like arches, the spurred goose ones curl out like twin spear-tipped devil’s tails.

One turkey wishbone is cracked on one side, showing marrow. Tripp said: “That comes from the worst-off period of my life. It’s from a dinner at the Salvation Army when I was about 21 in Reno.”

An unemployed drywall worker at present, Tripp pursues an enthusiastically laid-back lifestyle, spending a fair amount of time on his Rolling Stones and baseball card collections. He also has been something of a vagabond. A self-described Navy brat, he moved a lot as a child. As an adult, he’s lived in nine different Orange County towns and has roamed a good deal farther.

Once, he delivered a car to Texas for a friend, and instead of plane fare home, opted for a flight to Denver, where he lived two years delivering bottled water. Another time, he read a newspaper story about Wyoming and headed there, working in the oil fields. “That soured on me after a while. I’m used to it being like November here, where I’m barefoot and in shorts. And there I am in this field at 40 degrees below zero, working 12-hour days and freezing,” he said.

The first major bit of wanderlust was his Reno sojourn. He was riding back from a concert in Oakland with friends when he got the bug to head east.

“I’d read an article about Reno being the ‘biggest little city in the world,’ and I just decided I wanted to live there. So I had my friends let me out and I hitchhiked there. I had no shoes, nothing long-sleeved with me. I didn’t know a soul there. I hit town with $15 and spent $10 of it at a record store on a colored vinyl Stones record. Then I lost the last $5 gambling in five minutes, though I got a couple of free beers out of the deal.”

He ended up sleeping under a bridge for two weeks, before landing a small job and somewhat better lodgings.

“I started really missing home, so I went to the Salvation Army for Thanksgiving dinner and snagged this wishbone from the cook. They were feeding so many people there it was absolutely unbelievable. That’s why it’s one of the two charities I donate to now. I was way more fortunate than some of the people I saw there. I had a roof over my head, though it was in a building that was condemned,” Tripp recalled.

His memories of his other bones aren’t quite so specific. “I know that they made for some tasty eating. And I do know that the big ones, the ones from 20-pounders, come from my earlier years, when all the family was together. I’ve got real fond memories of most of my Thanksgiving dinners, and these bones make me think of that,” he said.

He hasn’t always been able to bag the bones before relatives snap them for luck. When he first started saving them, he had some thought of maybe snapping a bunch himself if he ever needed a big wish. Now he’s firm on keeping them and going for 1,000.

Tripp detailed the way he prepares them for posterity.

“For one thing, I eat just about anything resembling food on the damn thing. Then I wash them to get them all nice and smooth. I don’t do anything special other than that. Bones hang around for quite a while on their own, I’ve noticed.”

His collection at present lives in a cigar box, and he realizes he’s going to have to reach out a bit if he’s ever going to reach his goal of 1,000. This year he expects to get about a dozen bones from friends and other family members. He’s thought of going to food processors or restaurants to get a quantity of bones, but doesn’t like the idea.

“No, I want them from individuals, definitely. Without that, there’d be no character to them. These bones here, I know there’s a story behind every single one. I may not be able to distinguish one from another, but I know it’s there. “To get a whole bunch from a turkey farm or somewhere wouldn’t be the same. Think about Pinnacle Peak (the Garden Grove steakhouse famed for cutting neckties off patrons) with all the ties on the ceiling. Would you want them to go buy 10,000 ties and hang them all up there, or cut them off people individually? The way they do it, you know there’s a story to each one of those ties,” he said.

Could there be a more noble cause than this to spur a Fixations reader participation action? Tripp craves your bones. History demands them. He requests that you send your wishbones to Kevin Tripp, 13791 Manor Drive, Westminster CA 92683.

Please clean them well first, because I can’t stand the thought of Tripp having to gnaw on them, and the Post Office likely would think better of us too.